By James Maskell
This is another introduction from the Genius Life podcast number 118, where Max discusses the impact of functional medicine instead of pharmaceuticals with the author James Maskell.
James’ philosophy to functional medicine is much like my own. Prevention rather than cure. Put diet, exercise, stress management and sleep at the top of the priority order for living. By doing this your body and mind is strong enough to fight any disease the world throws at you, as well as massively reduce the risk of having a non-communicable autoimmune disease.
The focus on these four basics all have a positive on the psychological and biological aspects of the mind. The last remaining cog in the wheel is the social aspect of life. James cites multiple cases where group health visits are far more successful than one-on-one visits with a doctor because it makes people realise they are not alone. It allows them to share stories with others with similar diseases or issues, and gives a firm sense of community.
He rightly points out that prior to the industrial revolution, as societies we used to be interdependent on each other’s community. We used to buy and trade off each other in small communities within our own villages or tribes. Now, when we want something, all we do is click a few buttons on our phone and the thing we want is delivered to your door. The only person you ever need to see is the delivery man, and they are on such tight schedules there is no time to communicate.
If you refer to the Blue Zone studies, some of which has been maligned due to misrepresentation, there is one thing which stands out and is consistent throughout all areas. This is the social connection; the community. Whether the 7th Day Adventists or the Okinawans, at the forefront of their lives is a support community of friends and family.
Surely it’s time to look very carefully at the results of the doctors who are holding group classes for the modern day auto-immune diseases. If the results which can be found in this book are so outstanding, why are we not hearing about them more? The reason why is quite sad; being the whole pharmaceutical/healthcare industry who are interdependent on selling drugs to fix disease. This system does not leave room for community cure and care like James Maskell explains, and it’s about time we started to take these results more seriously and reverse the curve of ever increasing non-communicable auto-immune diseases.
This book is for anybody interested in helping people at a group level, or helping people generally.
To finish this review I would like to share this quote from Bertrand Russell I heard in this book which resonates so much with modern day Twitterism: “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world, the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt”. We need to reverse this and allow the intelligent silent doubtful majority to take back control of the worlds voice away from the stupid cocksure keyboard raging majority.
Love, peace and care to you all.