Holistic quandary

Recently I mentioned to a friend that Simon got burned on his hand so we brought him to the emergency room. My friend seemed surprised that I'd agree to that, being holistic and all. I'm not sure what his image of my life is like, but apparently it involves sitting in a mud hut and applying leeches to suck out the demons.

To be honest I'm not even sure holism is the best way to describe my philosophy. In my opinion health boils down to one fact; the human body is a complex organism that as been designed by billions of years of evolution to be treated a certain way. This means getting plenty of exercise (hunting and gathering), eating the right foods (vegetables, grains, and whatever you can hunt down with a stick), and getting plenty of rest (sleep when it's dark).

I have a great deal of respect for modern medicine, which strives to understand the body and treat problems when they arise. I don't, unfortunately, have much respect for modern doctors. Most of them learn the bare minimum in order to get their degree, then slack off on keeping up to date with the latest medical knowledge and make deals with multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical companies. They don't care much for preventative treatments and just jump right into pumping you with drugs. The majority of people don't think twice about this, thinking that any medicine is good medicine, but we don't really know the long-term implications of most of this stuff.

A good analogy, at least for me, would be a programmer dealing with a million line computer program. If you just start tweaking code willy-nilly in order to fix a bug then you're in trouble. If I tried that, instead of putting effort into determining the root cause of the problem and making the minimal amount of change necessary, I wouldn't last long in my job.