Ecological Medicine: Healing the People, Healing the Planet with Jenny Goodman

Thursday March 27th
Doors & drinks 6.30pm; Talk starts 7pm

What is medicine for? Ideally, its purpose would be to enable all of us to live a full and healthy life, eventually dying peacefully of simple old age. Such a medicine would educate all of us in the art and science of self-care. And it would step in when we got sick, with the best treatment selected from a smorgasbord of possibilities, ranging from herbs to acupuncture to osteopathy to surgery, depending on what the person’s situation required.

But there’s no profit to be made from what grows naturally – you can’t patent a plant. So, the pharmaceutical giants have an interest in telling us that holistic medicine is ineffective or dangerous or both. They’re busy looking for the ‘magic bullet’ cure, a futile but highly profitable quest, and they don’t want us looking at causes or methods of prevention.

In this talk, followed by discussion, Jenny Goodman, qualified medical doctor and author of "Getting Healthy in Toxic Times", will set out a vision for a new way to heal ourselves and the planet.

Ecological Medicine looks for the root causes of illness, especially the causes of our current waves of chronic, degenerative diseases; our epidemics of dementia, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, neurodegenerative and autoimmune disease, all of which were rare or unknown before the industrial revolution - and all of which are preventable.

It understands that human health is inextricably linked with the health of the bees, the trees, the birds, the oceans and the planet as a whole. And it highlights how hyper-capitalism is depriving us of the most basic things we need to be well and happy: clean air, clean water, nourishing and uncontaminated food, sunshine and the freedom to wander freely in green places.

It values many sources of knowledge, not just randomised double-blind placebo-controlled trials on fit young men for a drug to be used in frail old ladies. And it reclaims the epistemological value of information passed down by generations of clinicians and patients, knowledge that’s currently dismissed as “mere anecdotal evidence”. If wise women have been using herbal remedy X for condition Y for thousands of years, and it works, and modern biochemistry explains how, maybe we should listen.

Ecological medicine - which is a real practice, not just a vision – sees the whole human person as one joined-up ecosystem, not a series of separate compartments, each to be dealt with by a different hospital department. And not as a mind and body co-existing in uneasy Cartesian separateness.

Crucially, ecological medicine sees the human being as an intrinsic part of the wider ecosystem which is Planet Earth; we cannot heal the one in isolation from the other. The causes of our ills are not unknown. We are eating the causes, drinking the causes, inhaling the causes, and frequently rubbing the causes into our skin. We can stop, and we can discover the safe alternatives. Reclaiming control over our own health is a profoundly political act.

Jenny's talk will be followed by supper and discussion.

Kairos, 84 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4TG

Doors open at 6.30pm for drinks. Talk starts at 7pm.

£8 Kairos Club Member, £15 Non-member, £10 Struggling financially, £20 Supporter. Food complimentary.

Before requesting a discounted ticket, please consider sincerely: Are you struggling to meet your basic needs? Would you have to make a genuine sacrifice to buy a full priced ticket? Do you have reduced earnings through a lifestyle choice or rather because you're dedicating your time to unpaid work relating to the climate and nature crises or as a result of structural inequality?

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