It looks like they’re going to use bioremediation with two mushroom species common to the North Coast—turkey tail mushrooms and oyster mushrooms. A pilot project will start soon to demonstrate that it will work.

The alternatives faced by Fort Bragg are either to have the ash pits hauled away to a landfill or to have the soil wrapped in plastic and buried. These are the mechanical, engineered solutions to fixing poisoned soil. In contrast, the biological processes of bioremedation break down the toxins and revive the soil. Very nice.

But biology’s superiority goes way beyond cleaning up the mess made by industrial processes.

Biomimicry is a field of study that looks at biological processes as the model for how to do things right in the first place. The concept is described in Janine Benyus’s book Biomimicry with more information on the website biomimicry.net. There you’ll find information on the Biomimicry Institute, which researches ways to incorporate biological thinking and processes into our culture and economy, and the Biomimicry Guild, which looks for ways to find biological solutions for the work of engineers, architects, industrial designers, and other professionals responsible for our built and manufactured environment.

The biomimicry movement goes beyond replacing mechanical with biological solutions. Its explicit objective is to find sustainable solutions. William McDonough and Michael Braungart demonstrate this mode of thinking in their book Cradle to Cradle.

Virtually every production and consumption process produces waste—that is, stuff that we can’t use and that might even be toxic. McDonough and Braungart argue that our production and consumption processes need to be designed so that what’s waste to the process is food to some other process, whether it’s production or consumption in our built and manufactured environment or a biological process in the natural environment.

Fort Bragg is on its way to this kind of solution: turning toxins like dioxin into food for mushrooms.

However, McDonough’s and Braungart’s point is that genuinely sustainable solutions should be non-toxic to begin with. While biomimicry and its pursuit of sustainable (and non-toxic) solutions hold great promise, an Age of Biology will not by itself solve problems of human health. It only makes it possible.

What we’re talking about are biological or biology-inspired solutions to social problems. In our culture as it is now, that means those solutions must reach us as commodities. A commodity is something that’s produced for sale so its producer can make more money from its sale than it cost to produce. A commodity is not produced to be biomimetic. Nor is it produced to become food to a production process, consumption process, or natural process. Nor is it produced to be non-toxic or health promoting.

That disconnect between the purpose for which something is produced and its useful (and harmful) qualities is how dioxin wound up in the ash pits that Fort Bragg now has to get rid of and that then made it possible for Fort Bragg to choose bioremediation as a solution and with that solution take a step toward the Age of Biology. Personally, I think mushrooms deserve better than to be fed dioxin.

One part of the framework for the study is the extensive research on how and how much the built environment affects individual levels of physical activity. Some studies say it does to a modest degree, other studies say it doesn’t. What about the social environment? We know that a community’s social environment has a profound effect on overall health. So it’s sensible to ask how and how much the social environment affects physical activity.

Another part of the framework for the study is that individualized programs to increase exercise have mixed, mostly ineffective results. The consistency of results seems to have more to do with environmental factors than individual factors. In other words, the problem isn’t simply that people haven’t gotten the word that exercise is good for them but that to take hold each person needs the right environmental queues. Some researchers claim, for example, that your neighborhood’s average household income has more of an effect on how much you exercise than your personal household income.

The Wen study examines two aspects of neighborhood social environments. One aspect is the strength (or weakness) of mutually supportive relationships in a neighborhood, measured by such things as how much people trust each other and how much they fear for their safety. This is referred to as “social capital”—personally, I prefer “social wealth” but the dominant ideology of our time has infected the concept and so we’re stuck with it.

The other aspect of neighborhood social environments is how tough the day-to-day struggle is in general for the neighborhood, measured by such things as the average household income, the number of households headed by a single mother, and the number of households living below the poverty line. This is referred to as “neighborhood deprivation”—again, I’d prefer something like “neighborhood affluence” so that having more of it is a good thing like having more social capital is generally a good thing.

No one should be surprised that as a neighborhood’s social capital increases, people living their have better health generally and exercise more. Neither should anyone be surprised that as neighborhood deprivation increases, people living there have worse health and exercise less. What the Wen study found that was new is that neighborhood deprivation has a much more powerful effect than social capital on physical activity. This seems to link up nicely with the idea that the quality of the built environment has a positive effect on exercise since neighborhoods with greater deprivation are likely to have a lower quality physical environment.

As a surprise inside, when Wen and her colleagues looked at demographic variables, the only one they found to have an effect was the relative proportion of women living in the neighborhood: more women, more exercise.

