The Philosophy Behind Nourishing Eyes

I believe that natural health should be available and affordable for all, not just a privileged choice available to just the wealthier minority of our community. We have anthropological evidence of plants being used as medicines and in ceremony, e.g. the Shanidar Cave, Iraq, dating back 60,000 years. If you think back to the very beginnings of herbal and natural health medicine it was indeed available to all.

As long as you knew which herbs to use, for what complaint, where to find them, how to harvest them and how to use them (a tea, a poultice, a salve etc), then the tools of healing yourself were at your fingertips. Our communities held the people who had studied or apprenticed in this knowledge in high regard. They were our Tohunga, our wise women, our midwives.

The word drug is from the old French word ‘drogue’ meaning to dry referring originally to dried herbs (Bone & Mills, 2013). 80% of allopathic drugs have resulted from research of herbal medicines and even though they can be synthesised some are still extracted from the plant e.g. quinine, ergot, digitalis, vincristine (Chaudhury,1991). This in itself should give us confidence in our understanding of the efficacy of herbal medicine.

It is also fascinating to me that so many of our modern diseases are directly caused by the foods we eat. The ancients understood this too. Jesus advised a man suffering from epilepsy to fast (Mark, n.d.). The Ketogenic Diet mimics fasting. Hippocrates only tools were diet and herbs and yet he was the first scientific doctor and is widely hailed as the father of modern medicine. Dr. Geyelin reported his results using KD in epileptic children to the American Medical Association in 1921 (Carl E. & Rho, 2004) (Wheless, 2004). Johns Hopkins Ketogenic Center has been administering the diet since the 1920’s (The John’s Hopkins university, n.d.). Finally, before the advent of the mass production of insulin, diabetes was treated by a low carbohydrate diet and the ketogenic diet.

Why have we locked all this knowledge in a box and left it unused by modern medicine? Surely we should be taking Hippocrates advise and building upon successive generations of knowledge (Tsiompanou & Marketos, 2013) rather than reinventing the wheel and getting a rigid square. Because I can tell you modern medicine without the partnership of ancient knowledge gives a bumpy ride!! (Goldacre, 2012). Together in partnership you know that you can successfully cherry pick!

My dearest wish is that we reclaim our health and power of self-determination for ourselves and precious children (born perfect). The body knows how to heal if only given the tools and relieved of the hindrances to do so.