Let's Choose a More Empowering Story
about a 2 minute read
Our ancestors’ ingenuity and know-how kept them alive for untold generations – long enough for us to come along. Everything they knew is still available to us. We're just not using it because we've let it go missing from the stories we tell ourselves.
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The story of our time says that supermarkets, superstores, pharmacies, and "health food stores" provide everything we need.
In this story, our health and well-being rely on mass-produced personal care products, supplements in pills and capsules, pharmaceuticals, white-coated experts, institutions, and high-tech medicine.
We’re here because...
We're here, quite simply, because our ancestors were successful at caring for themselves using the plants and resources they found around them.
But for a variety of reasons we've lost touch with how to build and maintain health in earth-based ways.
Our story -- the story of modernity -- tells us that we're dependent on strangers and technology, and that we have no agency to care for ourselves within the family and community without consulting an expert.
This is a story that makes us powerless, but it's not the only story available to us.
Ancestral healthcare
Herbal medicine far, far predates recorded history1
Archeological evidence2 tells us that 45,000 to 80,000 years ago Neanderthals, close relatives of our ancestors, used medicinal herbs and successfully cared for injured, infirm, and aged family members who could not have provided for themselves, ensuring their survival over years or decades.
They used the same medicinal herbs we use today3. They had effective wound care and bone-setting techniques4. They even had tooth flossing.
The more we learn about our ancient ancestors, the less brutish they look.
Let's drop that idea
Our ancestors’ ingenuity and know-how kept them alive for untold generations – long enough for us to come along.
The only thing that's stopping us from caring for ourselves just as successfully, is a modern-day story that tells us we can't.
Of course, we’re blessed to have experts and high-tech medicine for when we need them.
But the idea that we can't take care of our basic health needs at home ourselves is ridiculous.
It's preposterous.
And it's incredibly dis-empowering.
Let's drop that idea.
Endnotes
- Healing modalities such as conventional medicine, homeopathy, naturopathy, and food science evolved from herbalism. Professions such herbalists, healers, bonesetters, dentists, doctors, pharmacists, nurses, surgeons, and massage therapists all owe their origins to herbalism.” From Phyllis Light, in “What is Herbalism”
- “Neanderthal dental tartar reveals evidence of medicine” and “Shanidar: anthropological and archaeological site, Iraq”
- Medicinal Plants in a Middle Paleolithic grave Shanidar IV
- A fascinating read about how our ancestors in the Upper_Paleolithic era may have cared for and nourished themselves is Jean M Auel's series of epic novels, Earth’s Children.