Health Beyond Civilization

I recently saw a patient who was so healthy he was almost intimidating. He was young, tall, handsome, and athletic. He literally had no complaints; said he woke up every morning feeling great, could run a mile without being winded, took about 2-3 breaths per minute, could do everything he wanted to do. He was just in for the experience of acupuncture, and get a one-time tune-up. So when I put my fingers on his radial artery, I expected to feel an abnormally healthy pulse.

Instead, I felt distinct signs that this person had been depleting himself, burning the candle at both ends, so to speak. Sure, he had a lot of energy, and that showed in the pulse; but there were also indications of a significant long-term drain, consistent with chronic overwork or overexertion.

This, then, begs the question: What is the difference between health and fitness?

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We live immersed in an invisible environment of ideas, concepts, and beliefs that limit and shape the way we think, feel, and act about ourselves and each other. Though unseen, they shape and guide and limit us on the deepest level. But because they reach so deep, we think they describe reality itself, and we don’t question our assumptions about things.

Medicine is not excluded from this. It would be nice if it were above the fray, pure of culture, absolute and simple. But the truth is that it’s deeply rooted in culture, that it both reflects and expresses who we see ourselves to be. We can see it in our everyday language: “There’s a bug going around.” “She’s getting on my nerves.” “I can’t wrap my brain around it.” “He’s all raging hormones.” “It must be in his DNA.” “She’s trying to watch her carbs.”

Or we talk about our bodies as machines: “Men are hard-wired to have multiple sexual partners.” “She’s got a few screws loose.”

Or we talk about disease in terms of war. The skin is the “first line of defense.” Then there are various white blood cells that “attack” and “destroy” invaders.

What do these examples tell us?

They tell us we are a biology first and a psychology second (if at all).

They tell us that we are at war, and that our foes are tiny things we can’t see.

Or, they tell us that the tiny things we can’t see that make up our body can go out of whack and there’s not much we can do about it.

They tell us that our bodies are machines and can be understood only by highly trained experts using expensive technology and prescribing strong drugs or invasive surgeries.

They tell us that there is no whole, only parts. And all of those parts can and will break down, with no greater purpose or meaning to them at all.

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People who do-it-yourself with their health often put much of their emphasis on diet, possibly because it is in part the most obvious thing you can control. There really is a lot that can be affected by your food choices and many other factors involving how and when you eat, and why. But digestion is really much more than just choosing what foods to put into your mouth.

Digestion is the central pillar of our biological existence. We were born with certain characteristics determined by genes and ancestry, shaped by influences in our environment; but it’s the constant intake, processing, and excretion of substances that allows us to continue to exist moment by moment. Thus, in these terms, digestion encompasses everything that flows through the body. That list includes, but is not limited to:

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This rigorous self-examination that is the foundation of self-healing would not be complete without an exploration of the psyche — your personality, your motivations and interests, your flaws and weaknesses as well as your strengths, your hidden talents, your breaking point.

Far from the narcissistic self-obsession that many may associate with such introspection, this is eminently practical work.

Whether we realize it or not, many of us growing up in this civilization have adopted the deep-seated belief in a division between body, mind, and soul. Even if we believe intellectually that the mind can affect the body and vice versa, it’s often not until we have personal experiences that demonstrate the connection convincingly that that belief begins to erode. But all indigenous peoples believed in what we think of as spirits and the supernatural as crucial elements in healing; if we seek to emulate our ancestors, we have to acknowledge that there may be truth in their beliefs, and seek to reorient ourselves according to ancient wisdom, rather than the other way around.

Moreover, as civilized human beings we’ve all developed a quite complicated, contradictory, and difficult-to-deal-with set of psychological dynamics, and if we’re truly serious about taking stock of who and where we are in order to assess our resources and our limitations, so that we can know best how to proceed with the re-indigenizing process, then introspection is an important step to take.

On a more mundane level, you won’t last a week in the woods, let alone a lifetime, without knowing your psychological limitations. Psychological obstacles can be as detrimental, or even more so, to the rewilding process, or any process that requires a fundamental shift of consciousness, than physical hindrances.

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The Body Scan discussed in the previous post is one way of establishing a baseline. Its advantages are that it connects you intimately with the moment-to-moment experience of your physical being, exactly as it is. It trains the mind and builds concentration power. It helps to seat you more comfortably in your body.

The potential drawback is that, like all mindfulness techniques, it runs the risk of building a body of experience without a mental framework with which to understand that experience. You can meditate or pay attention all you want, but these activities need context to be meaningful.

The context is your own life: Your activities, your interests, your behavior, your character, your idiosyncrasies and quirks, your goals and your life purpose. A practice such as the body scan temporarily removes you from the flow of all those details because they can be distracting to the experience of your being in the moment, and for that reason it’s very valuable. It’s also valuable to be able to reintegrate that awareness into the chaos of life.

How is this relevant to health? As I will say again and again, what I’m trying to do is endorse a concept of health as more than not being sick, more than a vague sense of being well, more than having good blood pressure or having a good body-mass ratio. Health is quality of life. To know how to improve your quality of life, you first have to know what your quality of life is right now. That includes attention to the physical and the nonphysical aspects of your life.

