Comments on: Thesis #22: Civilization has no monopoly on medicine.

By: Fallacy of just being dumb - Online Debate Network Forums

Fallacy of just being dumb - Online Debate Network Forums — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:25:37 +0000

[…] Originally Posted by Turtleflipper It isn’t perfect. But it’s better then leechs and voodoo dancing. I knew this would come up eventually. But really…IS modern medicine better? Jason makes an excellent point (in a long series of them) regarding how Shamanism helps the healing process. Not because of any magical acts or anything. It’s just neuroscience. Quote: […]

By: Taking Public Health Beyond Civilization (The Anthropik Network)

Taking Public Health Beyond Civilization (The Anthropik Network) — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 18:54:36 +0000

[…] The good news is that our learned helplessness with regards to medicine is an illusion—medicine is not the sole domain of civilization.8 Knowing that your community can see to its own medical needs is as fundamental to freedom as providing its own food. A society of people who are responsible for their own health and able to gather or grow their own medicines is a hard society to rule. These days we are dependent on the power structure of industrial health care—the secret society of the doctors, the white-male-dominated medical schools, the corporate decision makers with their toxic pharmaceuticals and heartless greed and labs full of tortured beings. That dependence is one more thing keeping us tied down to the State and unable to rebel with all our hearts or even envision a world without such oppression. With a new system of healing, based on self-knowledge and herbal wisdom, we will be that much more free. […]

By: Thesis #27: Collapse increases quality of life. (The Anthropik Network)

Thesis #27: Collapse increases quality of life. (The Anthropik Network) — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 14:40:52 +0000

[…] Our fear of collapse is an irrational one; one that is projected onto us by our leaders, who truly do have something to fear. This is the same class of elites that are the drivers and architects of all the problems we have so far discussed (see thesis #10). Now that we can see that civilization did not give us medicine (see thesis #22), or knowledge (see thesis #23), or art (see thesis #24)–but it does give us illness (see thesis #21), makes our lives difficult, dangerous and unhealthy (see thesis #9), destroys the way of life to which we are most adapted (see thesis #7), and submits us to the unnecessary evil of hierarchy (see thesis #11)–the true nature of civilization should now be plain to see: it is the means by which elites maintain their power and privelage, at the cost of everyone else. […]

By: Basic Primtivism Refresher (The Anthropik Network)

Basic Primtivism Refresher (The Anthropik Network) — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 17:52:46 +0000

[…] What is the “baby” we should be careful to not throw out here? Is it art? Medicine? These are universals, shared by all human cultures. As I argued in thesis #22, Western medicine is simply our own ethnomedicine. We, like the people of any culture, believe our medicine to be the most effective and all others to be mere superstition, but this is mere ethnocentrism. The simple fact of the matter is that a shaman in the jungles of Peru has the same sort of success rate with his patients as a modern doctor in a good hospital. In thesis #24 I discussed the profundity of “primitive” art, easily on par with our own. For example, though unwritten, Pygmy songs have for millennia maintained a polyphonic complexity that Europe was unable to rival until the 14th century. Or is it knowledge? Surely, civilization has given us knowledge we would not otherwise have…? Again, not really; in thesis #23, I touched on some of the immense indigenous knowledge we dispensed with at the beginning of the civilized project. We’ve gradually worked our way back to about where we started, so the whole thing’s something of a wash. Robert Wolff’s Original Wisdom is the type of book I’d think Pop Occulture readers could appreciate, though I personally prefer David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous. […]

By: The Anthropik Network » Writing, Language & Thought

The Anthropik Network » Writing, Language & Thought — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 19:46:45 +0000