The Wen study is an example of science that makes sense to us. You might even feel “Well! Big surprise!” That sells it short. This study does something science is supposed to do: make sense and help us better understand the obvious.

So does this mean that to get the exercise you need you should pack your bags and move to a wealthy, supportive neighborhood with lots of women?

No, it does not. It means that your social environment is sending you messages that get translated into your desire and commitment to exercise. Think of it as advertising and treat it that way.

Yet the reality of where you live remains—which you and your neighbors have the power to change. You’ll no doubt need some outside resources, but that’s not where it starts.

The key to physical fitness is an environment over which you have control and an environment that supports your ability to care for yourself (including your physical fitness). Personal fitness needs neighborhood fitness. That’s accomplished, not by some distant agency building better sidewalks and planting trees, but by empowering each and all of us in the sometimes difficult task of taking control of the place we live.

“These questions” refers to the political instability caused by rising food prices in nations such as Haiti, Egypt, the Philippines, Niger, and up to 36 others and how to prevent that instability from toppling those nation’s governments. Robert Zoellick, former US representative to the World Trade Organization and now president of the World Bank, said “We have to put our money where our mouth is now, so that we can put food into hungry mouths.” The answer that these men offered to “these questions” revolved around how to increase the commitment of industrialized nations to funding food aid to poor nations.

No one talked about how to enable the people of these nations to return to their traditional agricultural practices so that they will be self-sufficient as well as return to their traditional diets. Instead, their solution is to export crops produced in overabundance by agribusinesses in industrialized countries supported by government subsidies sent to a handful of farmers whose mailing addresses are in Manhattan.

A real answer to “these questions” presented itself at the same time that the world’s financial bigwigs were wringing their hands. One of the six winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize, Jesus León Santos, is revitalizing traditional agricultural practices in Oaxaca, Mexico. Starting over 20 years ago with a small tree planting project, his organization is reversing the erosion that started with the European invasion 500 years ago, stopping the out migration of people from the region devastated by the North American Free Trade Agreement, and returning native food crops to cultivation. We know it as sustainable agriculture.

The 1500 farmers in this movement use manure, not chemical fertilizer. They don’t use pesticides. And there isn’t a GMO crop in site. They’re not following these practices out of an environmental consciousness as we urbanized folk would understand it. They’re doing it because it empowers them.

Although the Oaxacan farmers receive some outside support, it’s the day-to-day magic of people supporting each other, using local knowledge, and strengthening their way of life that has made this movement a success.

Compare and contrast: wealthy nations dropping surplus commodities on hungry people displaced from their traditional agricultural practices by the very organizations responsible in whole or in part for creating these emergency conditions; versus people working together to restore the productivity of their land through traditional agricultural practices. It’s top-down versus bottom-up.

The Oaxacan farmers’ solution is such a good one that other farmers from around the world—including some in the United States—are talking to them.

The Sustainable Health Institute advocates just such solutions from the bottom up. It’s about people using local knowledge to build a thriving community. It’s about sharing that knowledge among communities. And while outside support is often critical in creating healthy communities, medical interventions (the equivalent of importing subsidized food to put into hungry mouths) whether conventional or alternative are not the answer—handy for an emergency, but not for sustainability. The economic, intellectual, and emotional resources that sustain our health are the one’s that feed our strength.

Many things impressed me about what I saw in this first segment. For example, researchers and practitioners state flatly that we live longer now mostly because of improvements in our standard of living with only a minor contribution from medical advances; that inequality in income and wealth predicts health and illness; that health is affected by the control we have over our workday (the less control, the worse our health); and that, even taking these factors into account, just being African-American predicts poorer health. And they were not contradicted. There is no “On the other hand, experts from the Reactionary Science Institute disagree.”

Even better, a physician from Louisville, Kentucky who is leading efforts to counter the effects of inequality says outright that his work isn’t about getting people to eat more fruits and vegetables, it’s about empowering them—not to be better patients, but to be better activists, to learn how to develop and use political power for social justice. Music to my ears.

In following the campaigns for President, I haven’t seen a glimmer of this kind of health awareness. It reminds me that the purpose of political institutions like the Presidency and Governor and Legislature and Police and Courts is to maintain stability and manage change when the need arises. It’s our job to make change.

