How has Modern medicine been shaped over time?
Has the lost art of integrative medicine and embodied living, contributed to the down fall of our collective health?
Recently I had the opportunity to visit Tiblesi, Georgia, one of the most ancient Christian countries. It is also said to be the birth place of medicine. I visited a local museum and I was astounded by what I learned as I looked at each excavation and ancient piece of history. As a health practitioner, and a Christian, many patterns began to click for me as I realized where we currently are in history, and how past cultures have shaped us.
If you are open to learning about the roots of medicine, allow me to share what I learned.
There was a time when faith, medicine, and culture, were deeply interconnected and taken seriously in the context of healing. Throughout the ages there has been a huge split, that led us to where we are now, where the current American medical model became a business, and a patient is stripped of their soul and their emotions, culture, and environmental factors are disregarded when it comes to treating disease in their body. In my opinion, this is one factor among many, fueling the rise in chronic disease.
How did we get here?
Let’s take a walk through history.
There was a time when medicine relied on the ancestral wisdom, medicinal herbs, nutrition, environmental facts like sunlight, moon position, plants, water, and community. This was due to necessity and in truth, a lot of people died from illnesses that likely could have been prevented with what we have access today. We have had many amazing medical advancements today, I am thankful for.
However, a lot of people were also healed during that time and with each season of suffering, trial and error, wisdom was learned and passed down through generations. This is becoming a lost art in modern medicine today, with an instant gratification and desire for quick fixes, and knowledge without the willingness to contemplate, slow down, savor, and learn from mistakes. But I digress.
Faith and medicine were also once deeply integrated, even before the time of Jesus. If a person became ill in a village, they would first see a faith healer who would pray and address issues of the mind. Others who were part of occult practices would cast spells and incantations for various health issues. I am not condoning spell casting and incantations by the way, I am simply telling you history. If you are a health practitioner who is practicing spells and witchcraft, you would do well to repent and follow the example of Simon the sorcerer, burn your books, and follow Jesus.
Anyways, they were also reliant on the village healer who knew the ways of plants. With experimentation, they were able to discern the poisonous nature of plants. At a certain dose, a plant could be poison, but mixed with the right concoction, it could be healing. This same concept is used in modern pharmacology today, an example is willow bark, which is what aspirin is derived from. According to Georgian history, the knowledge of plant wisdom was passed through families, and then it was suppressed with the Soviet union came to power.
However, despite it’s suppression the knowledge of plant wisdom and poison continued to grow and was abused. Poison was often used for murder, not just healing.
One significant figure, Mithridates of Pontus in Colchis, was said to create a concoction of poison that protected him from lethal doses, you can read about this in the ancient report of Pliny. His formula for the common antidote, “Mithridatum”, became known after him; and later, these poisons led to the development of pharmaceuticals.
As you continue to travel through time, another form of medicine, the practice of monastic medicine became widespread and revolved around the belief that medical treatment was interconnected with care of both soul and body. Monks became the leaders in medicine, hospital building, and healing.
Later throughout the years, after the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus and the boom of Christianity, Christianity and medicine were then highly integrated with a focus on the mind, body, and Spirit connection. In ancient texts like the codex of the “Euchologion” you can read where there was an integration. It begins with describing how prayer was used for healing and is followed by the blessing of the oil on the sick and the “chanting prayers for the sick”. Wisdom from the Old testament was also said to be used, an example would be when the prophet Isaiah instructed Hezekiah to put a fig bandage to heal the abscess (Isaiah 38:21) Christians also played a significant role in the establishment of hospitals and healthcare throughout the world.
When the Greeks came into power, medicine changed once again as the culture became highly influenced by philosophy and pagan worship. Asclepius and Hippocrates were influential at this time. Modern medicine today is built on some principles by Hippocrates. These include examining a patient, observing their symptoms carefully, making a diagnosis and then providing treatment(PMID: 25512827). He also introduced medical terms universally used by physicians, including symptom, diagnosis, therapy, trauma and sepsis. In addition, he described a great number of diseases and their names are still used today, for instance diabetes, gastritis, enteritis, arthritis, cancer, eclampsia, coma, paralysis, mania, panic, hysteria, epilepsy and many others.
