medicine

bombs over baghdad. a moment of silence, the 89th in one day, quadruple millionth in...

medicine i have learned is knowledge of herbs and trees and their properties and the elements tables and non-invasive and invasive procedures. i have also learned from my friends and family who have come up without much, who have struggled to pay rent, that medicine is also economics, and values and deeply psychological. i have learned from my friends who have grown up in greater privilege, that a house and car and light skin and a loving family do not always equate to happiness, that in many instances, people from the middle and upper middle classes suffer from depression, anxiety, etc.

i have learned that individualism, selfishness, greed, accumulation, are a disease. sadly, many of the practitioners of traditional medicine in the babylon system suffer from this disease, as their lust for money and power has furnished great walls between themselves and the people they are serving.

i have learned from family members who were mis-diagnosed, who were facing terminal illness, which were accentuated by the babylon medical system, that doctors are not gods, that the modern medical system, which guises under evidence and hard-science is an arrogant child in the face of the ancient.

i have learned that the greatest quality of a medicine man is humility. i have learned from the stories of my indigenous mother, life lessons that stretch to a time immemorial and fine-tuned with each generation, stories that remind me the importance of valuing knowledge that is part of a continuum.

although traditional medicine has seen an upsurge, it has been swallowed by the insatiable appetite of the babylon dragon and spit out like a lugi in plastic packaged babylon form. ayurveda and yoga are package deals bought and sold in the market like kitkat and addidas. and like sneaker corporations, the people selling are making bank.

sadly, many of the “natives”, the indigenous of the world, have adopted the ideology of the taker cultures they were subjugated by only a generation ago. so now “the man” is no longer identifiable by clear cut notions of race, but is himself of the elk of native, i.e. heads of states, corporations and of course those of us on the ground who aspire to accumulate through our own profit-driven ventures that place money over people, plants and life.

what was the spanish and british conquistador armies in the americas, india,
africa, decimating the native and imposing imperial rule, is now in the 21^st centuries, in addition to white, black and brown soldiers under white, black and brown presidents in the american, french, israeli, british armies, raping, pillaging iraq, palestine, afghanistan, native america, indigenous cultures who have yet to fully bow down.

today, as a native, you can just as easily have a successful fashion line as the man who fit the description of colonist in yesteryears, exploiting desperate natives who will work for 10 cents an hour, 18 hours a day, in sweatshops that exhaust priceless human and earth resources and trash the air and earth and leave extinct our bredren species.

medicine is more than a hospital n paycheck n an ayurvedic business venture. a keralan allopathic doctor who i met on the train platform near manipur, in karnataka, who was skeptical of some ayurvedic practices, said that medicine is a field of service. she told me how she charged 50 rupees for a consultation, which could last an hour, for all her clients, poor or rich, n that if they couldn't pay it, it was cool. she expounded on the ethics of medicine which she summarized in a sentence: if you are in it for the money, this is not the field for you. i told her she was more of an ayurvedic doctor - sacred in her practices - than most of the ayurvedic doctors i'd come across.