Although we might wish for an elected official who will lift up the downtrodden, reduce inequality, increase the control we have over our work, and eliminate racism, that happens only when a movement pushes those officials to do it. So the strategy of enabling people to exercise their power for better health is the right path. The documentary “Unnatural Causes” promises to show us how to build power and with it health from the ground up.

The institutions of our health care system are not built for this kind of health advocacy: it is a top-down system that’s about getting people into treatment, not redistributing income, wealth, and power.

That’s why we need to build power and health in another way. Our health care system is in crisis because it doesn’t address inequality as the core cause of damaged health. It’s also in crisis because it has no institutional means to empower people to build the healthy social and physical environments they need.

I’ll give you an example of how this other kind of empowerment works, an example we’ve discussed on this show before: aerial spraying to eradicate the light brown apple moth. Citizen activists concerned about their health are resisting this attack by the California Department of Food and Agriculture. They’re using their own experience supported by science to make their case—experience such as asthma attacks in children in the aftermath of the first round of spraying in Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties last fall. Public health officials are now following them—for example, the Public Health Officer of Santa Cruz County is now calling for a complete study of the pesticide the Food and Ag Department intends to use, issues first raised by citizen activists.

Power is as much about information and whose information counts as it is about organizing people to take collective action. Building power and health from the ground up, as the experts featured in “Unnatural Causes” advocate, calls for more than enabling participatory democracy. It calls for enabling participatory science.

Their concern is captured by this headline: “Public Health Risk Seen as Parents Reject Vaccines.” It’s feared that children who are not vaccinated will become carriers of disease and cause outbreaks of measles, mumps, diphtheria, rubella, smallpox, whooping cough, and other infectious disease. News articles illustrate this concern with stories of disease clusters popping up where too many children aren’t vaccinated.

Here’s what I wonder: if the parents are willing to leave their children “unprotected” without vaccinations, how does that affect public health? After all, the other, vaccinated children are protected. Right? Well, maybe not. For example, one of the stories told is of a 2006 cluster of 219 people in Iowa who got the mumps—and the majority of them had been vaccinated.

Does that mean vaccination doesn’t work? It means for the people who got mumps it didn’t. Something about their immune systems didn’t protect them. What kind of support would their immune systems need to prevent their getting sick? And if they did get sick, what kind of support would their immune systems need to make their sickness mild and their recovery rapid?

The medical and public health establishment seem to have only one answer: vaccinate. The rationale is that vaccination “trains” the child’s immune system to handle future exposures by developing antibodies. The assumption is that the body protects itself by pulling antibodies from the inventory it’s built.

The discovery over a decade ago of regulatory T-cells is changing this view of how immunity works. Put simply, regulatory T-cells hold back our immune system’s tendency to attack anything it doesn’t like the look of. So training a child’s immune system is more complex than building an inventory of antibodies. Despite this, “Vaccinate!” is the answer we get.

Although forced vaccinations are not upon us yet, the winds are blowing in that direction. For example, a recent recommendation from the CDC panel on vaccinations, which includes experts from academia and industry but not, for example, concerned parents, said that all children between 6 months to 12 years old should be vaccinated for the flu.

Parents who don’t want to get on this train have their work cut out for them. Only about 20 states have provisions for exempting children who attend public school from vaccination for religious or medical reasons. Only a few states have broader provisions that one might call exemption for “philosophical” reasons. Often, the process is grueling. The ACLU has taken up the case of a woman in Southern California whose two applications to her local school board were rejected because her religious convictions were, according to the board, not convincing.

One thing that seems to especially worry the medical and public health establishment is that an increasing number of parents opting out of vaccination are well-educated and middle class. These are well-informed parents who, as alternatives to vaccination, do things like hold measles parties where their children can be exposed to a virus and develop immunity the old-fashioned way. One woman decided against this, not because she didn’t think it would be effective but because she feared her child would be ostracized.

The medical and public health establishment, aided by the media, has embarked on its own campaign of ostracism aimed at parents who buck the system in which vaccination is an article of faith.

So I ask again: if vaccinated children are protected and only unvaccinated children are at risk, then what’s the worry? The answer is that whether your child is vaccinated isn’t the only thing in play. In fact, what’s in play is each child’s unique immune system, its capacity to resist pathogens, and its capacity to recover. Children’s immunity is the result of a wide variety of environmental factors interacting with her or his unique biology.

