Béa Bach
May 13th, 2025 We carry our carcass
everywhere with us. We need to feed it, empty it, move it, and make it
sleep. Our mind also has its necessary tasks: to understand, to
memorize, to be listened to, to make itself understood in return. To
negotiate our emotions, our inabilities, to confront our fears, to
camouflage our shame. There;s so much potential there for poor health! And if only it stopped there! Everything is an occasion for symptoms that warrant a visit
to the doctor: I can't digest milk anymore, I'm constipated, my hip is
frozen, I can't sleep, my son is hyperactive, my daughter is isolated,
my youngest has stage fright, my father is confused. It's not so easy
for medicine to meet the challenge of such disparate phenomena. But while
everything impacts our health, not everything falls directly within the
purview of medicine.
The circumstances of our death
Examining
the problem at its root means asking the very pragmatic question of the
list of circumstances in suffering, illness, and death. Dying of hunger
or thirst, of mistreatment, loneliness, lack of love, like the orphans
in Romanian institutions under Ceausescu. Or of injuries, burns, bites, or
various accidents. Dying in war, during attacks or natural disasters.
Dying of disease, of course, where epidemics, or a personal tragedy. Every circumstance has its potential risk. This is the problem with our
incarnation: our carnal vehicle is consubstantial with every other aspect of
our life. Thus, its maintenance is necessary to prevent or delay the
chances of passing from life to death. The flip side of this question is
the no less pragmatic question: what can best preserve our health or
heal us?
Protecting life is a subject with sprawling
ramifications, yet it is systematically brought back into
the medical fold just a little too quickly. Perhaps this serves to point the finger and hide the moon. The
fact remains that there is considerable confusion in our understanding
of medicine and the categories it comprises. Expectations regarding its
scope of action are undoubtedly also disproportionate. For while
everything ends well in the doctor's office or the hospital, we must
nevertheless distinguish between what falls within the purview of the
strict medical profession and its many annexes. Many other actors in
health and illness, some collective, others individual, are indeed
involved in the game without revealing their names.
At the
collective level, the economic, political, and military context has
immediately visible consequences, whether they involve deaths on a
battlefield or layoffs in a disaster-stricken region. In these times, a
realistic, and not merely idealistic, public health policy would do well
to anticipate the integration of factors such as war or poverty into
its actions. All the more so when the cascading repercussions are
inevitably felt for a long time, with the menu including: population
displacement, deterioration or lack of access to health and social
services, increased risks of all kinds, and other joys. From this point
of view, we are abandoning medicine (in the strict sense) in favour of managing the downgrade of human material, all entrusted to health
professionals – perhaps themselves just as disoriented – who will do
what they can with budgetary restrictions. A certain number of other
adjuvants, environmental, socio-professional or relational more or less
serious, also succeed very well in disrupting our body and our mind,
between various pollutions, night work and harassment, stress or
addictions. All are subjects of extra-medical origin but will inevitably involve medical care.
The Conditions of Our Healing
The field of healthcare is so broad, so present in our lives, that it is difficult for the general public to navigate. Medicine is often confused with medical and paramedical care in the broadest sense. However, the daily practice of medicine consists of routine procedures that do not require extensive training. In his day, Ivan Illich denounced the unnecessary and costly professionalisation of procedures that were once performed within families [1]. Today, everyone knows that many nursing assistants often do the work of nurses, who themselves sometimes do the work of doctors. Whether reluctantly due to a lack of staff, or through adherence for personal gain, we can see a know-how that is acquired through mentoring and practice, outside the classroom. Another example is the incredible story of an illiterate Ethiopian woman, sold, abandoned bloodless at 14, with a dead baby in her womb, narrowly saved by a delicate operation at the fistula hospital in Addis Ababa, and who, by dint of helping the nursing staff to take care of themselves, ended up as head nurse of this same hospital [2]. The technical side of medicine therefore requires well-trained technicians more than doctors. It was also the search for a particular technical know-how that led Alexis Carrel, Nobel Prize winner for medicine in 1912, to take lessons from an embroiderer – who did not have the study certificate – in order to perfect his technique of suturing blood vessels. The entire sector of rehabilitation and reconstructive surgery is also very specialised and requires a lot of skill. But it is also a question of technical gestures of craftsmanship, much more than a functional understanding of the interactions between failing organs. Thus, for a better understanding of the essence of medicine, we must exclude purely technical, surgical, or rehabilitation fields, regardless of their highly useful nature. Medicine is not technology, and indeed, the more technical it is, the more it is criticised.
Managing My Personal Health
Health is also—in part—our responsibility. Just as a painter is limited in his art by a hardened brush that has lost half its bristles, we don't make things easy for our doctor if we eat poorly, drink too much, and sprawl on our couch binge-watching Netflix series. Leaving aside the conspiracy theory that this might be enough to bolster a societal project beyond our grasp, we can at least agree that it is our responsibility to extricate ourselves, through an effort of will, from these deleterious living conditions. Thus, prior to medicine lies vital hygiene, or the minimum conditions for maintaining our vital vehicle. What we call health education—including physical activity, breathing techniques, dietary adjustments, and/or intermittent fasting—can do much to sanitise the environment, balance our daily lives, and increase our vitality. It is undoubtedly possible to improve our health through these means. But only up to a certain point, and for two reasons.
First, because modern life makes us sick. To use a metaphor, while we can always renovate our apartments, we unfortunately can't expand the walls. As a result, we remain more or less constantly immersed in this modern world. Diseases of civilisation are thus an unavoidable and recurring theme in health communication. The subject has been a recurring theme for a very, very long time now. Diabetes, obesity, cancer, and also autoimmune diseases—autism, rheumatism, and Alzheimer's—are discussed. There are countless articles, conferences and meetings on this central theme, which sometimes end with a touching attention to a gluten-free buffet aperitif [3]. As they say, "it doesn't cost anything"! Unfortunately, this does not solve the problem, which on the contrary has the unfortunate tendency to worsen. The second reason concerns the nature of so-called "chronic" diseases.
