There is only medicine

Restored from Instagram stories · 22 July 2025

as promised a few days back i told you guys i’ll write about my nuanced take on modern medicine and traditional medicinal practices.

few things. i’ll mention them as points. none of those points are in a chronological order.

1. from the dawn of civilization, we humans have always experimented with methods to break ourselves from various sickness, injuries etc., to help our body to repair itself faster or more efficiently.

we know what to do with fractures, external wounds, we found various methods to contain infection, found various cures etc.,

all only for one reason. the innate nature of our species to survive.

2. the zeal to survive is so strong with our species, that we developed methods to defeat the purpose of evolution/natural selection which makes us stronger by enabling the weakest in our species to still survive and pass on their genes to the next generation.

tldr: natural selection basically eliminates the weakest of our species, and the surviving strong ones procreate creating stronger generations and it continues.

3. so, throughout the annals of history, every civilization developed its own methods of finding cures for various diseases etc., and most medicine in most civilizations were strongly connected with their religious practices as a natural connection. people start worshipping God as they fear death when they’re sick and religious places also has monks/priests who also give you medicine and this goes side by side. take most civilizations including the non civilized african tribes where witch doctors do all kinds of stuffs to ensure you don’t die.

sometimes they worked and sometimes it didn’t. there were little ways to pass on info from one generation to other and the well developed civilizations in the east which tied it’s medicinal practices to organized religion started writing them down.

4. and when we started dissecting human bodies against religious instructions (by the greeks - you know who) and started understanding human bodies, we started developing better cures. because we now know more about how human bodies work and we developed a scientific systematic way on trying to understand how something works.

5. over time we started analysing the existing cures/methodologies which are being used and we started to find out which worked, which didn’t, how do we make it more effective?

6. when we wanted to understand what happens in the body in detail, we started inventing medical instruments which allow us to understand deeply (i’m abstracting a lot of info for general understanding) - starting with understanding how our cells work, etc., to the latest imaging machines we have where we can understand our body non-invasively (without opening our body up every time)

7. this allowed us to understand how medicines and various cures act and in-turn - the obvious - how to make better cures.

every single aspect of medicinal development is aimed for only one thing. how do we make it better?

8. statistically modern medicinal methods started producing better cures with higher healed to death ratio for every disease. let’s call it h/d ratio.

why did older medicinal methods have a lower h/d ratio?

lots of parameters even if older cures were perfect. either we don’t know reliably how the patient would tell the symptom, we dont have proper methods to diagnose - even if the cure is perfect, what good will it do if you dont know what cure to put for what diagnosis?

modern diagnosis methods in medicine actually eliminated those and increased the h/d ratio.

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now that we’ve understood how medicine has evolved, let’s go back to how we should view medicines as.

[a limitation to revisit: the healed-to-death ratio is an informal shorthand used in this essay. it is not enough on its own to compare treatments across different illnesses, patient groups and outcomes.]

9. as far as i am concerned, i don’t believe there are two streams of medicine - like modern medicine and old traditional medicine. it’s actually retard-ous to think that two distinct branches of medicine actually exists. it’s a crime that we allow it to actually exist.

there’s only one field. medicine. that’s it.

the problem comes when people who study modern medicine dismiss it as kumbaya.

no. the proper scientific method is - test for what it’s used, see how it acts, see what it’s positive and negative reactions are - if it is positive, then look at a way you can mass produce it and make it accessible for people and if it’s negative - improve and fix it or we reject and replace it with a better one.

then if someone’s still using it - wack ‘em if you love them or let them die allowing their idiocy to act as a potent for natural selection and thank the heavens that their stupid genes are not getting passed to the next generation. they’re still serving humanity a great deal by removing themselves from the gene pool. thank them. be grateful.

[a problem with the language here: arguing for better evidence does not require describing someone’s death as a benefit to the gene pool. how does that language fit with the stated goal of improving medicine for everyone?]

10. as many of you know me, i am a wild animal as any other. i’ve gone on hikes and i’ve been bitten by various insects, or centipedes and the local guy with us searched for a small wild plant (i forgot its name) - picked it’s leaves, crushed it in his palm, squeezed the juices and applied them along with the crushed leaves over the bitten area and the pain/stinging sensation vanished in a few mins and it started healing in a day and by the time i returned back - i was good.

i was constantly checking my temp to see if something else happened and other signs - nothing. i was good.

so i do know what medicines in many civilizations can do since i’ve experiences like this in many places. you get the gist.

but how do we understand how it works and mass manufacture it for the benefit of humanity?

that is medicine.

[a point to revisit: a personal experience can suggest something worth investigating. it cannot, on its own, establish what caused recovery or whether the same treatment is safe and effective for someone else.]

11. exactly why we shouldn’t have had a separate field called ayush and certify who practice there as doctors.

it’s absolutely retard-ous and we’re insane to not acknowledge that.

generally - medicine field should be researching traditional medicinal methods and seeing what we could get from there to add to our medical arsenal and not the other way around where we create a separate branch for it. that’s not how medicine evolves and it’s not effective to abandon one stream and jump from one to one another for cures.

oh this worked. this doesn’t. no. it needs to be one single field.

the only ones who go through mbbs, modern medicinal degrees should be called medical doctors. because they practice a method which has proven that it has a high h/d ratio.

this is exactly why i said my positions are nuanced.

i don’t dismiss when i see something cure. when someone says that all it took was some sugar pills from homeo to cure, maybe that didn’t require medicines at all and just placebo.

i dont dismiss people with contempt when they say in pain that modern medicine didn’t cure them. as far as i am concerned, good - now we’ve found a field where we must do more research to find medicines even if it means i have to research what were the old methods to cure - did they work etc.,

i don’t dismiss the old methods completely. i am ‘for’ testing them and see if it is viable and if yes, why and if not, why not?

and this is exactly why we should encourage scientific temper, rigor, the curiosity to improve medicine for the benefit of humanity - and exactly why it’s enshrined as one of our fundamental duties as a citizen of india under article 51 a(h).

tldr: there should only be one field - medicine. no such thing as modern medicine and ayush. all forms of medicine evolve and the recent ones are called modern. it’s stupidity to have two different fields and start naming people as doctors where h/d ratios are low.