Picture of illness from Microsoft Clip Art
In our Ancestors’ days, when someone became ill, the family cared for that person. Usually, there were several families, (mother, father, children) living under the same roof, with grandparents or elderly aunts and uncles. That meant that there would usually be someone available to do some healing and caretaking. As well, someone in the family, or someone within walking distance, had a knowledge of herbs and would probably know the herbs required to speed up the healing.
The person with the healing knowledge was usually considered a shaman, medicine man or women, healer, or witch man or woman. Note that in Roman and Celtic languages, the old meaning of witch was “one who knew of the earth”, or someone who knew about what grew and what was helpful.
In extreme cases of illness, families might pilgrimage, with the sick one, to a well known healer, or to a sacred shrine, to ask for healing from a particular god or goddess or saint or from Christ. Now things have changed. The healer that we go to is a doctor and the pilgrimage is to a hospital. Seldom do we care for our own – we are all busy, with jobs, and cannot care for someone on a 24 x 7 schedule. We trust others to care for them, and then are outraged when abuses take place, for example, as in abuse of the elderly in care homes.
Instead of natural herbs being cooked and made into teas or salves or poultices, our ill are given synthetic products, in large quantities. The drugs react to each other, in many cases, and possibly are toxic to each other. Unlike the healer/herbalist, the doctors getting samples and products from the drug companies may not know what the ingredients and the side effects are.
Why did we get to this place of not being able to care for our own? There are five reasons:
- as the practice of medicine developed, people were taught that only doctors knew enough about the body to treat the body, and that people who used natural remedies were con artists.
- as the industrial society required more people to work in factories or in other labour positions, people were taken out of their homes on a daily basis, and there was no one at home to care for others.
- this problem of being out of the home increased through World War I and II, and because so many young men (and women) were killed in the wars, created a gap where there were not any children left to care for elderly parents. This created small nursing homes to care for injured and elderly people, left without family.
- in the rebuilding of countries, through the fifties, sixties, and seventies, all able bodied people were needed to be in the work force. Corporations were replacing “mom and pop” shops. Women were increasingly taking on what were deemed "male” jobs. Soon babysitters were required for children, and day-cares became the norm.
- entrepreneurs, always watching for a service niche, realized that there was a market opportunity to care for children, the ill, and the elderly. Hospitals with a dollar agenda became big business, as did personal care homes, and education. Pharmaceutical companies grew up around the “illness” industry, for there is not the same amount of money or annuity in the “wellness” industry.
No, this does not make us bad people. It does show how we have been manipulated by circumstances and by those looking to profit from those circumstances. Perhaps it is time to take our power back!
Blessings,
Judy
