Humoral medicine - discussion

[homeopathic_meditations]

Today, ritaer has posted an invitation to discuss Galenic medicine. Specifically, to challenge the idea that our ancestors were idiots who never noticed that did not work at all.

"Any westerner who has studied the history of medicine has been exposed to the horror stories about the pre-modern practice of medicine in Europe and the Americas. "Heroic" measures including copious bleeding, purging with toxic metals such as mercury compounds and prescriptions made up of 20-20 ingredients are assumed to have killed more than they cured."

I am afraid Magic Monday will run out in a few hours. Therefore, if you are interested in this discussion, I am willing to pick up the ball and host it here for the rest of the week. Please share your comments and enjoy a thoughtful exchange of ideas.

Comments

[open_space]

Thanks for the offer! I'll chime in.

It's funny because I signed up for a trad mexican medicine program and out first homework was to watch The Medic, a movie about barbers.

I was intrigued by ritaer comment about the change in diet over that period and couldn't quite follow up. Do such things have drastic effects on health?

What is a 20-20 ingredient?

[homeopathic_meditations]

The Medic is a good movie, the book it's based on is more nuanced and does not take cheap shots at religion. Christian priesthood of the time were aware that they were not physicians and ABSOLUTELY did not demand that patients should not be treated. It is just that medicine of that time and place was more limited that what we are used to now-a-days.

On the diet theory, I think ritaer was onto something but cannot tell I'd agree with the timeline. There's no doubt that the kind of industrial food we get today is making us sick. However, it is a well documented process that can be traced to somewhere in the first half of the 20th century. It may be possible that this kind of diet was adopted earlier by wealthier people; who in turn made up a disproportionate fraction of physicians' clientele... but I doubt it moves the timescale enough into the past to matter.

[edit] I don't know about the 20-20 term either.

[open_space]

I was confused at those cheap shots at religion too. I didn't know there was a book though! I'll see if I can find it to read later.

[homeopathic_meditations]

For the record, I don't think the Muslims were treated fairly in the movie either. Even the Jews come about as jerks at times.

And, if I may dispense with etiquette, I shall spoil you. At the end the torch bearer does not start a messianic hospital at London, he's bullied out of town by Oxford graduated doctors. He sets out to establish himself in Scotland; which, in my head canon at least, would make him the legendary saint patron of the world famous med school at University of Edinburgh.

[boccaderlupo]

I think there's merit in examining particularly the humoral medicine, and especially through food and herbs. I have a bedraggled copy of a book from the old country, Per curarsi con le erbe, that I suspect draws much on the humoral concepts—which in turn I suspect draws on Neoplatonic theory and "sunthemata."

Wasn't it Hippocrates who implied that at some point all disease would be managed by diet? Or something to that effect.

I would caution, however, not to throw old entirely "modern" medicine, which is really various disparate courses of treatment lumped together. Some methods may be sound, some not—the category, broadly speaking, of modern vs. ancient should not matter, only the results. For that matter, I don't believe, for instance, that germ theory for example utterly excludes humoral theories, but rather that their intersection is poorly understood (or not at all).

Axé and health to you all.

[homeopathic_meditations]

Agreed on the value of humoral medicine. If you just pick up folk remedies and try to archive them by memory, it comes to a point where your bottleneck is your recall capacity. I have never tried to work out the correspondences, but I suspect the classic humors would make a great scaffold to use modern herbalism. That said, your book sounds like a keeper!

Indeed, it was Hippocrates who said "let food be thy medicine, and medicine thy food". Though to be fair, it was a more comprehensive system that included many lifestyle changes, not just diet.

Agreed on your take on modern medicine, too. I had the privilege to be at the conference that Dr. Giovanni Maccioccia presented in Mexico City in 2012. In the Q&A aftermath he responded to the question of whether can acupuncture cure cancer. Quoting from memory: "I always advice my patients to stick with their standard treatment for cancer [along with TCM]. For the few ones that, against my advice, decide to forego the oncologist's care, I was able to extend their life for a while, and to secure them better quality of life for a while... but at the end there's always something that knocks them out of balance and they just couldn't recover from that".

[open_space]

That's part of what my course is about, though its very simple as of yet. They just use hot and cold, no dry and moist and no degrees. Given that the Celtic Golden Dawn draws on alchemy and has herbal medicine components I am trying to catalogue some of the indigenous plants and do tinctures with them to see how it works, if at all. Maxochitl and Epazote the first ones I will try.

boccaderlupo I haven't found germ theory to be completely precise, because I have found in my own experience at least that germs come after an etheric deficiency first. Of course also by contact of microorganisms with an open wound. So, say, a poorly ethericaly fed ear canal gets constant infections.