The Body Scan helps you build a base awareness of your physical body. But there are ways to go farther, or to approach it from other angles.

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A good first step to take at the beginning of any endeavor is to take stock of where you are and what you have, so you know what your resources are, internal or external, and what your limitations are.

With your physical health, this is far more than just noticing that you have a problem or having the typical understanding that you have two arms, two legs, a head, and a torso. It involves taking the time and space to clearly and thoroughly examine and explore your body.

A good health care practitioner will do that for you when you have an initial visit. The methods vary according to what they practice, of course: A doctor or nurse might listen to your heart and breathing, take your pulse rate, take your blood pressure, maybe order some basic laboratory tests and have you pee in a cup. An acupuncturist might take your pulse, look at your tongue, palpate the abdomen, and examine your face. You’d be asked a number of questions about what’s going on with your health.

But no matter how thorough the diagnostic procedure is, no one can know you as well as you know yourself.

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Why is this whole Health Beyond Civilization theme so important?

Two reasons. First, if you’re reading this, you probably share the assumption, or are concerned about the possibility, that modern industrial civilization has reached its apex, because the oil supply on which it is based is now at a plateau or declining even while population and demand for oil skyrockets. Many, if not most, modern treatments for diseases are heavily based in relatively new pharmaceuticals and new technologies — and these are all based in a system that consumes massive amounts of oil, in surprising ways.

Among the few resources I could find on this topic is a report submitted to the Australian Senate on the impact of peak oil on medicine, co-authored by Dr. Paul Roth from PeakOilMedicine.com. It begins:

Most of our modern medical system is oil-dependent, just like the rest of society. Oil has been so cheap for so long that it has become a pervasive presence in health care delivery. This impact is most obvious when one looks at the transport systems required to maintain a health service. Just as suburbia has been subsidised by the endowment of cheap and plentiful oil, modern medical care is predicated on the cheap movement of things and people from one place to another. This cheap transportation is so crucial that the system must fall apart if no alternatives are developed before oil becomes scarce and even more expensive.

Above and beyond transportation costs, oil is present in items created from petrochemical derivatives (down to little things like rubber gloves and plastic syringes), or whose creation requires petrochemicals in their processing (stainless steel tools), or who simply require oil to run (anything that runs on electricity — MRIs, CT scanners, EKG monitors, pacemakers, computers, X-rays, etc.). Essentially, modern medicine evolved in an oil culture, and cannot exist without oil.

This poses a considerable problem to the entire edifice of modern health care if the oil supply starts to run out.

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The challenge of achieving and maintaining a truly healthy state of being requires us to develop a far more personal relationship with ourselves. I always maintain that the best help is self-help, simply because no one knows you better than yourself, and moreover, no one can act for you and take the responsibility for your own health and well-being. This is not to say that you should never ask for outside help; quite the contrary, sometimes another’s help is necessary and much appreciated. But healing goes much faster and is much more effective when you are an active participant in the healing process.

So what does it mean to be an active participant? First of all, it means being interested and curious in what it feels like to be healthy or unhealthy, as I discussed in my last post. This seems like a no-brainer, but I do occasionally treat patients who maintain that they are absolutely fine, when I can see that they’re full of problems. And maybe that’s okay with them. Everyone sets their own standards. But, I would encourage everyone to raise their standards, because we are all capable of so much more.

By the way, this is not to say that you should become a hypochondriac. The opposite of the example I just gave is the person who is full of health but constantly worrying about every little thing. That’s not the goal either. If the first example is someone who’s in denial, this person is someone who is always living in fear.

The goal is to be awake, alive, curious, without getting trapped. Sure, we all live in denial or fear now and again. But overall the appropriate attitude to cultivate is a centered awareness of what we feel. That’s the first step.

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As you can tell, this blog is about “health beyond civilization.” One of its premises is that modern industrial civilization will end — whether with a bang or a whimper, I don’t know. That point is well-argued elsewhere, and those topics won’t be covered here.

But one thing that must be discussed before we can embark on any other kind of discussion is the first part of that title — namely, health. What is it?

The easiest definition of health is that it is the absence of illness. For many people in civilization, and certainly for the insurance companies, this does the trick. But this is an entirely unsatisfactory definition. All it does is allow people to maintain a minimum of functioning, ignoring all of the more subtle activities and processes at play in the human bodymind. But because most people think of health in just such a broad and vague way, they often have no way of labeling or describing the minor inconveniences they have.

“I’m basically healthy,” you say, “but I just have hay fever when pollen season hits.”

“I’m fine, I just get headaches every so often when I’m stressed.”

“I’m doing great, except I had to get stronger glasses. But hey, everyone wears glasses these days.”

“I can’t walk too far, but all I need to do is drive around and sit at the computer, so who cares?”

No, unless you’ve got high cholesterol, high blood pressure, overweight, or some other number that can be measured, you’re considered fine by medical standards. And being fine by medical standards, you think you are fine.

Are you?

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