I’ll give you an example. Pyrethroid, organochlorine, and organophosphate pesticides disrupt cell signaling that directly affects immunity (along with other functions). This happens through the disruption of an enzyme called nitric oxide synthase that affects the ion balance between cells, principally calcium ions. In the developing tissue of children, this can have effects that are more pronounced than in adults. And the specific effect on a specific child depends on how they’re exposed, how much they’re exposed to, and for how long interacting with the ability of the child’s body to clear toxins.

So instead of cleaving to the true religion of vaccination, I think we should ask the right question first. It’s not “Who should be vaccinated?” To which our response is supposed to be “Everyone!” Instead the question is “How do we support our children’s immunity in a way suited to each child’s unique biology and environment?”

This is an instance where a higher price really did indicate a better product. Although there are many exceptions, we in general expect a better product when we pay more for it. Our economy works that way; our culture works that way. Price means value.

This identity of price with value even works in medicine. A recent study by some economists showed that when people were told a placebo was priced at $2.50 per pill it was more effective in alleviating pain than when they were told the same pill was discounted to a price of 10¢. This is quite remarkable: price signaled more than market value; it signaled pain relief. What’s even more remarkable is that both groups experienced significant pain relief: not only did 85% of those taking the $2.50 pill report pain relief but 61% of the 10¢ pill group also reported relief.

Newspapers had some fun with this. Their spin was that people’s expectations were set by the price and those expectations affected the outcome. It almost seems like cheating. There is this aura about placebos that those who improve aren’t playing fair. In fact, there’s a characteristic of clinical trials called “placebo washout.” The purpose of placebo washout is to eliminate people who will respond positively to a placebo so it doesn’t interfere with the results, which, of course, are intended to show the efficacy of a drug. No cheaters are allowed in clinical trials.

I wonder if any big deal researcher has wondered about studying what’s going on with these “washouts” who get better with a signal that “Help is on the way” in the form of a pill that isn’t supposed to work? That’s really what a placebo is doing: it’s sending a signal that “Help is on the way.” The price experiment and the news articles about it frame the placebo effect as being about expectations. In fact, there’s an extensive literature on the placebo effect that does much the same thing. Administering a placebo gives people the expectation that they’ll be cured.

It comes close to saying “It’s all in their head” and “It isn’t really real.” But “It’s all about expectations” really begs the question. How exactly does the mental state of expectation affect the body?

Another recent study points to an answer and supports my idea that your body understands very well what kind of signal it’s received when you take a placebo pill or received any other kind of care that says “Help is on the way.” The study I refer to involved words delivered both subliminally and consciously before performing a task. Would it make a difference in how the task is performed? The test was to see what effect these words would have on a motor response, in this case the force with which subjects grasped a handgrip. The subliminal words were about physical exertion, words such as “vigorous.” The consciously visible words were about encouragement and consisted of positive adjectives such as “good.”

Those who experienced only the subliminal words exerted more force than the control group, in a process that’s called priming. But the group who experienced both subliminal exertion words plus consciously visible encouraging words had a dramatically greater grip force.

This experiment wasn’t about expectations. It was about words, our vessels of meaning, directly signally the body. Meaningful acts are not restricted to words. Taking time to listen, sharing a meal, or giving a pill that’s not supposed to do anything can all mean that “Help is on the way” so far as your body is concerned. And they can all support your body’s innate capacity to heal.

The literature on the placebo effect alludes to this connection between meaning and health effect. It discusses placebo effects that vary by culture. Some of this literature calls the placebo effect the middle ground between your body’s amazing capacity to sustain and heal itself and the intervention of a priestly healer, whether that’s an MD or a shaman.

The reason that the power of the placebo effect doesn’t get much research funding is obvious: it’s a financial washout for drug companies, medical device manufacturers, and the organizations that protect what they have defined as the interests of priestly healers. It seems to me that for reasons of both cost and humanity, healing should start with what your body is already capable of doing and supporting that, then move on to sending and receiving the signals that tell your body that “Help is on the way,” and only as a last resort move on to the priestly healers.

Most of these buildings cause sick building syndrome. Although sometimes categorized an “unexplained illness” along with multiple chemical sensitivity and fibromyalgia, significant elements of the syndrome can in fact be explained. One of the problems is that, as with those other illnesses, conventional science is unable to grasp the multi-system effects that characterize these illnesses.

With this limitation, clinicians and researchers struggle to come up with diagnostic criteria. Those who are sympathetic try to make sense of the symptoms that can include a range of allergic and immune reactions, toxic reactions, and neurological effects. Those who are not sympathetic work to show that it’s all in their head. Meanwhile, people suffer.

