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Support for universal, single-payer health care has become an article
of faith for most on the Left in the United States. But missing from
the discussion of the issue is the question of what kind of health
care we are going to universalize. Are we embarking on a project of
liberation or extending the reach of a system of domination that often
undermines public health?
Modern Western allopathic medicine -- a system that seeks to suppress
the symptoms of disease rather than to support the body's systems, and
that treats the individual in isolation -- arose from a mechanistic
view of the universe that gained favor among a growing middle class in
Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its is the product
of the same world view that gave rise to capitalism and the
privatization of the commons and drove genocide against the peoples of
the Americas, the enslavement of millions of Africans, and the often
brutal suppression of the knowledge, wisdom, and religion of Europe's
poor, rural majority. As Starhawk explains in The Earth Path:
"In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe, new economic
stresses caused by the influx of gold from the Americas challenged the
power of the old ruling classes, which was based on land. A new power
began to arise, based on money, trade, and the beginnings of
capitalism. With it came a new ideology, the mechanistic model of the
universe, which saw the world as made up of separate objects that had
no inherent life, could be viewed and examined in isolation from one
another, and could be exploited without constraint.
"For this new economic order to be accepted, old ideas of the dynamic
interrelatedness of the universe and the sacredness of nature needed
to be broken down [ . . .]
"In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were still areas of
common land in Europe that belonged to the community rather than
individuals. While land ownership was highly concentrated and
enormously hierarchical, land was nevertheless not considered mere
property that could be bought or sold in isolation -- but rather a
nexus of rights and responsibilites deeply tied to a community.
Peasants might not own any land, but the might have the hereditary
right to gather wood in the lord's forest or graze their pigs under
his oak trees. The folk customs -- the maypoles and Morris dances and
fairy tales tied to particular places on the landscape all reinforced
those traditions. [ . . . ] The view of the land as animated by
spirits and nonhuman intelligences was a deterrent to its wholesale
exploitation."
Fundamental to the project of separating rural people from the land
was the marginalization and criminalization of herbalists and
midwives. To quote Starhawk again:
"[The witch persecutions] were an attack on forms of knowledge and
healing that did not have the approval of the authorities. Midwives,
herbalists, and traditional healers, many of whom were women, were
considered suspect, and the practice of medicine became a specialized
activity concentrated in the hands of male doctors.
Although the herbalists of that time were more empirical and truly
'scientific' than the doctors of the day (who were busy bleeding
people according to their astrological signs), the doctors' knowledge
was considered official and valid while the midwives' and herbalists'
knowledge was seen as supersitious or outright traffic with the devil."
A good herbalist maintains a close connection to the plants she works
with, understanding them as part of a living system, and understanding
the intricate relationships between plants and humans and how they are
mirrored by the intricate relationships among the cells of our own
bodies. Midwives have a deep relationship with the power and mystery
of women's bodies that defies reduction and translation into
mechanized clinical procedures.
Herbal medicine and midwifery also gave people more power over their
own lives. Most rural people had some basic knowledge of the plants
needed to cure common ailments -- and could grow or gather these
plants themselves. That, of course, remains true in many places today.
The midwives of the time were especially dangerous because they
generally also knew about herbs that could prevent or end a pregnancy,
giving women more control of their own bodies -- just as many do today.
Criminalizing traditional medicine allowed medicine to be put in the
hands of a group of men from the middle and upper classes who
subscribed to the view of the human body as just another machine that
could be meddled and tinkered with without regard to the differences
between bodies, the connections between and within its systems, or the
economic and ecological relationships the body participated in. This
remains true of most allopathic medicine today. Even when it looks at
prevention and health maintenance, the medical profession seems to
view the body as a machine with a common owner's manual that describes
universal rules of proper maintenance.
The approach is often as unscientific today as it was in the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. Ecology and evolutionary biology have yet
to inform mainstream medical science. Take the treatment of bacterial
infections: doctors know that the heavy use of antibiotics leads to
the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. And the creation of
new generations of stronger antibiotics leads in turn to the creation
of new generations of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Yet they continue
to use the same approach over and over again. Yet because the approach
succeeds each time in treating specific infections in specific bodies
they claim success. And wait for their patients to come back again
next year so they can repeat their apparent successes with new drugs
against new germs. Meanwhile they are killing their patient's gut
flora over and over again, and ignoring the integral relationship
between the digestive system and the immune system.
Or take the approach to creating new medicines: scientists take
medicinal plants into a laboratory, isolate the compound they believe
is responsible for the plant's beneficial effects, synthesize it, and
then reproduce that compound over and over again in an identical
process. But as one herbalist explained to me, our bodies don't remain
the same over time. Living plants experience the same pollution, the
same weather, the same shifts in temperature that our bodies do, and
evolve in response. A compound isolated from usnea lichen growing in
the Maine woods thirty years ago might not ease my asthma as well as a
tincture made from usnea harvested this year.
Keeping medicine in the hands of a small, professionalized elite --
and a pharmaceutical industry that is capable of mass producing
synthetic chemicals also makes it easier for governments and
corporations to limit people's freedom to control their own bodies.
Witness the great lengths Planned Parenthood and others had go to to
first convince states to allow pharmacies to provide the "morning
after pill" to women without a prescription and then pressure
companies like Wal-Mart to make the medication available. It was an
amazing organizing effort. But all of it could be lost quickly in a
post-Roe v. Wade world if Congress decided to outlaw emergency
contraception -- not hard to imagine given the growing power of the
Christian Right. But the seeds of the wild carrot plant (also known as
Queen Anne's lace) -- a common ditch weed in most parts of the country
-- can be made into a tincture that has the same effect as the
"morning after pill." And our government's war against a certain other
common ditch weed makes it clear that the living Earth is still
unwilling to comply with laws imposed on it by those in power.
Then there is the fact that the manufacture of synthetic medicines is
often a highly toxic process that can create health problems for
factory workers and for people downstream and downwind. And that's not
even taking into account the damages caused by nuclear medicine.
All of this makes me question whether fighting for access to the
current medical system is really the struggle I want to be in.
Wouldn't it make more sense to work to promote a decentralized system
where local practitioners worked with people to help them find,
cultivate, and use the plants they could use to promote their own
bodies' natural healing processes? A system which recognized the deep
connection between the health of our bodies and the health of the
deserts and forests and fields that are home to the plants we use for
food and medicine? A system that acknowledged that we can't reduce the
living world to a system of interlocking parts?
Instead of looking to extend access to a system that continues to
treat our bodies and the Earth as inert machines, let's support the
revival and resurgence of a science that understands the world as alive.
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Sean Donahue is a poet and freelance journalist living in Sumner,
Maine. Much of his writing is available on his website at
http://www.seandonahue.org. He can be reached at seandonahue@riseup.net.
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