Do you ever wonder what will happen when personalized and lifestyle medicine take America to a different place? When the reversal of heart disease and dementia and multiple sclerosis and mental illness become the norm? When cancer will be treated without chemo and radiation?
What will happen when we realize that the most healing place on the planet is a home kitchen? What will it mean when we take control of our health before losing a leg to diabetes or our hair to chemo or our life savings into expensive custodial care at the end of life?
If you wish to explore how healing a home kitchen can be, check out this new offering, The Healing Kitchen: Let Food Be Thy Medicine, here. It comes in 9 episodes, and for now it’s free to watch online.
Clinics and hospitals will evolve into places for acute and trauma care, for diagnosing complex conditions, and for designing treatment plans to address root causes. But ultimately, home is where we will do the ongoing work of treating sickness, reversing disease, and maintaining wellness.
This sounds like a fairytale given where medicine and human health are today. But what health and environmental research has been proving for a few decades now, is that the most significant physical causes of chronic disease are food, nutrition, and toxins. Think insulin resistance, celiac disease, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, lead poisoning linked to violence, pesticides to cancer, and both to lower IQ in children. These examples are only the tip of a huge iceberg labelled ‘chronic disease’.
True, food and toxins are not the only factors. What about heredity? Epigenetics tells us that genes are not our destiny, that environmental factors both physical and emotional - even thoughts themselves - can change gene expression, can harm it or heal it. Trauma, emotions, stress, even ancestral issues, also factor into health and disease.
The good news is that we now know more about these causative factors than ever in human history. Even better news: these ‘root causes’ are yielding to the drugless methods of lifestyle-based practitioners. And the best news of all: we humans now have the real potential to control the things that make us sick, we will not forever be at the mercy of adverse drug reactions and side-effects, nor so dependent on our current system of expensive and complicated healthcare.
One day we will be able to look toward our own homes as places of healing. To the kitchens where processed foods will be replaced with nutrient-dense, toxin-free foods from regenerative farmers who are also cleaning the air and water around us. Good food is not only the foundation of the body’s ability to heal itself, real food and herbal wisdom have the capacity to treat infections and wounds and to reverse chronic conditions.
See current examples of protocols that reverse dementia, mental illness, multiple sclerosis, heart disease here, here, here, here.
One day, we will walk out of the dark places of this toxic world, a world we ourselves have created, and into the clean homes and healing kitchens of tomorrow. Our medicine will come mostly from the fields of local farmers (here), and the cooks in our kitchens and the tenders of our home spaces will be the caregivers who make us well.
When an infant has an earache, a child has measles, a teenager becomes depressed, or a spouse falls ill, the clinician and the cook/home tender will become a healing team. As we each in our own time decide to engage with healing and wellness, American culture will be changed, lab coats will become aprons and homes will become hospitals.
As you ponder what sounds like a fairytale now, check out The Healing Kitchen episodes. In the trailer you’ll hear a presenter say: "if we lose connection to plants, we'll lose connection to what the human experience is about”.
True. But actually, the human experience is everywhere, including in the halls of mammoth medical complexes. Perhaps our task as humans is to more consciously choose what experiences we want and in what places we want to have them. In hospitals or in homes? In open-back gowns or in aprons?
We’ve written before about toxicity here and here, and losing home and health here. After almost a century of ‘better living through chemistry’, convenient food, and homemakers lost to the workplace, our homes have become just as sick as we are, and they too must be healed.
Living Well Locally suggests that it’s time to come home now, time to make our kitchens places of healing. Through the hard experience of chronic disease, the painful deaths of elders, a mass shooting every 21 hours, and, by no means least, the 40% of our children who are sick . . . through all these things we have learned so much. We now have enough knowledge to re-inhabit home in new ways, to make this sacred space free of toxins, safe from trauma, and healing for those who live there.