One thing that distinguishes sick building syndrome from chronic illnesses-such as multiple chemical sensitivity-is that symptoms stop when the sufferer leaves the sick building. Somehow this seems to suggest to researchers that sick building syndrome is not a chronic illness. However, research shows that symptoms have a well-defined dose-response relationship and that the people who are most likely to react also have physiological markers that point to conditions such as compromised immunity. It’s like saying you’re allergic only when you’re sneezing.

On top of that, there seems to be little research into the long term implications for health. If someone works in a sick building for 20 years without having symptoms, are they at greater risk of compromised health or early death?

An example…

A recent study found that increased smog outside increases the incidence of sick building syndrome reactions. What’s called ozone is a principal bad player (by the way, it’s not just the molecule ozone, but other molecules that are heavy oxidizers). The explanation is a quite frightening.

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are everywhere in buildings. They come from paint, carpet, furniture, computer equipment, you name it. Some of these materials have been shown to contribute directly to sick building syndrome reactions. What the oxidizers in smog do is oxidize materials that would otherwise be stable and non-toxic and turn them into toxins. Ventilation systems then circulate the old and the new toxins throughout the building.

The ventilation system contributes in another way. Most filters on ventilation systems are made from polyester. Ozone reacts with polyester and produces VOCs. The researchers estimate that the ill effect of ozone indoors is ten times its effect outdoors because of these reactions.

Back to long term effects: it’s well established that ozone contributes to increased risks of diabetes, heart attacks, and stroke not to mention asthma, emphysema, and other lung diseases.

Since you probably spend about half your waking life working in a building that is very likely sick, the next time you start looking for a better job, you’d be wise to check out the health of the building you’ll be working in.

Shift work isn’t healthy, both physically and financially.

Who are the people suffering from shift work? For the most part, they’re the working class. Their income is only a little over twice the official poverty line. They tend to be a single income household. They average 31 years of age and have only a high school education. In other words, they are people who are just getting by. They really need their jobs. Surprisingly, African-Americans and Latinos are not over-represented in this class of shift workers. As you would expect, the bulk of injuries and illness from shift work is in occupations such as machine operators; but also prominent are service workers and professional and technical workers.

Why do these people suffer these risks? Biologically, shift work disrupts circadian rhythms, the ticking of the biological clock that tells you it’s time to sleep when instead you’re running a drill press.

Socially, shift workers suffer because the needs of industry trump the health and safety of workers. Although not the Satanic mills of Charles Dickens’s novels, current industrial practices still count workers as fodder. With the fear of losing steady work, people within sight of poverty have little choice but to take the jobs they can get and, if injured, get back to work as quickly as possible. That in itself creates its own cascade of stress and with it the risk of illness.

This is bad news. But it’s not the worst. People who work long hours are at consistently greater risk of injury and illness than shift workers.

Biologically, long hours disrupt the circadian clock not by confusing your body because you’re active when it thinks you should be sleeping, but because you’re active when you should be resting. Yes, rest and relaxation should be part of our day. It’s healthy.

Socially, long hours have two sources. One is the use of overtime as a substitute for hiring additional workers. This is a long-standing and time-honored way for companies to minimize costs: making two existing employees work overtime is cheaper than hiring a third employee. That’s for wage workers.

For salaried and independent workers, industry has nurtured a butch work culture in which you are expected to put in 60 hours per week. Anything less and you’re napping on the job. If you pause, you’ve lost. Despite your white collar, you’re still fodder.

Sleep and rest are good for us. We deserve a culture, and especially a culture of work, that honors our biology.

What I want you to recognize is that what I’ve described is a biased perspective on the problem that reflects an equally biased perspective on health generally. It takes some effort to see this as a perspective at all instead of simply the way things work. Purchasing products to lower our carbon footprint and greenhouse gas reducing standards for industry leaves in place the social processes that actually make those choices seem natural.

I was reminded of this by a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last week that looked at who benefits and who suffers from ecological damage. The damage these researchers identified is what’s called in economics an externality: a cost or benefit from producing or consuming a product that isn’t accounted for in its price. For example, the loss of forests increases damage from flooding: the timber company buys the land, cuts the trees, and is paid for the lumber; when heavy rains fall, there’s little left to keep that water from wreaking destruction downstream.

