Hippocrates and hypocrisy walk hand in hand in wellnessland

I have spent the past four years immersed in the alternative-health sector, becoming increasingly aware of the interconnectedness between food, environment and health. Over the next few months I want to explore some of these connections and invite a broader conversation.

I don’t claim to be an expert. I’m just another web surfer vacuuming up information. So my method is hardly scientific, more like bricolage, that unstructured, inquisitive playfulness that Levi-Strauss believed shaped the way in which children learn. But I’m fortunate in being part of an organisation that is constantly engaging with customers and suppliers about alternative approaches to wellness, and that conversation has helped broaden and deepen my interest in this fascinating area.

I am no CAM fascist (CAM = complementary and alternative medicine) but, along with increasing numbers of people out there, I have become deeply suspicious of Big Pharma and the industrial food chain. However, I am just as sceptical of many of the alternative treatments and therapies you find in Odyssey and Renaissance magazines; IMHO both the orthodox and complementary health sectors spew forth miasmas of deceit and delusion. No one is an angel in this business: Hippocrates and hypocrisy walk hand in hand in wellnessland.

The recognition that we can have a significant influence on our health by choosing healthier lifestyles underpins the massive growth of CAM in all its myriad forms. Disillusionment with orthodox medicine, with its obscene costs to the consumer and equally obscene profits to the industry, is another. But there’s one more driving force, perhaps even the most important, behind the rapid growth of the alternative health movement: the explosion in the distribution and sharing of health-related knowledge over the net.

Across the web, people are gathering in virtual communities to share ideas, experiences and information about illness and the efficacy of various treatments. No longer is the medical/pharmaceutical industry the exclusive gatekeeper to health knowledge; in fact, patients today are often better informed then the professionals they consult.

These virtual communities also provide a key missing ingredient in the medical paradigm: empathy and support, which for many may make the difference between fighting on and giving up. Often this all adds up to true knowledge, a global, collective wisdom that is far superior to the so-called gold standard of clinical trials often paid for by pharmaceutical companies who sometimes have a penchant for suppressing outcomes they don’t like, even if it kills you.

Of course the web is a minefield of bad information too, but it seems to me there is no better self-regulating mechanism for bullshit detection than an engaged community; that this “open source” model is the key to the unlocking and sharing of knowledge.

Before World War II, large numbers of people did not die from the Big Four — cancers, heart disease, diabetes and obesity — that dominate today’s morbidity hit parade; they were taken by flu epidemics and infectious diseases. The Big Four only emerged as major killers in the wake of pesticide-driven agri-business and industrialised food production after World War II. (If you haven’t yet read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring yet, you will likely find it more disturbing then Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth for the simple fact is that way back in the 1950s — the period Carson was writing about — the poisoning of the planet was already taking place on a devastating scale.)

Toxic food, toxic environment, toxic bodies, toxic minds … this is my dirty little canvas. Feel free to grab a paintbrush and join in.