Hippocrates also had an integrated approach for caring for patients and included a focus on environmental causes, natural treatments of diseases, the causes and therapeutic importance of psychological factors, nutrition and lifestyle, independence of mind, body and spirit, and the need for harmony between the individual and the social and natural environment.
But as time moved on, medicine changed once again from his time partly because the physician in the time of Hippocrates was a sole provider of health care and now the typical patient is referred and shuffled around to multiple providers who have multiple specialities. This was of medicine was highly influenced by another man named Rene Decartes.
He was a french philosopher who also shaped our current health model. He developed the concept of body-mind dualism. He was a Christian, who I believe meant well, but he was a deist, and his influence led to the separation of the mind, body, and Spirit in medicine and in the church. He played a role that created progress in medical science through the study of physiology and anatomy, however, “by isolating the mind, his work denied its significance in an individual’s experience of health and led to a mechanical view of the body. In the words Clinical psychologists Dr. Mehta, the holistic picture of health was lost when medicine and the body were mechanized (Journal of Behavioral Health, 2024, Vol 13, NO. 13, NO.4, Page 1-8).
In the “enlightenment” period, which was a complex time, faith and religion were eventually excluded from scientific truth and put in the same category as superstition. Then, the medical community did not want to be bound by Christian ethics, so that also played a role in forming the medical model we have today. Clinical psychologist Dr. Mehta even admits one of the main negative aspects of the Enlightenment is its dismissal of traditional Christian dogma. You can dive deeper into this perspective in Voltaire's "God and Human Beings," which calls for a separation of church and government, promoting secularism and a deistic view of God as a creator who does not interfere in human activity. Unfortunately deism still plagues the church today, leading people to live a disembodied faith and believe God no longer interacts with His people. And it highly influenced the care we receive today.
As time went on, medicine eventually became commercialized and economically powerful and focused on treating the patient physically, while refusing to acknowledge the Spirit and mind. Between 1938 and 1951, federal drug legislation and regulation played an impact on the market for drugs, and between 1929 and 1949, the amount of money that consumers spent on drugs prescribed by doctors rose from 32 to 57 percent. By 1969, prescription drugs made up 83 percent of consumer spending on pharmaceuticals. Lastly, between 1939 and 1959, drug sales rose from $300 million to $2.3 billion, with prescription drugs accounting for all but approximately $4 million of the increase Self-medication, which in the early twentieth century was widespread and viewed as a “sacred right,” now took a backseat to the pharmacological treatments guided by physicians after World War II (PMID: 17096638).
Once drugs were made available only through a physician's prescription, the pharmaceutical companies stopped advertising directly to patients and instead targeted health professionals. By the 1960s, more than 90 percent of the pharmaceutical companies' spending on marketing was aimed at doctors. As a former Nurse Practitioner, I can now tell you, they come to clinics during lunch time and educate providers on the best new drug, hoping we pick them.
Why do I share all of this? I am not against modern medicine or medications, I believe they can be life saving. My hope is to help shine light on how we got to where we are today and to help wake others up to the importance of reclaiming the mind, body, and Spirit connection when it comes to caring for our health and wellbeing.
With the knowledge regarding our consciousness by researchers like John Eccles, or research on the placebo effect and prayer, faith practices should be taken more seriously. Has the lost art of integrative medicine and embodied living, contributed to the down fall of our collective health?
This does not mean health is promised but it does mean, there is a lot of unnecessary suffering happening today under the guise of “medicine.”
Want to learn more about how to care for your body as a whole and reclaim an embodied faith? Join us inside The Aligned and Renewed Community, where we bridge the gap between functional medicine, spiritual formation, & the biology of trauma and nervous system dysregulation, so you can learn how to break free from survival mode, reclaim your God designed vitality, and start thriving instead of surviving.
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