Creative inspiration can come in many forms and from many different directions. About thirty years ago as I began my career studying Pharmacy and medicine, I was surprised as I studied the mechanism of action for various medications that in some cases, we just didn’t know why a drug worked. I had to reread and think about that. It had not occurred to me that there is still so much about the human body and the medical field that we don’t know or don’t yet understand. I found this to be very thought-provoking. I had assumed, as a young twenty-year-old student that I would just be learning from books how everything works, not that we wouldn’t necessarily understand how everything works. This really opened my mind to questioning the things that we read in our textbooks rather than taking everything that we are taught as fact.

            As I continued through school, learning about all the medications that we use to solve all the health problems that we have, I continued to challenge myself to look at things from a different angle. Seeing patients with five to ten medications all doing various manipulations to their body’s systems didn’t seem like the right answer. The more I studied the body and how amazing it is, the more I felt that the answer isn’t in taking medications that manipulate the body to temporarily solve its problems. The answer is having the body’s cells be able solve those problems on their own. It’s a nice thought, but not something that we currently know how to do. The more that I studied the effects of diet, and looked at alternative methods of treatment for diseases such as cancer the more I came to believe that the treatments and medications we have today are the best we can do right now, but the true answers are yet to be discovered.

            In my medical history class, my thoughts were further reinforced. We learned about some of the medical procedures being used just one hundred years earlier. I found myself thinking and almost laughing about how little they knew back then and how some of the medical practices they used were doing more harm than good. After moments of reflection, I realized that the same things were going on now. In less time, I bet 50 to 60 years, we will be looking back at this age of medications and laughing about how much we just don’t understand today, and in many ways doing more harm than good.

            So how does this happen, how do our cells become able to heal themselves? Is this a question that can be answered by science or by medicine, or are we not yet evolved enough to answer the question?