It’s widely recognized that modern medicine focuses primarily on relieving disease symptoms. Billions of dollars are spent researching diseases and treatments that manage, but don’t really cure, those conditions. So it’s little wonder people think of health primarily in terms of fighting disease. This viewpoint is strongly linked with Louis Pasteur’s germ theory, which taught us that germs invade an otherwise healthy body and make it sick. The war against germs has become the model for health care in general—diseases are invaders, which must be fought and conquered.

Disease care is necessary, but it shouldn’t be called health care. It is time to shift the focus away from disease and focus instead on health. It’s time to look more closely at the way healthy people eat and live. It’s time to place less emphasis on treating diseases and more emphasis on building the health of the person.

Returning to Traditional Wisdom

In our quest to do this, traditional systems of medicine, such as traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) and Ayurvedic medicine from India, can help us. Even the wisdom of traditional Western herbalism can come to our aid, because all traditional systems of medicine viewed health as the natural state of balance within the body. Disease was primarily seen as the result of an unhealthy diet and lifestyle that threw the body out of balance.

Traditional medicine used metaphorical models, such as the western four elements (air, water, fire and earth) or the Chinese five elements (wood, fire, water, earth and metal) to describe these imbalances. Herbs, diet and lifestyle changes were recommended, not to treat the disease directly, but rather to bring the person back to a healthy, balanced state.

Because of this, two people suffering from the same disease could receive completely different treatments in traditional medicine. This seems strange to those steeped in the Western medical model, but it’s really easy to understand. The treatment isn’t aimed at fighting the disease; it’s aimed at correcting the underlying imbalances in the body that allowed the disease to occur. When these imbalances are corrected, the body does what it does naturally, it heals itself.

Contrast this with modern medicine, where a person may spend the rest of their life on medications to control high blood pressure or depression and one can start to see the wisdom in the traditional approach. It just requires us to unlearn our disease-care thinking and learn health-care thinking instead, which is what this issue of Sunshine Sharing will help you do by introducing you to the concept of biological terrain.

The Practice of Traditional Western Herbalism: Basic Doctrine, Energetics, and Classification by Matthew Wood

Strategies for Health by Steven Horne