The Nature of Acute and Chronic Illnesses
To return to the theme of the circumstances of our death discussed above, an acute illness poses a risk to life. A potentially fatal episode that justifies the word "emergency" and the service of the same name, insofar as the body can "give up" and die. But it can just as easily survive on its own. This is where your maintenance and your efforts at vital hygiene will pay off, because a well-maintained body is more likely to rise to the challenge and fight it effectively. We can indeed rely on the extraordinary capacity of humans to overcome their health problems, even when they present themselves in extreme forms. An organism can quite easily fight off a serious infection without any external support other than its own vitality. Hippocrates called this principle vis medicatrix naturae, the healing power of nature. A commonplace principle that many may have observed in themselves as children: indeed, there are cases where we heal on our own. In order not to confuse the two, it is important to differentiate between chronic diseases and mechanical emergencies capable of short-circuiting the body's vital response. Indeed, a severed artery causing significant hemorrhage or a pneumothorax is incapable of self-healing: vitality doesn't know how to stitch!
But returning to chronic illnesses, no "spontaneous" recovery is to be expected. The body's vitality, augmented by all the treatments in the world, will do nothing to reverse this. It is understood that many patients have reversed their illness through natural means, considerably improved their daily lives, and reduced their pain. This is why it is absolutely essential to encourage these self-help approaches, off the beaten track, when they are well-conducted. But we must pay tribute to Samuel Hahnemann for having studied and understood the nature of acute and chronic illnesses and for having been able to establish their difference experimentally [4].
"Truly natural chronic diseases are those which, left to their own devices and untreated by specific means, are constantly progressive. Those which, despite the best moral precautions and physical care, torment the individual with ever-increasing suffering until the end of their life."
Samuel Hahnemann
Thus, a chronic disease, in the homeopathic as well as the modern sense, while not fatal, does not heal on its own, unlike an acute episode. It is on this chronic background—indelible without adequate means—that our diseases of civilisation are superimposed. Any personal reform, any type of care—stress management or sugar exclusion—will certainly help. They limit poisons and give the body more energy to endure or contain the chronic disease. But these "best precautions and physical care" do not eradicate the disease. The moral of the story is that if a chronic illness cannot heal on its own, nor by natural means, then we have all the justification for medical action to be taken, to compensate for what the patient's vitality alone is incapable of doing. The true medical art would therefore consist in being able to cure, not just an acute episode, but a chronic illness. But this is where the problem lies. Because chronic illnesses are precisely defined by contemporary official medicine as incurable, or rarely curable, diseases. An admission of failure if ever there was one, at the very point where medicine would need to be competent. Incurable chronic illnesses treated by modern medicine therefore do not heal. On the contrary, they worsen over time, requiring more and more doses at increasingly frequent intervals.
The Heart of the Profession
So, to recap, it is unfair to blame medicine for the consequences of conditions external to its art, such as chemical pollution, a dysfunctional professional environment, armed conflict, or a deplorable lifestyle. One could also free medicine from everything extra-medical, technical, and routine. But one would hope for a core niche where it can practice its art with excellence. The nobility of the profession should reside in the numerous dysfunctions of the body and mind that must be deciphered and treated. That is, acute and chronic illnesses. Emergency medicine is an impressive field of medicine, requiring high-intensity, precise interventions for acute illnesses that flare up, and from which one risks dying. These medical feats must be applauded. But as heroic and necessary as they may be for the lucky patient who benefits from them, this type of medicine is relatively rare. The real job, thankless and redundant, is dealing with the usual stuff. The pain, the discomfort, the dysfunction, the manageable but constant signs that limit, prevent, or compel. And which worsen over time. These non-fatal illnesses for which contemporary medicine does nothing, lacking the ability to know what to do, other than to note "to be monitored" in the margin, until it can suggest palliative action or intervention. This gaping lack of expertise is the valid reason why patients try every type of action and therapy, refusing, for their part, to give up. Some have the bad taste to reproach them for it or prevent them from doing so on the grounds of protecting them from charlatans and cults. It's as if the snake were biting its own tail!
Conclusion
If everything is illness, not everything is medicine. Our tragedy is that the most useful and noble medicine is ultimately the weakest aspect of our Western healthcare system. Yet this is not a new discovery. For a long time, the main criticism of contemporary medicine was based precisely on its poor results with chronic disease. Nothing has changed in reality, except for a sleight of hand. The medical establishment has simply sidestepped the problem: chronic diseases are now presented and taught as incurable illnesses. Thus, criticism has become obsolete with a declarative stroke of the pen, leaving patients stranded. Faced with this observation, it is legitimate for patients to continue seeking a medicine that will cure them of their chronic illnesses. And perhaps—since it is better to light a candle than curse the darkness—a duty for those who practice it to make their voices heard.
Notes
[1] Ivan Illich, Némésis Médicale, 2021
[2] Nicholas D. Kristof et Sheryl WuDunn, La Moitié du ciel, Éditions des Arènes, 2010.
[3] https://www.leparisien.fr/hauts-de-...
[4]
Homéopathie, Pratique de la nouvelle médecine, nouvelle traduction du
sixième Organon et commentaires, par le docteur Édouard Broussalian, HLP
Publishing SA, 2018
Source: https://www.egaliteetreconciliation.fr/Les-cent-visages-de-la-medecine-78375.html
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