A Different Perspective: Health, Disease, and Sickness

              For much of my life, I studied the humanities with focus on health, sickness, and disease. Most of this time, my goal was to find a way to eradicate disease in pursuit of perfect health and a long life. I had visions of creating paradise one patient at a time, by making sure to balance their bodies back into a state that was disease-free. However, the philosopher at the core of my being was always observing and questioning what I did, and what was taught to me. While many of my colleagues had no problem glorifying the ancient texts our medicine is based on, promising patients a life free of pain, helping them find ways to “overcome” the consequences of the choices they had made, selling them the image of eternal youth, I was never able to make any of those promises. I saw how the business model of eastern medicine excluded a large portion of the population in the for-profit model everyone adopted. I saw community acupuncture clinics who were trying to bring the medicine to the people struggling to keep their doors open and having to raise their prices. I saw the amount of enabling that happened in the treatment rooms, especially the elite practices focusing on serving the rich.

Was I really helping someone to stay “healthy” when they were working a job that caused the carpal tunnel syndrome I continued to treat, or was I rather enabling an unsustainable and painful life choice? Is it really sustainable to support people who waited too long to have children with IVF, effectively putting more of the collective’s resources into the hands of a few who have enough money to pay for it, people who already hold more of their fair share of collective resources hostage? From where I stand, the last thing this planet needs is more rich kids using up more resources in their first year than many I know have access to in a lifetime. We don’t need more humans, we need the human beings that are currently in existence to realize that we are all from the same source, and all deserve to live a life in dignity where everyone has access to the basic needs: housing, food, medicine, and clean water and air. Wouldn’t the more humane thing be to take those resources and give them to those who need them, but have been denied access to them? There are tons of children in the foster care system who would love to have a family that cares for them.

What about the obsession with staying young forever, fighting aging with all we’ve got in our Forever 21 mentality, feeling entitled to be wrinkle-free and able to do as much as we want for as long as possible? It completely leaves out the spiritual aspect of human existence, the fact that aging and death are a natural part of life. To me, aging is to retrospectively make sense of my life and connect all the experiences of my earlier years into a story that is congruent and doesn’t depend on the other players in it being evil or good while I maintained my hero/victim narrative; it has nothing to do with the way I look or how much I have accumulated in resources. It is all about acknowledging the many times I played the villain thinking I was the hero, and showing my child by example that you can learn from your mistakes and make amends. My doctorate specialty was in healthy aging, which included my favorite subject of psychoneuroimmunology, which includes the effect of the psyche through the neurological system on the way we process, digest and manifest life. Yet, most of the classes were lectures on how we can treat towards perfect lab numbers, perfectly smooth skin, bodies without pain, and helping humans way past their prime create more children in labs because they felt entitled to having children. None of it is focused on embracing the decline and giving of ourselves to the future generations, all is focused on ego-pursuits of being the best at pretending to stay young forever. One of the reasons I always preferred rural mountain communities over cities is because in the mountains, humans are still connected to the natural circles of life, accepting death as a natural part of living. In the cities, we go on Ayahuaska trip number 15, trying to hallucinate our way out of the darkness of life, just to go back to our privileged, comfortable lives and profit-driven jobs.

As we go through life, we evolve, change, and grow physically, mentally, and emotionally. Growth is only possible through change. As we age, our body’s physical structures need to rearrange themselves, letting go of the old that has passed its peaks, and replacing it with the new. Our bodies constantly reinvent and change themselves: a damaged liver can regrow itself, and our intestinal lining renews itself every 5 – 7 days, and our skin, the largest organ, replenishes itself continuously as well. As a child grows into an adult, the growth plates, also called epiphyseal plates, which are made of flexible cartilage to allow for the continued growth of the long bones, harden and turn into rigid bone to give the body more stability. This transformation takes resource, and can be painful, as we see in the typical growing pains we see in teenagers. We grow mentally and emotionally as well as we step out of our comfort zones and start to look at the world through perspectives that don’t align exactly with the perspectives we were exposed to and taught during our childhood years. We learn to understand and manage our emotions better, finding new ways to deal with disappointments and other unpleasant emotions without causing harm to self or others. We learn to accept that different people do things differently, and that this is ok. We may move to a different country and realize that much of what we were taught to be wrong in the country of our origin is desirable in the new country we are calling home. While some of the countries in the east like China or India may regard a good burp after a meal as a compliment and a sign that the guests enjoyed themselves, western cultures will see it as rude. Neither is good or bad, they are simply different customs agreed upon by a group of humans that share a specific area during a certain period of time.

