Issue link: https://cp.revolio.com/i/633516
Page 58 | Abby's Magazine - www.AbbysMag.com Contrary to what you may think, detoxification methods of healing have been used across all cultures for centuries. They are not an invention of new age medicine. Fasting, for example, is one of the oldest therapeutic practices in medicine. In fact, internal detoxification and cleansing are as old as the idea of health. Four thousand years ago, according to the earliest medical textbook ever discovered (the Ebers Papyrus, found in the sands of Egypt), physicians were already using enemas to help the body cleanse and fight off disease. Around the year 400 BCE, Hippocrates, the Greek doctor generally accepted as the father of Western medicine, gave his patients cleansing herbs to help their bodies heal and was an advocate of fasting for improved health. Galen, another highly influential Greek physician, born 129 CE, believed cleansing was crucial to keeping the body in balance and good health. Ayurvedic medicine, a traditional healing system that has developed over thousands of years, utilizes detoxification methods to treat many chronic conditions and to prevent illness. Its very empowering to know we can reduce our risk of disease and lessen our exposure to these ubiquitous toxins that are a product of our modern culture and, inevitably, our attempts to advance the science of food, agriculture, medicine, and engineering in general. Our diets A LittLe and health are unfortunately largely controlled by three giant sectors and driving forces of the economy: food and agricultural corporations, including food processing giants; pharmaceutical companies; and the chemical and manufacturing industry, which aims to create unnaturally occurring products that may be superior in some ways to naturally occurring ones, yet incredibly harmful to humans in other ways. Because these three sectors are huge economic generators, we are led to believe their activities are okay – that processed and chemically altered or modified foods and agriculture, as well as chemically engineered goods and drugs, are actually better than what nature would provide. But this is far from the truth. They may be better in the sense that they make our lives easier, but the cost is exposure to potentially harmful substances.