Health Beyond Civilization

This post is about hypoglycemia, but it may also be useful for those who have other blood sugar disorders such as diabetes. And given the state of affairs in the developed world, what with the heavily sugared diet, I think almost everyone is at risk for blood sugar disorders.

I have hypoglycemia, a pre-diabetic condition that mandates that I avoid refined carbohydrates, including sugars, starches, and grains such as rice or bread. If I don’t, I very quickly notice it: My energy drops precipitously, I feel dangerously drowsy, and I start getting a pounding headache. If it gets bad, I’ll throw up or even pass out (but I’ve learned enough not to let that happen!).

Hypoglycemia is “hypo” (low) “glycemia” (blood sugar). Blood sugar, or glucose in the bloodstream, is a primary energy source to cells throughout the body. We get it from carbohydrates, roughly broken down into “refined” carbs (white rice, white flour products, white sugar) or “simple” carbs (usually, fruits), and from “complex” carbs (the many types of vegetables). Simple/refined carbs go more quickly to the blood and so give a quick jolt. Complex carbs break down more slowly. Generally, the sweeter it tastes, the quicker it goes to the bloodstream.

Diabetes is hyperglycemia; it happens when, for whatever reason, there’s too much sugar in the blood. Hypoglycemia is opposite, but related; basically both indicate that the body has trouble regulating and distributing energy, usually because there’s some kind of underlying energetic deficiency, which can be caused or aggravated by poor diet (and usually is, with diabetes).

I had always eaten lots of rice and pasta. Things started going awry during my first summer at Teaching Drum in 2000. Higher quantities of sugar were eaten there as part of a food addiction cycle that I’ve written about elsewhere. Then one day we were all fasting for the entire day in preparation for a sweat lodge ceremony that evening, and as the day went on I felt more and more horrible as my blood sugar plummeted. I was barely able to stumble my way the half-mile down the trail to where the van was parked, and the ride in to the house was very difficult because every bump on the dirt road threatened to make me puke.

When I finally got to the house, everyone else left for the sweat, and I staggered into the house, opened up a can of tomato soup, ate a little, lay down, and passed out. When I woke up I felt tons better.

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The Beijing Olympics are in full swing, and Michael Phelps is getting a lot of hype as the greatest Olympian ever, i.e. having won the most career gold medals, as well as shattering a lot of world records for speed. Seeing the attention paid to Olympic sports and herculean athletic feats, and to Tiger Woods’ recent epic tournament win among other things, gives me pause for thought.

Sometimes I compare myself with those athletes and it makes me feel, not inadequate, but profoundly puzzled. I look at the statistics on growing obesity and health problems on the one hand, and the massive adulation (and salaries) given to sports figures on the other, and it makes me think something is not quite right.

Part of the problem, I believe, is that virtually all of the modern sports do not even touch on the basic philosophy of living life, much less achieve the complete integration and unity of physical activity with living life that should be the foundation of a healthy human being’s relationship with body and nature. Take Olympic swimming as an example. These are essentially very simple races, back and forth in a straight line, in predefined distances. You can train for that, sure, and practice over and over again, expecting the same basic conditions every time. You can become great at it, compete with other athletes who have trained for the exact same circumstances, and win handily over them multiple times in a week to be called one of the greatest athletes ever.

I don’t mean to demean Phelps’ achievements, or Tiger Woods’ achievements, or Lance Armstrong’s achievements; they are remarkable feats. What I do want to do is question the frame.

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When it comes to wilderness skills, or even just being outdoors, some things are just assumed. If you go hiking, mountaineering, or camping; if you sign up for a course on survival skills or foraging wild herbs; if you go tracking deer or wolves; then there’s a good chance you’ll get dirty, cold, wet, and tired. It kind of comes with the territory — it’s a no-brainer. It’s the first step that’s so obvious that no one ever talks about it: In order to enjoy and learn from the wild, you have to take a step outside.

But because it’s so obvious, that transition from indoor to outdoor becomes overlooked as a category of study in and of itself. Often this doesn’t matter for people who are predisposed to enjoy those activities; they whiz right through and are playing in the dirt before you can sneeze.

For the rest of us, though, it can be of some value to walk through that step over the threshold a bit more carefully. If we’re stepping from a closed space to an open environment, and especially if we’re used to spending 90% of our time in the closed space, then there are many things that influence us that we’re not used to, from physical sensations of weather and dirt to mental changes like the fact that there’s just more space.

In this post I’ll be examining the effects of weather and climate on that first step over the threshold.

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Vision problems are epidemic in our society. Nearsightedness, farsightedness, astigmatism, as well as more serious disorders like cataracts and glaucoma, they’re all part of the picture. Socially, vision problems have gone from signs of weakness to being so widespread as to be perfectly acceptable, even normal. Not too long ago, it was still out of fashion to wear glasses; now I hear there are even people with good vision who wear glasses for the look!

There are a lot of theories on the causes of this vision epidemic; certainly poor diet, stress, technology, industry, etc. can’t help. But in the end, like many other things that aren’t urgent enough for a busy person to worry about, we take the easy way out and get glasses or contact lenses, or some of the more cutting-edge technologies like lasik.