Changing our responses to triggers is a big part of mental and emotional growth, and it takes time in which we will feel uncomfortable until we integrated the new perspective as another valid option. If the new perspective we are trying to integrate into our current state of being is not only described as different, but judged as bad, this integration gets even harder. Change takes time because we literally need to reprogram our nervous system to use different pathways. It takes many trials and errors and a whole lot of self-awareness to lay solid new connections, and to allow old parts of us to die to give birth to improved and new ways of being. We may lose friends and family over adopting healthier ways of dealing with life that are not based on enabling abuse or destructive behaviors. Unfavorable sensations cannot be avoided. Life itself depends upon death to exist, and life is consuming itself constantly. For us to live and grow, other life forms must die, whether it is the chicken we had for dinner, or the greens for the salad we had for lunch. For plants and trees to live and grow, other life forms must decompose to add nutrients to the soil from which the plants feed. Without adding organic, decaying matter, a garden will not thrive and will eventually die. Life without pain, discomfort, or death is impossible; they are a natural and necessary part of life to exist, just as joy, comfort, and birth are.

Let’s look at the three concepts I’m discussing in this post: Health, sickness, and disease. I don’t look at these three terms as exclusively pertaining to human health, but to the health of the entire ecosystems we are part of. I see neither as inherently good or bad, but simply as three different states of being. Here are my definitions of these labels:

Health is a state that is sustainable for life by not going to extremes, instead finding a balanced middle between consuming and contributing; we get some and we give some, and most importantly, we share. This middle is not one static point, but a wide spectrum of different ways to create an environment that follows that natural ebb and flow of life. We grow a garden and eat the food, but only take what we need for each day, allowing other life forms to feed of the food we grew as well. We take what we cannot eat, and instead of throwing it into the trash to go to some toxic landfill, we give it back to the earth in form of compost. That is sustainable.

Sickness is a state of unsustainability in which we move from the balanced and sustainable middle ground to the more extreme states of polarity, expressed by taking more out of each moment than we need while not giving enough back to keep balance. A cancer cell is a perfect example of a sick state of being: it consumes without abandon, killing its own host in the process. We grow food in monocultures in industrial settings with toxins to eliminate all other life forms that want to feast on our foods, poisoning the soil, water, and air. We toss what doesn’t look perfect and grow more food than we can sell so it ends up in the trash while humans go hungry because they can’t afford the food we grow. That is not sustainable.

Disease simply means a state of not being at ease, in short, being uncomfortable in some way. The prefix dis- means not or the opposite of. It does not necessarily imply a state of sickness, it describes a state of current unease and points to an imbalance of some sort in the current moment. Since discomfort is an essential part of growth, disease is not always sickness, even though it can be a symptom of sickness. We grow a garden and notice some plants dying because of insects. Instead of using pesticides to kill the insects, we learn more about the plants we are growing and see that some of the plants we planted next to each other are not compatible and allow for insects to double up on the destruction. We go through the temporary inconvenience of pulling our old gardens out to be composted, and then rearrange the way we grew our garden by using companion planting, where we only put plants together that are beneficial to each other. That is how we take the unsustainability of incompatible plants in one space and turn it into sustainable companion planting. 

One of the main issues I had when I practiced medicine was that none of my patients matched the textbooks. Every single person came to see me was uniquely different, even if western medicine had bestowed them with the same diagnosis. The first years of my practice, I focused on autoimmune conditions. I had developed Graves’ disease, an autoimmune condition that leads to hyperfunction of the thyroid and can be life-threatening. The western doctors saw only two ways forward: medicate in hopes the thyroid will stabilize itself again or go ahead and get rid of my thyroid gland with radioactive iodine and then put me on life-long thyroid hormone replacement. When I asked them what the causes of it were, and whether diet and lifestyle could support my body in healing, they looked at me like a had grown a second head. The resounding answer was NO. Yet, I had just started my studies in eastern medicine, and as someone with AuDHD, I saw way too many possibilities through the patterns I had learned about in school. Instead of just blindly following my doctor’s orders, I took a self-led integrative approach. I did Tai Chi three times a week, changed my diet according to eastern medicine principles, saw a therapist to help with my ability to deal with stress, got regular acupuncture, and took herbs in addition to the western thyroid medications I was prescribed. Six weeks later, when I went to my first follow-up appointment, my doctors were stunned. I had flipped from hyperthyroidism to hypothyroidism. They had never seen anything like it before and advised me to wean off the thyroid medication. Three months later, I took my last fragment of a thyroid pill, and my thyroid has been stable ever since. The doctors couldn’t explain what they saw; even my autoimmune markers were almost undetectable.  Yet, when I tried to engage them in a dialog about the extra measures I took, they immediately blocked any attempt, telling me “that couldn’t have been it.”