I like the "modern vs old shouldn't matter, only the results" part because well, its true. There are several problems to carry that point across today. The first is that it has been my experience that for energetic therapies to work really well the patient has to have a strong etheric body and that is rare these days so we are in more need of strong 'mechanic' and chemical approaches. There is also the part that people these days cannot pay attention for more than a few minutes or do something for more than a few days and to get the body into balance can take months if not more whereas taking a pill is just "convenient". I am no expert but at least that's what my acupuncturist says.

Ear "Infection"

[moser99]

It's funny you mention ear "infection". I use the quotes because truth-be-known-if-there-is-a-truth, you are never sure it is a microbe causing the problem.

I have had a painful ear for 55 years, maybe longer. It got to the point in 2014 that it was bleeding regularly so I went to an ear-nose-throat specialist MD in Seattle, a young Asian guy who who dressed and acted Perfectly Seattle.

Even tho I was already on a self-described "boatload of antibiotics" from am infectious disease guy back East, the ear-nose-and throat MD started me on a course of cookbook antibiotics for ear infections.

I went back 3 times and he finally painted my eardrum with gentian blue that took care of the problem for a few months. The supermarket in my hometown had a "Mexican" section where they sold gentian blue for $1 a bottle. My wife and I were paying $14K a year for private health insurance and I still had to pay cool-guy ENT MD $1100.

The ear problem still comes and goes. I can learn more from one story than the best clinical trial ever published.

Re: Ear "Infection"

[homeopathic_meditations]

Curiously enough, my first big error in acupuncture caused a mild ear infection to get much worse; thankfully the patient was myself. This happened back in 2011 and I struggled with that issue for the most part of the following decade.
I did not keep detailed records, but from what I recall: Practicing taiji-quan helped, but I still suffered from itching and overproduction of earwax. Eventually this faded away, roughly around the time when I started experimenting with intermittent fasting.

Re: Ear "Infection"

[moser99]

Thanks for the report. I thought I might get scolded for not noticing I was replying to an old thread.

Have you read Steve Solomon wife's book on fasting? I think her name is Isabelle Moser. Steve wrote my favorite gardening book. soilandhealth.org Maybe you know all this,

Re: Ear "Infection"

[homeopathic_meditations]

Nope, never heard of it. Sounds interesting, I will give it a look and see if it's a good match for me. Thanks!

[homeopathic_meditations]

My opinion on this one is based on Dr. Lester King's book The Medical World of the 18th century.

I think the premise that classic humoral medicine is the same as heroic medicine is just wrong. Ancient classic medicine would give just remedies that should be drank or eaten. As has been correctly pointed out by jmg, barbers did perform forms or crude surgery and other invasive procedures such as bone setting. IMHO, heroic medicine was the brain child of the lift of ancient taboo to corpse dissection.

With corpse dissection came a much more accurate knowledge of human anatomy, and with that a sketchy, trial-and-error sort of discovery of physiology. Heroic medicine came about at knife point... or rather scalpel point in the hands of the first pathologists. They would try and seek what was peculiar in this corpse in comparison with all those other corpses, correlate that with cause of death, and then figure out what is the purpose of that anatomic structure might be.

It was inevitable that in this slow process lots of weird and plainly wrong ideas got floated as the scientific truth. One curious example is the custom of drawing arteries as blue and veins as red. It was believed that arteries carried air as veins carried blood. The reason for this is that arteries have one extra layer of muscle that pushes the blood out in absence of a hearth-bit. But this was not observable until good enough microscopes were invented, so the early doctors made up a theory that claimed air/oxygen moved around the body in gas form: after all, lungs and hearth are connected, so it must be that hearth pumps air along with blood, yes?

Hahnemann had a special kind of hatred for doctors that made up things: His first precept in the Organon of Homeopathic Medicine reads: "The highest and only calling to the medic is to turn back the sick to health. That is what is called to cure. Their mission is not, however, to forge the so called systems, mixing up empty ideas and hypothesis on the intimate nature of the vital processes and the way how disease is generated in the invisible interior of the organism (about which so many doctors have so far wasted greedily their intellectual energies and their time in the seek of fame). They also try to give endless explanations about the process of life and the origin of disease (that shall forever remain occult), wrapped in unintelligible words and abstract, affected, pompous expressions that proclaim vain erudition, with the goal of dazzling the ignorant, while the sick sight uselessly for help."