Seemingly Correct Treatments and Lifestyles
If you have flat feet and suffer from collapsed medial arches, when you enter a doctor's office they will, per modern guidelines, recommend special shoes to improve symptoms, or suggest surgery to relieve the pain.This is correct and standard from modern medicine's standpoint, but actually, just a few thousand years ago our ancestors had no flat-foot problem at all. They simply did not wear shoes or socks, walking barefoot on the ground. Even today some peoples walk barefoot most of the time and have no flat feet.There is a Chinese saying: "The barefoot fear not the shod"—describing the propertyless fearing the rich and powerful, because united they can revolt. From a medical view, going barefoot also beats wearing shoes: barefoot walking fosters plantar-nerve development and prevents many foot diseases. Thus to cure flat feet at the root, the best method is not orthopedic shoes or surgery but going barefoot. But even if modern people knew this, few would try it, because we have instinctively felt barefoot walking is wrong.Barefoot not only makes feet more sensitive but also avoids tinea pedis and onychomycosis. These are fungal; fungi live and breed in warm, moist environments, and our shoes and socks provide exactly that. Of course, if you get tinea pedis or onychomycosis, you most likely will take liver-damaging antifungals rather than free your feet from shoes and socks.Large statistics show that for type-2 diabetes, dieting and exercise far outperform metformin and other hypoglycemics. Many type-2 diabetics can escape diabetes permanently through diet and exercise. But most choose metformin rather than giving up good food and exercising more.Many anti-cancer drugs are not as great as advertised; while killing cancer cells they kill normal cells—especially our lymph-system NK cells (natural killer cells), which specifically kill harmful cells and microbes including cancer cells. Meanwhile, anti-cancer drugs also drive cancer cells to evolve stronger offspring. Thus quite a few cancer patients survive longer and better without anti-cancer treatment than by actively killing cancer cells.If you, like me, are a knowledge worker sitting too long at a desk, we face the same problems—cervical spondylosis, lumbar disc herniation, and neck/back pain. When we see a doctor, we are told to take analgesics and avoid lifting. But actually, people doing long-term lifting work have far lower rates of back pain than the sedentary. Weight-bearing clearly improves back pain, because it trains the back muscles; avoiding it only worsens our kind of pain.I was once tormented by back pain and sought doctors everywhere; almost all told me to avoid lifting. But I finally solved my back pain through weight-bearing and heavy physical labor—I stopped all treatment, lost twenty jin through cycling and farming, and my back never ached again.If you are modern-educated, with high-school education or above, you instinctively avoid many unclean things, knowing they harbor harmful microbes that cause disease. Is this view correct? To a degree yes—cholera, flu, and plague germs come that way.But when you are overly fastidious, you pay a higher price and risk of malignant lymphoma, asthma, atopic dermatitis than those poorer and less educated. Because these "dirties" are not useless: our body is not our sole possession; countless microbes depend on us. The microbes on the human body outnumber our own cells; they make our body home, help us digest food and waste, train our immune system, and are health guardians.Thus these conventional treatments that seem correct to modern people, and these similarly seemingly-correct lifestyles, are to some extent wrong. Our understanding of health is shallow; many of our current treatments and health ideas will one day be ridiculed by our descendants as ignorant and backward, just as many of us ridicule our ancestors.But the truth is often that some ancestral lifestyles were healthier than ours. When we sit in comfortable backed chairs, looking down on primitive people standing or squatting to eat and rest, thinking this makes our bodies healthier, we make a great mistake. Actually their lifestyle is healthier: standing or squatting burns more calories than sitting in a comfortable chair and also exercises muscles.Surviving in nature, we evolved countless abilities to adapt—possibly optimal solutions to environment-induced diseases. But we have not valued them, instead superstitiously trusting still-clumsy human medicine. Biologically, all Earth's creatures share a common ancestor; other creatures evolved abilities different from ours. We often suffer thrombosis, but leeches and earthworms do not—they evolved anticoagulant ability. We humans use exactly this, extracting active compounds from leeches and earthworms as anticoagulants. So our diseases may be solved by learning from our ancestors and our biological near and distant relatives.The other side of civilized evolution is the degeneration of many truly valuable abilities and healthy lifestyles. Modern humans have more means against infectious disease, extending lifespan, but meanwhile suffer more chronic diseases.Ancients were not plagued by today's high-incidence diabetes, heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis, wisdom-tooth problems, flat feet, cervical spondylosis, depression, or anxiety—diseases of affluence. They consumed fewer calories, moved far more, ate more roughage, did more physical labor, and had fewer desires and worries than people today.Let us lay down our arrogance, be less self-righteous, examine our stale assumptions, and change our lifestyles; perhaps we can live more healthily without spending so much on health.