              After my own lived experience with an autoimmune conditions, I was determined to learn more about their patterns and dynamics. I know in my case, my mental-emotional state and my stress levels were big contributors to developing Graves’ disease. At the time, I didn’t know yet that I was genderqueer and neurodivergent, but I was working with my son who was diagnosed with dyslexia and ADHD. I recognized many of his ADHD behaviors in myself, and also knew I was prone to depression and anxiety. I believe my complete recovery was the result of me being able to completely change my perspective on what it meant to have an autoimmune condition. Instead of seeing myself as sick and at the mercy of the medical establishment, I saw my body trying to do the best it could with what it had at the moment. With the help of teachers, therapists, acupuncturists, friends, and fellow students, I took all the feedback I got and spun it into a narrative and plan that felt right to me. I became actively involved in my healing, applying everything I learned in school to my own situation, taking what worked, revising or isolating what clearly didn’t work. Instead of lamenting my fate of having an incurable disease, I embrace it as a lesson to help me understand the medicine I was studying on a more personal level. I listened to my body and my soul, consciously going against a lot of what the experts had written, taking note of everything I tried, honestly assessing whether it worked or not. Once I started seeing patients with autoimmune conditions, I saw so much of what contributed to my stunt with Graves’ reflected in them. All of them were trapped in high-stress life situations. Many were struggling to stay afloat financially as single women in a man’s world. Almost all of them had eating patterns that were ideal according to western nutritional standards, but completely wrong energetically based on eastern nutritional theories.

              Some of the patients came in with lists of articles they found about why their disease was incurable, accompanied by long lists of symptoms they already had or would inevitably develop down the road. They had effectively identified the disease as an integral part of themselves and came with clear expectations of disease management. Those were also the patients who were too busy to do a food and emotions journal to help me help them identify patterns, reluctant to add herbs to the prescriptions their endocrinologists had given them, and were unwilling to consider their jobs or lifestyles to be part of the disease. They insisted on the victim of disease role, seeking out more specialists to get more scientific labels they could hide behind, putting their entire faith into “science” until their autoimmune condition became their entire identity. Then there were those patients who came in with questions, open to examine their lives from a deeper perspective, and took on an active role in their recovery. They did the food and emotions journals, they took the herbs, they were willing to change their diets, and if resources allowed for it, to look for different jobs. They didn’t mind the times of uncertainty and discomfort in changing their ways because they had faith in their body’s ability to change and heal. They were willing to play with perspectives that didn’t fit their original one and were able to integrate the newly suggested perspectives with their old one, and they were willing to examine their own contributions to the disease they were in. Several of them found themselves leaving old jobs, leaving destructive relationships, completely stepping out of their comfort zone and reinventing their lives, this time not listening to the experts on the outside, but the quiet whispers of wisdom from within. These were the patients that were able to reverse the symptoms, or at least managed to reduce the impact their autoimmune patterns had on their lives. For the former group of patients, the disease got locked into awareness as sickness, and that is what they manifested. The latter group of patients took it as a lesson rather than a sickness-sentence, and even though some of them still experienced periodic dis-ease, instead of feeling sick, they felt empowered. They took the opportunity to explore themselves in relation to their entire life, and were willing to learn from the experience, and do the necessary internal changes to allow the body to manifest a healthier reality.

              One of my mentors who specializes in oncology always said that he could tell by the first consultation what a patient’s chances at a positive outcome was. According to him, the ones who came in with friends, family, and a lot of questions usually fared way better than those who came alone and had no questions or hope. Our mind shapes our reality, but unfortunately, our mind is also easily hijacked by the world and the words of those around us. In a way, our brain is the processor that takes in the subtle whispers of our soul as well as the narrative of the world around us. If the general narrative is that answers are found outside of oneself, that experts know more about the person in front of them than the person themselves know, the soul has little chance to be heard.  I believe that we are all born with a vision that is deeply embedded in the core of our being, the vision our soul chose for this incarnation. It speaks to us through emotions, those visceral responses we feel when we are facing situations with others. It warns us of dangers and drives us toward pleasurable experiences. Soul wants to experience in the body it chose, and it can only do that as long as we are alive. Our muscles tense and we freeze when we are facing something we fear; a reaction that gives us the chance to take in everything around us to decide what the next best step is. Our blood pressure rises and we attack when we are angry; a reaction that allows us to protect ourselves from threats to our survival.