[…] The shaman is the primary healer in his society, but only because of the holistic understanding oral cultures have of the world, wherein sickness is caused by poor relations with the non-human community. We often dismiss this as anthropomorphic superstition, yet if we allow ourselves to reason in a different idiom for a moment—to date to think mythopaiecally and holistically, like someone from an oral culture—we will note that our own ideas of infection have much the same to say. We are infected by pathogens that take up residence in our bodies and use our bodies for their own ends: a failure to properly demarcate the boundaries between the human community, and the non-human (pathogen) community. We might see the shaman’s methods of treating this imbalance as superstitious and foolish, but there is no denying that they are effective—as effective as the balian offerings to the “household spirits.” This is the difference between the “holistic” thinking of oral cultures, versus the “reductionistic” thinking of literate culture. Literacy promotes a greater understanding of the raw mechanics of the world, at the expense of every other level—in short, a greatly diminished set of knowledge, but knowledge that is far more precise and detailed. The “holistic” thinking of oral cultures generates much more knowledge that operates on multiple simultaneous levels. An excellent example of this is found in the differences between Western biomedicine, which excels at the treatment of disease but is often startled to learn that there is a distinction from sickness or illness at all, and most shamanic ethnomedical systems, which are equally preoccupied with all three.13 […]

By: Herbo-primitivism and Anarcho-herbalism » The Anthropik Network

Herbo-primitivism and Anarcho-herbalism » The Anthropik Network — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 17:29:43 +0000

[…] See also, “Thesis #22: Civilization has no monopoly on medicine.” Of course, learning herbal medicine is high on the list of the tribe’s priorities; see, “Herbal Medicines 101.” […]

By: Jason Godesky

Jason Godesky — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 22:24:34 +0000

Civilized populations have more immunities, yes. That is not a “more complex immune system,” that’s more antibodies.

The greatest genetic diversity is still in Africa, where civilization has always had a hard time lasting for very long, so your argument about genetic diversty flies in the face of the realities of genetic diversity.

Mass vaccinations don’t impress me, though, but perhaps that’s because I watched them nearly kill my brother by giving him a meningitis vaccine that gave him meningitis.

But overall, I would agree with you that civilization has a superior immunity to disease, because they’re afflicted with more diseases. They need more antibodies just to survive all of the horrific ailments the civilized life introduces.

Civilized people becoming foragers … well, we’d enjoy the antibodies of civilized people, combined with a way of life that means almost never encountering a serious pathogen, anyway. Like an armored truck to protect you from a nerf gun.

By: _Gi

_Gi — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 22:14:56 +0000

So, Gi. You’re saying that a group of people who have never experienced a particular virus had no immunity to that virus? I agree.

I am saying more than that. I am saying that the civilized populations inevitably did encounter much more virii than non-civilized. I am saying that it is much more likely for civilized populations to have much wider immunities. Not only our civilization is a more complex way of life, it forces our immune systems to be more complex, with a high number of full and partial immunities, and it forces us to develop these immunities much quicker than foragers can do it. Also, growth of civilized population ineviably leads to more thorough gene mixing which makes it harder for the pathogen to infect the whole population. And now we also have mass vaccinations.
That program further increases the number and power of our immune responces. In other words, we are much better adapted to living in sickness-inducing environments.

By: TonyZ

TonyZ — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 19:06:52 +0000

A common mistake people make that somehow poor people, colored people, anyone not white and from America, are not leavers. We all want to be on top of the pyramid. It’s just a matter of walking way before you are TOO sucessful at fullfiling your childhood dreams….

By: TonyZ

TonyZ — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 19:00:10 +0000

Excuse this comment, it’s a little off topic.

I did a study once in college for a little extra credit to see what if any anti-microbial effects common cures had on various common infectuous diseases.

As a control, we used penicilin in some peteri dishes to observe what definite prevention of growth would look like.

To make a long study short, we found red pepper to be slightly more aggresive in preventing pathogen growth than penicilin. While penicilin inhibited growth in the area it was physically at, the pathogen seemed to grow around the red pepper. So beyond inhibition, it showed signs of prevention.

I know as a scientific fact that infection is preventable and avoidable. SO maybe I am a little on topic here. But last itme I checked, red pepper has been around a much longer time than penoicilin, and I know of no mutant capsicum-resistant(the active ingredient in the pepper) microbe.

Civilization not only does not have a monopoly over medicine, doing everything themselves is leaving them thousands of years behind…