drug it up

kim on 5:01 pm January 8th, 2009 / 1 Comment »

My job is to teach, and to run a business based on, the stilling of the mind’s fluctuations, so today passing the rite aid on U Street was a challenge.

A big sign I’ve never seen before was right there on the front door:

20% discount on all drugs!

This means two things to me. 1) Demand side: People are less able to afford the drugs they have been prescribed by their doctors, who by and large prescribe these “remedies” for the symptoms of disease, rather than for the disease and/or its cause , and 2) Supply side: The free market (and recession) is driving this sale in order to keep drug-buying traffic high at Rite Aid.

Yoga and its sister science, Ayurveda, or China’s Acupuncture, or even walking 15 minutes a day (possibly to yoga class), could render these discounts–and the RiteAid drug counter itself–utter failures.

all we have to do is use these ancient approaches to health and treat our bodies not as inconveniences when malfunctioning, but rather as messengers of the body’s inherent ability to heal itself.

1. 
   On February 27th, 2009 at 5:10 am Stewart Lawrence Said:

   Kim, I am not sure that I can really agree with your view here. There are conditions that people suffer from, including mental-psychological ones, that can become sufficinetly acute that they must be treated, in part, chemically, to restore the body’s natural balance.

   Since all yoga practitioners believe in balance, we must be clear that conditions of this kind exist, and not become perceived as anti-drug or anti-Western medicine, even if Western medicine, especially as practiced in the advanced captialist countries, is so obviously corrupted by motives unrelated to appropriate quality care.

   Yoga, on the other hand, should be a full component of many many conditions that require restorative care, including the ones that may require specialized medical/drug treatmnents on the front end. For example, someone recoveirng from clinical depression should surely consider yoga as part of an all-inclusive holistic recovery program that also includes whatever medication they’ve been prescribed. Yoga, counseling and other forms of body work can surely speed the suffere’rs recovery makinmg it less likely that they will have to rely or rely so heavily or for so long, on their anti-depression medication.

   In general, though, I don’t think we can respond to the bias and imbalance of the corporate-dominated medical system with a view from a completely different health paradigm that in practice could be just as imbalanced – and actually harmful.

   The actual requirements for the care of any suffering and recovering individual should trump all other ideological and philosophical considerations. Everything out there in the world today – every individual and practice – is somehow part of the solution to the challengess we face -in medicine and wellness, and in all other realms. Let’s find a way to affirm them all.

   Namaste, Stewart

   imbalanced view of our own.

   disagree.