Our being constantly takes in information from the outside through our five senses. Our nervous system and brain process the input it gets, and then comes up with a response to meet the stimuli. How we respond depends on many factors. We have sensory processing with covers our five senses: vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. Motor control allows us coordinates and execute the movement of the body in the space we are in. The cognitive functions allow us to connect the various aspects of an experience with memory and emotions, helping us to to make sense of all the input from the present moment, helping us plan a response. No two people will experience the same situation in the same way. For one, each will focus on different sensory input, some may be more focused on sounds of a certain frequency, others may be mostly visual. Moreover, our memory contains completely different data, because it is exclusively programmed by each person’s collective experiences, and the lived experiences as well as the intergenerational trauma that the body holds activate different responses depending on these experiences.

When I look at disease at the very core, I see it as a conflict between the soul’s vision and mission, the memories stored, the current available reaction pathways of the nervous system, and the input of the environment. We have the body representing all the past experiences encoded in the DNA and physical structure of our bodies, determining our current capabilities in terms of how we react and process things. We have the soul which is an ethereal entity carrying the dream we were born with for the future, and we have the mind and the nervous system, which needs to figure out how to bring the past and the future on the same page in the present. Since the present is quite complicated and includes many moving factors like environmental factors, other humans, and the systems we created to keep life moving, the nervous system has a difficult job. Not only does it need to figure out how to run the future dream on past and often outdated hardware (the body), but it needs to figure out how to do that on the stage of the present moment, which is shared with many other bodies of different ages, each with their own past, their own dreams, their own script and agenda, relying on the same resources and props. That’s a lot of compromise to work out.

When our inner drive for creativity is continuously stifled because of rigid gender role prescriptions and societal contracts, we effectively stifle our soul and our purpose. When we cannot express our true feelings about our lives and are forced to stick with the “all is well” narrative we are pushing as the only acceptable option, we lose ourselves in pretty lies. When we are not allowed to oppose the status quo anymore with questions or observation, we imprison our spirit in the darkest crevices of our being. Our spirit becomes depressed, anxious, and distorted, and we find ourselves in a constant state of dysphoria and repressed frustration. This stagnant energy eventually manifests in the physical form, either as sickness, body dysphoria, or as violent expressions of rage. I have seen many times how friends and patients presented with tumors around the base of the neck and upper chest area, and the one thing they had in common was that they were born into a culture where they weren’t granted a voice and a way to express their authentic selves. It was gay men raised in fundamentalist religious households who were shamed and censored into hiding who they truly were, forced to live a lie. It was mothers who came from patriarchal cults who had to carry the shame of failed marriages while single-handedly raising the children the fathers left behind. It was women trapped in abusive relationships, unable to find the resources or support to leave because society excused the men’s behavior as “boys will be boys.” From where I stand, these cancers are the result of unexpressed dreams coagulated at the gates of expression, slowly turning into toxic entities of resentment and unexpressed anger and shame over being wrong that festers until the body dies and the soul is set free again. This is true sickness, not just disease, and it cannot be cured from the outside in by using drugs and medications and following generic medical advice of the latest gurus and “experts” in the field of medicine; it can only be addressed from the inside out, by learning to trust our intuition more than the words of others, and by finding a way to move our being into more supportive and compassionate circles that hold a safe space for us to explore our inner world of angels and demons. However, the system thinking that is holding us all hostage doesn’t hold safe spaces for those who need them because the collective has convinced themselves that stopping to run equals the end of civilization.

I’m not surprised that for the first time in history, our collective life expectancy is declining, and we continue to see worse medical outcomes, pandemics, and an increase in phenomena like long covid and autoimmune processes. Life depends on diversity to survive, yet we allowed one way of thinking to hold the entire world hostage. We handed our food production over to unethical corporations interested in nothing but profits, and our health into the hands of big pharma who sponsor most studies and treat us with chemicals at ever-increasing costs. In our attempts to create paradise on earth for all while maintaining our addiction to being happy and comfortable all the time, we have pushed anything that doesn’t fit our “be nice or go away” philosophy into the shadows and tailored our entire existence to keep those in power comfortable. White cishet thought has created all the laws and structures we are still blindly following, demonizing any groups outside of that narrative as disruptors of peace, or lazy bums. Constructive criticism or philosophical discussion have become impossible without triggering someone who takes a disagreement as a personal affront. Our addiction to personal comforts is in stark contrast to our ego’s determination to go through life as unquestioned heroes, so we created entire industries around wellness centers and fancy retreats to help us save the world by imagining floating figures of light without having to enter the trenches of hell that true heroes are born out of. We keep on chasing any light we see, ignoring the shadows we cast upon the world in our attempts to be a shining beacon of perfection. We support a system where playing the game is what gets you rewards, where we are applauding advertisements as art that are full of lies and stereotypes pushed past the brink of absurdity, and where we glorify the gamblers of Wall Street while shaming the ones in Vegas. We expect to stay young forever, and any normal changes occurring in the process of aging are labeled as diseases to be fixed with modern medicines. We are criminalizing homelessness, and supporting greedy oligarchs who would take the last bite of a starving child’s plate. We have left our humanity at the bottom steps of the patriarchal elevators to heaven and are looking down on those on the ground as losers and threats to our stolen comforts in life. Yet, no matter how much we spend on medicines and supplements and distractions, our egos are never satisfied while our souls’ dying dreams are making us sick. Our bodies are not designed to live in a world of collapsing ecosystems, constantly running around to distract us from the impending doom looming in the shadows we tried to ignore for too long, stressing about keeping up with an increasingly unsustainable and destructive status quo, and trying to survive in a world that is denying too many access to the basic resources for life. No matter how much we pretend we are the masters of life and mother nature, it doesn’t change the fact that we are merely parts of nature, and disposable ones at that.

