In Reply to: On being a healthy skeptic posted by Thinker on August 17, 2007 at 13:10:37:
When I post a news article or link to one, that doesn't imply that I agree with everything that is written in it. I didn't think I needed to spell that out, but obviously I do.
What interested me are the concepts of sin causing disease and faith healing, those being the dogma I was immersed in so long.
I've been studying biological evolution for the last year or so, and recently began reading about the paleolithic diet.
I've been a vegetarian for about the last ten years or so, but now I am seriously considering switching to the diet our bodies are genetically adapted to, that of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
In reading up on that subject I came across this comment on the body's ability to heal itself:
[There is a ] strong recognition of the principle of the body as homeostatic self-healing mechanism. An understanding of the fundamental health principle that outside measures (drugs, surgery, etc.) never truly "cure" degenerative health problems. In spite of the grandiose hopes and claims that they do, and the aura of research breakthroughs, their function is really to serve as crutches, which can of course be helpful and may truly be needed in some circumstances. But the only true healing is from within by a body that has a large capacity, within certain limits, to heal and regenerate itself when given all of its essential biological requirements--and nothing more or less which would hamper its homeostatic functioning.
The body's regenerative (homeostatic) abilities are still commonly unrecognized today (often classed as "unexplained recoveries" or--in people fortunate enough to recover from cancer--as "spontaneous remission") because the population at large is so far from eating anything even approaching a natural diet that would allow their bodies to return to some kind of normal health, that it is just not seen very often outside limited pockets of people seriously interested in approximating our natural diet.