05/07/2025
Over the years, Iโve had my fair share of frustrating conversations with doctors, particularly those who refuse to acknowledge the roots of their own profession.
I remember one exchange with a surgeon who, upon hearing what I do, scoffed and said, โI work with science-based medicine.โ
I simply asked, โWhere do you think the science came from?โ
The look on his face shifted, not because I was rude or aggressive, but because I challenged him to think outside the sterile walls of the lab. There werenโt always beakers, pills, and peer-reviewed journals. Medicine didnโt begin in a hospital, it began in the earth, in the forests, in the hands of healers guided by generations of observation, intuition, and wisdom. Isn't that what science is?
Another time, my neurologist, a man of many credentials and one very linear mindset, began to shift his view when I started quoting some of his own favorite scientific references. I think in that moment, he realized I wasnโt just a passive patient. I wanted to understand. I needed to know. And maybe, just maybe, he softened to the idea that healing is more than a prescription pad.
The truth is this: modern medicine has its roots in tradition. Was it when people like Imhotep passed down Egyptian principles and the philosophers like Hippocrates contunied to study via asklepieion of Kos, a healing temple dedicated to the god Asclepius, that science and healing began to formally converge?
Or was it some other ancient convergence?
We owe a lot to those who started asking the right questions long before there were labs to answer them.
Letโs stop pretending tradition and science are enemies. Theyโre chapters of the same story.
