The Loss of the Solar Physician

"The Temples and Cult of Asclepius", color litograph from portfolio series "A History of Medicine" illustrated by Robert Thom, date unknown,(caption on picture) "Every night for a thousand years (500 B.C.-500 A.D.), sick and afflicted pilgrims flocked to the Grecian Temples of Asclepius. Healing and advice were sought during dream visitations by the ancient god of medicine", history, historical figure, helping, doctors

Brendan Heard and Iásonas Lupus

“The Best Doctor is Also a Philosopher”
– Galen

As we see with studies on the effectiveness of placebos, belief and assurance can be unequivocally proclaimed an aspect of medical treatment. The culture that created the concepts and oaths of our practice of medicine were themselves interwoven with a religious or numinous duty. The institution was as much a spiritual vocation, an art bestowed by the gods, as a studiously practical one. With the removal of solar tradition from medical institutions the spiritual health and the solemnity of the vocation’s struggle with death are lessened and ignored, to the detriment of both practitioner and patient. Medicine is no longer considered so much a sacred art as a means of profit for big business. The favourite practice of modern medicine is generally to drug the patient to numbness.

Medicine, like all the sciences and arts, should be threaded with our cultural dedication to a higher, unseen, unpward-looking theological order. Without which the practice is robbed of its sense of sanctity, which is natural to it. Anything thus robbed degenerates into an engine for money. And in that nihilism of quantia it loses all purpose, all value.

The ethos of these modern institutions, like all our other institutions, can be sensed upon entering them. Slovenly absence of hierarchical uniforms signifying authority, absence of statues, no gardens, no real paintings (at best meaningless splatter-paintings), no uplifting aesthetics, no classical music, no organic meals, nothing that might actually facilitate a recovery process. The atmosphere of a place always has an impact upon the psychology of its inhabitants, but Modernist art theory has robbed us of the very idea of recognizing objective beauty. None of this would be considered good to the Therapeutae of Asclepius

Under our current medical practice, people are callously made dependent on pharmaceutical pills, towards a more immediate but superficial recovery. Physicians can no longer make scary-sounding lifestyle recommendations, for fear of the effete wrath of the spoiled and undisciplined modern adult-child, which will hear nothing that might transform their physical and mental health in the long term. To a solar-medical perspective, a holistic, healthy lifestyle makes individuals less dependent on physicians, thereby it is antithetical to profits.

What is often ignored completely in modern diagnoses is the importance of environment, diet, and physical activity. The beauty of our surroundings, the balance of routine connection to nature, to living healthy, and not the endless illusion of choice in a toxic marketplace of exploitation. The interconnection between the body, mind, and spirit is seen as non-existent in the paradigm of the market-as-god, a fragmented world view which corrals us like rats in a maze. A truer pharmaceutical system would involve a guild devoted to herbal craft, its journeymen and masters dedicated to a patron saint or deity. Thereby all eyes are looking upward, and the profits are made secondary to ethics of the vocation, and the material needs of the patient is threaded with the necessities of mind.

The Hippocratic Oaths, like many others, lose their meaning in money-world.

Foolish the doctor who despises the knowledge acquired by the ancients.
– Hippocrates


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