The Search Continues

[jarandhel]

Well, my explorations in modern medicine have lead me to the beginnings of western medical tradition as it exists today: Hippocrates. Found a fair amount of translated writings by him, and I'm slowly going through his works. The writing style is kind of hard to read, the medical theory highly based around the geography and seasons of greece, but I think there is also a lot here that makes sense. It speaks about a correlation between climate and health that just feels logical to me. It's something I'm going to definately look into more, though it's description seems a bit too steeped in the geography of greece to help everyone everywhere... if I take the general ideas, though, and look into modern application of them, I think I could learn quite a bit. I'm also very surprised to note that Hippocrates favored an approach that I can only describe as holistic, compared to modern medicine, as it treats people as individuals, teaching that a person's proclivity to disease can be anticipated by his climate, his habits, and other similar factors. That seems like common sense, but it is something that often seems to be forgotten in western medicine. With the exception of occasionally innoculating people against flu if they are inclined to get it or putting people on preventative diets and exercise regimens to improve their general health and reduce the risk of disease, there seems to be little emphasis on predicting disease and preventing it so much as there is on diagnosing it once it has onset and curing it afterwards. If we could more accurately predict the proclivities people have to certain illnesses, it seems to me that we could much more effectively administer preventative treatment, which for many diseases would be far more effective than current post-onset treatments. At least, that's how things seem to me right now. I still have a lot of reading and research to do.

-Jarin