Health Mythologies

Mythology abounds in this age of science. 

Mythology is interesting in that "the collective we" generally thinks mythology belonged only to the ancients, and was replaced quite recently in context of we technologic humans with rational scientific thinking. And let's also remember that mythology only forms around mostly unconscious notions of immortality.

So how then does mythology sneak in around us since we know it isn't true? Robust and complex narratives that serve unconscious biases! And narratives can be factual and narratives can be false. And without common sense (the capacity for logic) false narratives can and frequently do go unnoticed.

I'm reading a fascinating book at the moment: Dissolving Illusions - Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History, by authors Suzanne Humphries MD and Roman Bystrianyk. It puts a lot of flesh on the bones of what people who think in terms of the cause of health already generally know. Which in a nutshell is that the cause of health is the several practices that together maximize biological strength, which then incurs significantly higher levels of resistance to disease.

Of course all life forms die at some point, the question is how do we civilized humans maximize healthy life span, increasing longevity in the process, and minimizing unhealthy life span and degrees of suffering at the end of life stage. Too many people die relatively young, or spend the last decades of life in suffering.

These cause of health topics are factual narratives, and it is surprising so few in our society have any notion of it. Maybe all the cause of disease commercials for drugs has something to do with that. But awareness is increasing partly due to the pandemic, and the rest due to the internet, the greatest medium of knowledge dissemination since the Guttenberg press...which was quite some time ago ;)

One wonders if significant advancements in the dissemination of knowledge always meets backlash. Narratives must be controlled by the established purveyors! Even if, or perhaps especially if, these narratives are heavily biased, or just plain wrong.

So if we indeed learned the lessons of the pandemic, it taught us several things. Primary among them is a robust immune system was significantly better prevention than the so-called vaccines. (Many, myself included, take issue with the use of the word vaccine when speaking of experimental genetic modifications.) 

The degree of impact the pandemic had was amplified greatly when the powers that be ignored the findings of dozens of early seroprevalence studies from around the globe, and then was magnified further by the experimental genetic modifications, and then by the lockdowns that were both destructive and unnecessary.

The book Dissolving Illusions reminds us that earlier and far more deadly pandemics were caused primarily by poor nutrition, terrible sanitation, and abuse of children's health with child labor. I'm early in the book still, glancing toward latter chapters it does appear the cause of health is a central theme, even if that specific term is not used.

https://tinyurl.com/3k4dmawb