Stop Outsourcing Your Life: A Healer’s Message
Now that we are in the midst of a pandemic, it may be a good time to reevaluate our entire approach to wellness. We know that for people who are under 70, the risk of dying from or even showing symptoms of Covid-19 is minuscule — that is unless you have a pre-existing condition. That caveat is the big pile of elephant stink in the middle of the room. Everyone smells it, but no one wants to talk about. Although the United States is the wealthiest country in the history of countries, our health is atrocious. Per the National Institute of Health, nearly one out of three Americans is considered obese. Per the CDC, over one third of Americans are diabetic or pre-diabetic. Heart disease and cancer are the leading causes of death in the United States. The list goes on. Let’s face it, we are not a healthy nation. What is going on?
The causes are many, but it’s a fair bet that the amount of chemicals in our food, homes and atmosphere certainly doesn’t do our bodies any favors. At some time today, most of us will eat a genetically modified food product that has been sprayed with endocrine disrupting pesticides. Most of us will go to school or work in the morning while inhaling the exhaust from automobiles. Most of us will go to sleep tonight with our bodies stretched on mattresses that have been sprayed with cancer causing fire-retardant chemicals. And chances are, most of us will spend far more time this week sitting in front of a screen than doing anything else except sleep. How long can a body hold out against this death by a thousand health hazards? While I don’t have the answers, I was once gifted a question.
When I was twelve years old, my family drove from New York City to North Carolina to help build a house with Habitat for Humanity. It was a long hot trip in the way back of the little red family station wagon. My parents are both tall and with all of our luggage, my two brothers and myself, it was a tight ship. On our return trip, as we drove through a town called Old Fort, my father saw a sign that said “Chief Two Trees” tacked to a tree on the side of the road. He turned on a whim and drove up to a modest little house at the end of a dirt driveway.
We got out of the car and introduced ourselves to a man sitting on the front porch. He had a shock of gray hair on his head. He wore matching grey sweatpants and sweatshirt and smoked a brown cigarette. He acknowledged our presence without much surprise, as if strangers on his doorstep was a common occurrence. He then took one look at me and commented on how my spine had a pronounced sideways curvature. It was imperceptible on the surface of my body and so nobody had ever noticed it before, including any medical doctor. Later, his observation was confirmed with x-rays. This was Chief Two Trees, a Cherokee leader and healer. With the consent of my parents, he had me lie down on a bench on the porch and with a quick move did something to balance my posture. Noting my dry cough, he prescribed an herbal remedy.
Two Trees hit it off with my parents and they talked for most of the afternoon. He seemed to welcome the opportunity to share his thoughts and visions. He warned my parents about the future. He told them how clean water would become like gold, how genetic engineering would endanger the food supply and people’s reliance on pharmaceuticals would become a huge problem. This was back in the late ’80s, before any of these issues were in the news. Even if they had been, they would have had a hard time finding their way to a little town in Appalachia.
Later in the day, we were invited to attend a sweat lodge ceremony. Two Trees asked nothing in return for his medicine. He accepted whatever the person seeking healing could afford. His herbal remedies and prescription harkened to a time when people relied intimately on the earth and community for wellbeing; a time when, I can only imagine, people did not seek excessive personal profit from helping others.
Every indigenous culture has its own traditions of health and healing. Most of us can find healing plants growing in our local woods, back yards, neighborhood parks or the cracks in the city sidewalks. Most of us have never learned that the common pine trees in our neighborhoods could help us to prevent a seasonal cold or how a simple dandelion can help lower blood pressure and reduce cholesterol. We should think about that in these days when we are being encouraged to rely on a medical system that relies on our poor health for its revenue. Native wisdom has to a large extent been eradicated by loss of elders, language and culture. Natural ways of healing, used by our ancestors for millennia have been systematically discredited by the medical establishment as inferior. There is nothing that can compare with modern medicine if we have a serious life-threatening illness. However, most of our illnesses are caused or exacerbated by harmful toxins in our environment and food supply, and by lifestyle choices. And our choices are indelibly influenced by the hours of media we consume daily.
