A Midwestern Doctor

When you study the history of medicine, you will frequently observe that the nature of disease completely changes depending on the era and these forgotten sides of medicine can be found within many di erent sources and medical systems. As far as I know, Chinese medicine provides the most detailed picture of how human health has changed over the centuries, with medical texts that have been written over a span of thousands of years—while still remaining in use—and the Chinese have been relatively consistent in the use of their diagnostic framework.

Unfortunately, the history of those changes is almost always forgotten and people in each era instead tend to assume disease has always been the way it is presently (with the exception of modern medicine loudly proclaiming its banishment of many infectious diseases).

The history of these changes is critical to understand because o en if you can recognize when a problematic disease emerged, doing so makes it possible to obtain an otherwise unobtainable perspective that allows one to identify the root cause of the disease (o en an environmental toxin), and develop an e ective treatment protocol for addressing it. Unfortunately, in most cases, this perspective does not enter the practice of medicine because the causes of a pervasive illness in society is o en something people in power have a strong nancial stake in keeping in use, or because so much money is made from treating the disease that there are strong nancial pressures to have it remain “unsolvable.”