But there are alternatives out there, and many of them have their origins with a man named William Horatio Bates.

If you’re interested in natural vision improvement, you’ve probably heard of Dr. Bates. He was an ophthalmologist in the early part of the twentieth century who broke with the mainstream idea (which is, to my understanding, still mainstream) that vision, once worsened, cannot improve. The mainstream “cure” for vision problems was, inevitably, corrective lenses; but to him, this made little sense. It was like telling a person with a broken arm that they must stay in a cast for the rest of their life. So he set out to discover if it were possible to restore perfect eyesight.

To make a long story short, he did indeed find that this was possible. For this he was essentially excommunicated from the medical community.

I suppose this has always been the story of mavericks who devise better ways of doing things, but I’m always surprised by attacks on this sort of thing because it is perfectly verifiable in a scientific way.

The essence of the Bates Method and its successors is actually quite simple:

Relax.

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The Chinese, among others, have developed a philosophical framework to understand health based on the notion of qi, or vital energy. It can constitute a very useful set of metaphors to use in organizing the cultivation of one’s own health.

According to the Chinese, the three most basic types of energy related to physiology, termed the “Three Treasures,” are:

• Jing, or innate essence
• Qi, or vital energy
• Shen, or mental energy

Jing can be considered potential energy. It’s the “battery charge” we come into the world with, the genetic and inherited and ancestral influences. Some people are born with a lot of jing and they don’t have to do much to be or stay healthy; they can eat anything and do anything and still be running circles around you. Other people are born with very little jing, and they are sick from day one, and maybe even have some disabilities.

Potential energy is useless, though, unless it’s converted into something usable. In physics it’s kinetic energy; in Chinese medicine it’s qi. This is all of the things for which we use up the charge on our batteries: All of our basic physiological functions, like eating and digesting and moving around; all of our ways of interacting with the world, like walking and talking. Pretty much everything, really, is based on the flow of qi.

Finally, even kinetic energy is useless unless there’s something to direct its movement and make it purposeful. That’s the shen, the mind and the emotions.

Though placed in distinct categories, functionally they all flow into each other. Pushing yourself until your qi is depleted and you’re really tired will affect your ability to function mentally and make you irritable and moody. Thinking and worrying too much will, likewise, affect your physical energy, maybe disrupt your digestion.

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From SurvivalBlog, here are a few letters discussing emergency medical care in a post-civilized environment, with a lot of good ideas. They tend to have more of a doomsday and militant perspective over there than I feel familiar or comfortable with, but who’s to say that’s not warranted in a post-civilized situation.

The original letter:

I have been a reader of SurvivalBlog for at least a year now, and I feel it’s time to get involved. During this time I have been adding to my preps, building a library, and re-certifying my medical credentials. I have also done a lot of reading, getting many opinions concerning the future. I found one thing that I am at a loss for, and that is the subject of this letter.

In all my medical re-certification courses and also in the medical library that I have put together, I have these questions: If society does go down the dumper and all social services and amenities cease, along with gasoline and diesel fuel for transport, how do we get injured or seriously ill individuals to proper medical facilities? Who would be there to receive them, and what kind of treatment could we except once this patient arrives? None of my training programs nor the books that I have in my library address these questions. They all state: “Transport the patient to the nearest medical facility for treatment.” So, what do we do?

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This essay has been floating around for awhile, but it seems very apropos to this blog so I think it’s appropriate to repost it here.

This is Anarcho-Herbalism

Thoughts On Health and Healing For the Revolution
by Laurel Luddite (used by permission of the author)

My medicine chest is a council of bioregions, with representatives gathered together as I make my way around the world west of the Rocky Mountains. The Coptis root was picked out of the churned-up scar left by an excavator, at the retreating edge of the Idaho wilderness. The tiny amount of Pipsissewa leaves came from an ancient grove above the Klamath River just feet away from where the District Ranger sat on a stump talking about his plans to cut it all down. I am drying Nettles from the California creek where salmon die in the silt left after a century of industrial logging.

Every jar holds a story (often a ghost story of dying ecosystems and places gone forever). I am honored to have known the plants in their home places and to have studied their uses as medicine. But for people not lucky enough to roam throughout the wilds, purchased herbal preparations such as tinctures may be the link back to this sort of healing.

Like so much in this consumerist society, it is easy to ignore the connections between a bottle on a shelf in some store and a living, growing plant out in the world somewhere. It can be hard to know if the plant grows a mile away or on another continent. There is much to be said for reconnecting, for educating ourselves about the herbs we use and gathering our own medicine when we can. That’s how we will be able to build a whole new system of healing ñ one that can support our movement away from the corporate power structure that medicine has become.

The development of a new medical system, or the recovery of ancient models, will be another link in our safety net when industrialism fails. It will keep us alive and kicking out windows now in the system’s last days when so many people have no access to industrial medicine. And it will reestablish our connection to the real medicine that is the Earth.

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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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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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