Having labored behind the scenes on commercials for over a decade, I got a sneak peek at the business of winning hearts and minds. The power of advertising is real and it has shaped us more than we know. We can observe the exorbitant sums that companies pay to influence us and watch their investments pay off. In 2013, the top 10 pharmaceutical companies spent over 98.3 billion dollars on sales and marketing, and 65.8 billion on research and development. That glaring disparity in their investments indicates their true values. In that year, we spent 258.2 billion dollars on prescription drugs.
I can’t help but wonder if the barrage of advertisements we’ve been subject to since birth hasn’t played a role in our divestment of self-sufficiency. Advertising is the religious arm of industry. Commercials are apostles of consumerism. Any time we see or hear an advertisement, the message is reinforced that we can have anything we want if we only pay for it. And every time we pay for something that we should be doing for ourselves, like taking responsibility for our nutrition for example, we lose a bit more control over our lives.
Years after our trip through Old Fort, I asked my parents about their conversation with Two Trees. As they recall, his main concern was that, in industrial society, people pay a grocer for their food. They pay a physician to take care of their health. They pay a lawyer to take care of their disputes. They pay a school to teach them. They pay gurus to fill their spiritual needs. They pay attention to television to be entertained. And the list goes on. And then people just sit back and expect their money’s worth, but they only get about a ten percent return on their investment. Because, in reality, ninety percent of a person’s health, well-being and agency will always depend on personal actions and habits. Over time, when we give up much of what we could do for ourselves, we suffer for it. We are so busy working to pay somebody else to take care of us that we don’t notice what we’ve lost or could claim by right of our indigenous heritages. This was the gist of what Chief Two Trees was talking to my parents about. The modern word for it would be outsourcing.
Outsourcing is our story at the moment. Our health, nutrition, entertainment, education and even many of our opinions have been outsourced. How can we begin to adopt personal responsibility for the daily habits that form the foundation of wellness? Physical health is one of the essential elements of any culture. Every indigenous culture’s health is interwoven with its diet and medicine, both of which are taken from the landscape and traditional knowledge. Modern food and health systems are outsourced globally, divorced from local ecosystems and traditional knowledge. And what is more, the private healthcare system is founded on a fundamental conflict of interest. It depends on sick people for revenue. If diabetes, heart disease and obesity disappeared tomorrow, pharmaceutical stocks would tank. At this point, the system needs us to be sick, and that is a sick system.
Advertising plays an important role in convincing us to participate in the process of outsourcing our well-being. It has encouraged the liberation of our desires while enslaving us to the never-ending wheel of consumption. The outsourcing of healthcare, nutrition, spirituality, entertainment, education, defense, and just about everything else, disconnects us from the relationships closest to us. By forming bonds with products and services, we give up our interdependence with people and things that are close to us and intimate. Instead, we become dependent on companies that are large and impersonal. By allowing media to shape our values and govern our conversation on the issues, we easily become divided and forget common goals and visions. We forget that with health knowledge and healthy habits we can care for ourselves and each other just as we have for millennia. The good news is that we can reclaim much of what we have lost.
Two Trees’ question for my parents was, “are you going to claim your own life or allow a system of control to take over and dictate your values for you?” That question has powerful implications. Claiming one’s own life, health and well-being does not have a price tag, but it does have value. We may continue to shop at grocery stores for food, but we can take more responsibility for our nutrition. Weigh alternatives between food products and true food. Learn about how our food is grown and where it comes from. We can also turn to local farms. We may continue to seek remedies from our pharmacies and physicians, and we should, but we should also take more consideration for preventive medicine like fresh air, movement and traditional knowledge. Every culture and every location has traditions of healing. We may continue to turn to lawyers, teachers, gurus, and Hollywood, but consider first what you can do personally for your disputes, your education, your spiritual life and your entertainment. We can cook a meal from scratch instead of from a box. We can have a hot cup of ginger honey tea for a sore throat instead of immediately taking an over-the-counter medicine. We can pick up a book and learn more about home healthcare. We can pick up an instrument or a sport to entertain ourselves. The list of what we can do for ourselves is endless. And each act has the potential to infuse our lives not just with agency, but with purpose and joy. The more we do for ourselves, the more we can claim our lives. And the beauty is, in order to stop outsourcing, we don’t have to buy a thing.
