The Two Worlds We Live In

I love this, I always break this one out at parties. Modern medicine has existed in the way we know it for only around a hundred years. The replies that I get are a good indicator of the company I’m in. They range from, “What did people use before that?” to, “No duh..”. We have a massive disconnect from our traditional selves, as a people we have “lost” so much knowledge with regards to the practice of healing, I have “lost” in inverted commas there because it’s not truly lost, there are keepers of this information, not necessarily some dude deep in a European forest or some witch in the Malay swamps, we have access to these resources right at our fingertips, we’re experiencing a resurgence of traditional medicines, the glory about the information age is that it’s not just kids on Tiktok, but a wave of people who have realized that along with the westernization of the world, we are losing more and more pockets of people who carry this knowledge, not that these folks are just dropping like flies, but along with the westernization of the world comes a lot of ease, a lot of information bubbles swaying our opinions and changing our ethics themselves.

Ease isn’t a bad thing, not really. The problem that arises with ease is laziness, we get used to quick fixes, quick thrills, and the ability to order Burger King straight from your couch. Now I’m writing this as a complete hypocrite, I love the type of life we can achieve when dipping our toes in a more modern life, in all honesty, I wonder what its repercussions will be, but that’s a point for another blog. This ties in with medicine because it makes our philosophy around the concept murky. There are benefits to taking plant medicines as a whole, there’s white willow bark. Willow bark has demonstrated efficacy in alleviating headaches. Additionally, there is evidence suggesting that it is less prone to causing gastrointestinal side effects compared to other pain relievers, such as ibuprofen (Advil) and other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, this comes from the White Willow bark having a compound that soothes the effect of the headache relieving agent within the body, but with the ability to just have a supply of paracetamols that you’ve bought from the pharmacy is just way easier.

Now this doesn’t necessarily mean that we need to suddenly plant a grove of white willows, not all of us are privileged to have the time or the space to execute that, but maybe it’s about just picking our battles, we’ll never be those people who our ancestors were, we need to make space for modernity, but still try and remember how beneficial it is to keep aspects of that life alive.

Go touch some grass, take a walk in the forest, kiss a rock, whatever, do you.

-Llewellyn