01/31/2026
Medicine doesn’t end the story...
Sometimes it starts a second illness
“The person who takes medicine needs to recover twice.
Once from the disease and once from the medicine.”
That line came from Sir William Osler, one of the founders of modern medicine, and one of the "Big Four" founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital.
And it should stop us cold.
Because somewhere along the way, we accepted a strange bargain.
We treat symptoms aggressively.
We manage numbers.
We suppress signals the body is sending.
And then we quietly accept the side effects as the price of doing business.
Fatigue.
Weight gain.
Blood sugar instability.
Digestive damage.
Nutrient depletion.
New diagnoses that require new prescriptions.
That second recovery Osler warned about has become invisible.
Not because it disappeared.
Because we normalized it.
This is not an argument against medicine.
It is an argument against pretending medicine is neutral.
Food choices matter.
Blood sugar matters.
Inflammation matters.
Root causes matter.
When those are ignored, medicine often becomes a long-term substitute for a conversation we never had.
The body keeps the receipts.
It always has.
And healing works best when it does not create a second problem to solve.