You should not be surprised to learn that nations like Bangladesh with a low per capita income bear the burden of damage and little of the benefit while high income per capita nations like the United States reap most of the benefit and little of the damage. This story of unequal exchange is an old one, much older than our current era of globalization. It really starts with the expansion of European imperialism centuries ago.

Climate change is only one of the six so-called drivers of ecological damage that these researchers examine. But it is what has our attention and imagination right now. Thinking ecologically, it’s easy to see how climate change is linked to the other drivers of ecological damage: agricultural expansion and intensification, ozone depletion, deforestation, overfishing, and mangrove forest destruction.

Ecological damage makes a place uninhabitable. This is damaged health in the most profound sense. As areas of nations become uninhabitable, some people will die, some will adapt, and others will migrate. Some will migrate from the country to the city. Some will migrate, with or without permission, from one nation to another.

While activists and political leaders and even some corporate leaders exhort personal choices and government standards that reduce our carbon footprint, few societies are preparing for the onslaught of mass migrations that is likely over the coming decades. No doubt activists and artists and some politicians will put on spectacular events to raise money for those who suffer. I can guarantee that no events will be scheduled to alleviate the social inequities that are at the root of these migrations.

To do so would question the sanctity of market capitalism as a way to provide people with the things they need. It’s that sanctity that makes it difficult for us to look beyond personal decisions about what we buy—both literally and figurative—as solutions to what are clearly social and global problems. Let me be clear: these personal choices are far from irrelevant. But they are only half the picture. The other half is what we do together as communities that determines the alternatives from which we get to choose.

The sanctity of the market and its operations create a world for us, a world of consumption, that makes it look like what we buy brings health, that commodities give us our health, that even health itself is a commodity—something for us to purchase. I invite you to examine your own health choices in order to see the social ecology in which they are embedded. Then act to make that ecology healthier.

The title is kind of a give away about how the article approaches fibromyalgia as something that’s made up. The article itself is about the first-ever drug approved by the FDA to treat fibromyalgia. The story suggests that the FDA, drug companies, MDs who treat fibromyalgia patients, and even fibromyalgia support groups that get financial support from drug companies are in cahoots in making up the disease. The other side of the story consists of MDs who think fibromyalgia isn’t a disease and that patients are made worse my medical interventions.

There is, of course, a third option: take sufferers at their word and acknowledge that conventional medicine hasn’t got a clue how to deal with it. But I digress. For the moment.

The article discusses how fibromyalgia activists are really happy with the approval of this drug. Not because it will cure them, but because it brings legitimacy to their condition and their cause. A direct connection is drawn to the relationship between increased “recognition” of depression and the introduction of Prozac. In other words, if a drug exists to treat a condition then it must be a real disease. “The day that the FDA approved a drug and we had a public service announcement, my pain became real to people.”

The critics, including an early investigator who defined the diagnostic criteria for fibromyalgia who now doesn’t think it’s real, cite the newly approved drug’s dismal performance in actually reducing pain, the significant side effects, and the likelihood that it will quickly fail and patients will move on to yet another drug. However, they do expect these new drugs to do one thing very well: make a boatload of money for drug companies. The reason for this is simple. Both critics and proponents agree that once there’s a drug, physicians will be more willing to diagnose someone as having fibromyalgia because there’s a drug they can prescribe.

What about the pain people experience? The critics have two things to say. One is that diagnosed sufferers make themselves sick by having a diagnosis that reinforces that self-conception. “The more they seem to be around the medical establishment, the sicker they get.” Interesting comment, from which I draw a very different conclusion. Before I get to that, the other thing critics say is “Most people manage to get through life with some vicissitudes, but we adapt. People with fibromyalgia do not adapt.” I guess fibromyalgia is, like being gay, a lifestyle choice.

What awful little men.

Here are the problems with conventional medicine illustrated by this sordid tale.

Conventional medicine treats diagnoses not human beings. The job of a real healer is to alleviate the suffering of a specific human being. If that person is in chronic pain, then what the healer should be looking for is its cause and alleviating that. Why? Because pain is nature’s way of telling you something’s wrong. More specifically, chronic pain is your body’s way of telling you that something’s out of balance. A real healer would restore balance not tape shut the mouth of the pain that’s crying out.

Those healers exist. They point in two places: hormone imbalance and the disruption of biochemical processes, disruptions shared by other systemic conditions such as multiple chemical sensitivity, chronic fatigue syndrome, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Recovering from fibromyalgia by establishing hormone and nutrient balance is about healing and health, not diagnosis and treatment.