Our continued insistence that man knows better than nature has led to a society that has grown incompatible with life. Industrial farming is poisoning our food, soil and waters with increasing use of pesticides and herbicides. Profit-driven farms put their focus on the appearance rather than quality of the produce they grow, leading to mediocre foods with poor nutrition profiles. Monocultures are a threat to our food supply because they are more prone to failure in adverse conditions, rely heavily on the use of pesticides and herbicides, and harm the environment by limiting natural diversity which is essential for survival. Our environment is polluted with electromagnetic radiation, bombarding our bodies and nervous systems day and night. Night skies are polluted with artificial lights, our forests are burning because of droughts and poor land management, and the wealth inequality has surpassed the inequality we saw before the French revolution. Our bodies are constantly fighting the barrage of environmental, emotional, and mental toxins they are bombarded with day and night, yet somehow, we expect to stay healthy. When our psyche and nervous systems collapse under the constant onslaught of stimulation, preventing us from continuing “business as usual”, we medicate them instead of learn from them. It is easier to diagnose these neurological evolutionary divergences as sickness with labels of autism or ADHD, blaming the fates for the discomfort we see in our children and ourselves as we struggle in the world we created than it is to realize that it is our way of life that is causing these patterns.

If we want to see a healthier world less wrought with man-made suffering and sickness, we need to change the way we live. We cannot insist that profits and global economies are more important than human life. We cannot support endless wars by “othering” those that sit on lands and resources we want for ourselves. We must support diversity, and create spaces within the outdated concept of countries, nations, and borders for those who want to return to a simpler way of life; one devoid of stock markets and banks and corporations, one of small communities of likeminded humans living with the planet. We don’t need to dismantle what we have, but we must create space for those who have different dreams and different needs for their lives. My dream has always been to live with a group of like-minded people in an intentional community far away from cities and towns, growing and raising our own food and medicines, and offering a safe space for those who need a reset, teaching the forgotten art of living with the land. All my life, everyone around me dismissed my vision, calling it a pipe dream. Yet, my dream requires little resources from outside of the community and is more sustainable than any ideals I was pushed to pursue. Luckily, times are changing, and the old thought grounded in fear, pride, and greed is slowly losing its grip. Over the course of the past 5 years, I have seen a huge increase in ecovillages and intentional communities forming, and people trying to find some to join. What was once seen as a cult is now growing to be a viable option for the future. There is still a lot to learn, and many of the communities I’ve been following have failed because the founders are still rooted in the hierarchal, transactional structures that prevent the egalitarian system that is needed for a community to thrive. But the first steps into a new direction are taken, and that is what counts.

As more outcasts and humans who cannot fit the narrow binary narrative of modern society are losing their houses, their health, and their access to the most basic requirements for life, the forces in the shadows will grow. We cannot fight this force with the light we stole from those we cast into the dark corners of life, we can only embrace it as the parts of ourselves we have been too afraid or too proud to face. There are not enough antidepressants and anxiolytics in the world to help those who still have a voice and ground to stand on to pretend everything is honky-dory. Health is not an individual pursuit, it is a collective effort to make sure every single human on this planet is heard and seen as the three-dimensional being they are, with their own dreams and their own ways. It means embracing and learning from diversity from a stance of love and compassion, not fighting discomforts and vilifying those we don’t understand. The planet is big enough for all of us to have a piece of ground to stand on, to create distance between the ways that are not compatible with each other. We may not be able to create paradise on earth, because hell will always be part of who we are; but we can create a healthy life on earth by sharing and having faith that there is something bigger than us, something that is invested in life to survive itself without the constant wars that keep on killing it.