| Absolutely. During that time they also developed anesthetics and therefore became fascinated by surgery. Surgery required them to be very clean, so they were involved in the whole process of understanding microorganisms, infection, cleanliness, and surgery all at once. It was a very powerful set of actions that got focused in biomedicine. And those that had less power were simply put out of business. That was because of the movement of money and political power. So biomedicine rose to the top, it took on this cloak of scientism and it proceeded to push a lot of bright ideas out as it pushed the idea of infection. Now infection is a very good idea, it’s a very powerful model of reality, but it’s not the only powerful medical explanatory model.
What do you mean by scientism?
Scientism is science that hasn’t been fully understood or is being applied inappropriately. Just like a legalism is something different from a law.
What got pushed aside during the great rush to apply the infection model so far and wide, to problems for which it was well suited and problems for which it wasn’t?
There was a lot of very interesting exploration of endocrine systems and hormones in the 1930s. At the time they didn’t have the wherewithal to treat people who had endocrine issues like diabetes. But they recognized it. People were trying to treat with something called glandulars, which are the glands taken out of animals that had been slaughtered for meat or other purposes, and feeding those glands in a purified form to sick people. And it worked pretty well. But that whole model disappeared with the push for the pharmaceutical model, in which the idea is to find the single most powerful component of an herb, or a gland.
The so-called active ingredient.
Yes, the active ingredient, which is then turned into a pill. Or an injection. The push was not toward exploring glandulars but rather toward finding these purified substances. Today only alternative practitioners use glandulars. As far as I know, most MDs have never heard of them.
Back around the same time, there were many extraordinary discoveries about what we today call vitamins and minerals, their effects on the body, and what happens if you are lacking one or more of them. This goes back to the 17th century, when they started having sailors eat oranges, lemons and limes. They didn’t know why those fruits helped, but early in the 20th century, they figured it out. That is to say, Vitamin C in these citrus fruits was preventing scurvy. There are a whole number of other conditions that were fairly common at the time and now are very rare because we understand that they were nutrient deficiency diseases.
We now can buy those nutrients, which have been ‘purified’ based on a pharmaceutical model. So you can go out and buy a lozenge of Vitamin C. Now, if people think they need more of it, they can buy a chunk of it and eat that rather than lemons and limes and oranges ...
It is very odd that biomedicine never picked up on nutrition and nutrient therapy, even though it is solidly bioscientific. So all of nutrition, strangely, has been categorized into CAM [complementary and alternative medicine], and MDs who do nutrition counseling are considered CAM practitioners. But at least it means that we non-biomedical practitioners can use nutrition, and that is a good freedom to have.
It seems that we are coming full circle on the use of isolated nutrients, realizing that the so-called purified versions actually lack context and lack various co-factors which may turn out to be extremely important. It appears to me that we are coming back, ever so slowly, to the idea that the fundamental unit, the basic building blocks that we should be dealing with in nutrition, are the whole foods themselves rather than the various chemical constituents (vitamins, minerals, antioxidants and so on) into which scientists can break them down.
Yes, so the pharmaceutical model and the cultural desire for purity, which is very strong among Americans, very strong, has led to a model of medical reality in which we look for the single active agent, or the most active agent, in some natural substance. And then we give that to people. People are now realizing that something is missing. So using whole foods (or whole herbs) turns out to have some benefit. |
