19. Your medication or your life

January 17, 2018 Sticky Thoughts No Comments

One of the shocks of my professional life came rather late: after 7 years of study, 8 years of medical practice and several years of working on a medical decision support system. It came while reading about how many categories of medication act more than purely symptomatically. Or better said: how many don’t.

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Actually *, there are only two who don’t: medication against foreign life forms inside one’s body (antibiotics and the like) and medication against own cells acting as foreign ones (anticancer medications). ALL the others have the special characteristic that they do NOT cure. They only relieve symptoms. As it may be to you now, that was very weird to me. I had to check it several times before accepting it as a fact.

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This doesn’t mean that medication doesn’t work of course. It relieves symptoms and in a number of cases this is all that is wanted or needed, indeed all that is necessary to save one’s life by giving the body-mind enough time to heal itself.

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The fact is: all medication acts against life, either against ‘foreign life’ or against the expression of the own life. Otherwise put: all medication is poison.

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Again: this poison may be good. It may even be life saving.

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It cannot be otherwise. Life is too deep and too complex for a simple substance to be able to ‘heal’. In the end, this healing idea comes from a magical way of thinking. What people still seek in medication, is the ‘magical healing potion’. But that has in fact never existed. It was never the ‘potion’ that healed, but the ‘magic’ around it. That is: in the case of good magic. There is also of course, and always has been, bad magic.

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In our age of rationality, we still think that ‘medication heals’. I thought so too. Well, it doesn’t.

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The lesson is: if you value life in depth, you should look at taking medication not too rashly as the first thing to do. Especially so in the case of psychosomatic illness, because here what do you think medication is against, eventually?

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In many cases, using the own ‘inner strength’ through mental imagery and autosuggestion is in principle at least as effective as medication. The downside is: the ‘main stream’ in Western culture flows the other way and this may be stronger and more ‘inside you’ than you think. The upside is: tools have been developed that can be very helpful.

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[*not counting vaccines and vitamins as ‘medication’. One can argue about this but that doesn’t diminish the main tenet of this text.]