Healthicine

What if the healthiest foods were the cheapest? What if unhealthy foods cost more? Would it make a difference to your health? To your family? To your communities? To your city, your country?

Unfortunately, we have a perfect example for comparison. What is the healthiest drink? We’re not certain, but the best candidate is water. In most cities, water is almost free. But what drinks sell best? Not water. Why does this happen?

Let’s suppose you are a drink manufacturer, and you want to produce and sell the healthiest drink. And of course you want to make a profit. You might think that selling the healthiest drink would be a recipe for sales, profits, money. Imagine you are the company CEO, you head over to the Marketing department and say “Water is the healthiest drink. We need a marketing plan for water.” What will be the response? Continue reading →

Is your prescription a medicine, a symptomicine, or a crutch?  What is a medicine?  What is a symptomicine? What is a crutch?

Webster’s: a medicine is “a substance that is used in treating disease or relieving pain and that is usually in the form of a pill or a liquid“. This definition is quite broad.  A medicine might cure a disease.  But it might be just used to ‘treat’ a disease, or relieve pain. Or it might just prop you up, so you can ‘live with your disease’.

A medicine that cures your illness is a pure medicine.  Many medicines only treat symptoms – these are symptomicines.

Symptomicine: a medicine that only treats signs or symptoms of an illness.

Some medicines are like a crutch.  They prop you up until you can get better. Or if you lose a leg, or some other important aspect of your health, they might be needed to prop you up indefinitely.

Are most medicines cures, symptomicines, or crutches?  What do you think? Continue reading →

Here we have two rats enrolled in a medical study.

Neither one of them has any illness.

Which rat is healthier?  We don’t know. We give them both an ‘illness’, maybe  a cancer.  We administer a medicine to one, and a placebo to the other. Then we measure the effects on their cancer, their illness.

But we don’t measure any effects on their healthiness. Continue reading →

I recently saw a video stating there are no women in the Lord of the Rings.  I took a quick search on the internet and found more than a few posts about the lack of women in Tolkien’s series, from the Hobbit to the Lord of the Ring series.

There are no (real) women in Tolkien.  But that’s not all.

There are no real children, who need to be nurtured and cared for.  There are no real babies and no mothers nurturing them, trying to find time to sleep.  No angst ridden teenagers. There are no real aging seniors, who need help to look after themselves.  There are no caregivers. There are no care receivers.  There are no homeless people, Continue reading →

Healthicine is not an ‘alternative medical practice’ – it is the practice of health, not of medicine.  A healthicine is not an alternative medicine, it is something that improves healthiness. Health is larger than illness.

Our current medical systems – both conventional medicine (which is known by many names) and ‘alternative medicines’ (of which there are many different types) share a common goal.  The primary goals of medicine are to fight illness and symptoms of illness. Sometimes, medicines are used to ‘prevent illness’, but there is little emphasis on health. Continue reading →