An Evolution of Health & Wellness
An arms race by propelled by trial, error and profit
Health and wellness, in addition to being personal pursuits, have woven themselves into the fabric of our economic systems. From Ancient marketplaces where healers offered their potions and balms, and wisdom and nuances of the body were exchanged to spiritual retreat sites such as Eleusis; body, mind, and soul healing have an integral tether to the material world. Fast forward to today, and we find ourselves in a world where the quest for well-being fuels entire industries. The pharmaceutical giants, the fitness empires, the sprawling wellness retreats—all these are manifestations of our timeless desire for health, transmuted into more systematized economic engines. Even the digital realm echoes this ancient trade, with apps and online consultations bringing the healer’s touch into the palm of our hands. This isn’t just a contemporary phenomenon but a continuation of a deep-seated human tradition. Profit is a condition of survival. It is the cost of the future, the cost of staying in business.
For the most part, humanity has practiced and refined our understanding of health and wellness in the same way most knowledge accumulation has taken place: the hard-won lessons of trial and error. “When the ship is going down you don’t hold a caucus - you give a command.”
The introduction of modern forms of medical intervention are wide-ranging and encompasses all sorts of interesting technologies, compounds, and surgical techniques. Many of these practices leave hints that can be used by anthropologists and other investigators to more accurately refine our understanding of the historical past. For example: Dr. Benjamin Rush, a physician and medical practitioner, and member of the Continental Congress was famous for his “Rush’s Bilious Pills” a laxative also called “Rush’s Thunderclappers.” These mercury-laden laxatives were used so frequently, they’ve helped archeologists retrace the Lewis and Clark Trail due to the mercury deposits in the dug-out latrines. Maybe one day in the future there may be some anthropological investigations relating to vaccination adjuvants and preservatives such as thimerosal - time will tell.
Other forms of health interventions have been wide-ranging in the successful treatment of disease, physical mutilation, and mental crisis. Surgeries of all kinds and emergency care have come a long way in the last 150 years. Karl Landsteiner, the Austrian biologist, physician, and immunologist was able to distinguish the main blood groups in 1900. This made successful blood transfusions possible and dramatically reduced the risk of endangering the patient's life, responsible for saving more lives than almost any other interventionist technique. Fleming’s penicillin discovery gave humanity the world's first broadly effective antibiotic substance and drastically reduced the risk for bacterial infection and death. When James Watson and Francis Crick laid the foundations for understanding the Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid in April of 1953 combined with the new technologies made available via the development of ever more complex integrated circuitry through the semi-conductor revolution, an entire new horizon of understanding was made available to the practice of biology, medicine health, and wellness.
This began with an investigation of what makes biological systems subject to death and disease. Leonard Hayflick was interested in the recursion limit on cellular mitosis and found that there seems to be a limit on the number of times a cell can self-replicate. The Hayflick limit was identified as a parameter of the structure of the chromosomes themselves. It was discovered that telomeres are like the little caps at the ends of our chromosomes, made of DNA and protein. They act as protectors, keeping our genetic info safe from getting chewed up, mixed up, or messed up. Think of them as the plastic tips on your shoelaces, stopping everything from fraying. These telomeres are super important because they help keep our genetic code intact. But here’s the kicker: as we get older, these protective caps get shorter. The more they shrink, the closer our cells get to their endgame—either shutting down, self-destructing, or sometimes turning cancerous.
As time went on, such is always the case trial and error experimentation began to take place in the new field of medicine. Originally, playing with this newfound substructure of biological life involved bombarding genetic material with radiation and seeing what was spit out. Rather than the lengthy process of eugenic selective breeding which allowed for the domestication of wheat to have chaff that is easily removed, canines that are different shapes and sizes bred for specific purposes, and chickens that have quadrupled in body mass at maturity in less than 50 years worth of industrial farming practice.
Pioneers like George Church laid the foundation but with ever-new discoveries in the technology arms race genetic editing has just gotten faster, cheaper, and more precise. In the twenty-first century, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier discovered that Cas9 enzymes together with CRISPR sequences form the basis of a technology known as CRISPR-Cas9 that can be used to edit genes within organisms. This new advancement in chemistry paired with ever more innovative leaps in engineering has given rise to possibilities such as Create Your Own Baby: The Future of Human Embryonic Gene Editing with ever more blurred ethical lines.
Beyond the creation of life, the inverse has also naturally been explored. Designer diseases, viruses and bacteria to be weaponized have been the ongoing topic of research of individuals as well as collective interests. In the United States, places like the Plum Island Animal Disease Center (PIADC) the subject of page-turners such as Lab 257, have been supposedly shut down after the United States' offensive bioweapons program was closed in the late 60s, but it’s clear that there is no shutting down a system that sees itself as integral to survival.
These programs often disguise themselves as altruistic in nature, playing on the idea of innocent curiosity similar to the work of Sydney Brenner’s with the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. The natural model organism for the investigation of developmental biology, due to the fact they are sexually reproductive and have about 1000 cells 100 of which are neurons and can be completely mapped to provide insights into biological complexity. But make no mistake, in the pursuit of power, there is no innocence.
Aspects of wellness and spirituality have been commoditized as well. Luminaries such as Anton Köllisch, Alexander Shulgin, Albert Hofmann, Terence McKenna, Timothy Leary, John C. Lilly and countless others have had their message of plant-based shamanistic psychospiritual practice become bottled up packaged and sold. Bernhard Guenther, a well-established wellness practitioner writes of the Plant Medicine Manipulation and The Dangers of Psychedelics in a growing market for ‘healing’ and ‘enlightenment.’ A very similar discussion of how the same process of bastardization and commodification of health and wellness as a service can lead to very troubling outcomes.
As a theme when considering one's own health practices, I have come to really believe in the camp of Darwin. The further away the practice or substance is from your genetic past the more likely it is to have adverse consequences on the system as a whole. That isn’t to say that all novel strategies and forms of nutrients are inherently toxic, however, it does mean that there are typically power-seeking or profit strategies guiding their creation and adoption.
Jean Baudrillard, a French philosopher distilled the distinctions between Simulacra and Simulation as follows
A simulation: a good faith copy of the original truth
Some perversion of the original truth
The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality
The fourth stage is pure simulacrum, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever.
Consider the differentiation between the two when it comes to health and wellness. Look out and take care. Harken back to the guiding principles of Archie Cochrane: the Scottish doctor who wrote Effectiveness and Efficiency: Random Reflections on Health Services. Advocated the use of randomized control trials to make medicine more effective and efficient. Revitalize the spirit of the originator of evidence-based medicine, health, and wellness in the current era.
In the meantime:
Exercise both mental and physical
Glycemic variability to maintain a healthy pH balance in the body
Sunlight exposure to aid in cellular revitalization
Walking barefoot and touching the ground to maintain electrostatic neutrality
Heat and cold exposure
Clean water, robust mineral intake, and the minimization of inert, heavy or artificial materials
Spiritual and social balance
