by Kieron McFadden
Somewhere back in the middle ages. the use of leeches to cure physical ailments must have begun its demise with a similar question to the one posed by the title of this essay. One day, someone looked at the state of medicine, took on board new advances and discoveries and asked the question: do we actually NEED leeches at all?
Until that time "everybody knew" that leeches cured illness despite the fact that there was no evidence they did anything at all except leave an already sick person closer to death by virtue of blood loss. One can imagine that the owners of the leech farms would have been only too happy not to have the palliative effects of leeches called into question. Indeed, one can visualise the leech farming corporations investing heavily in marketing campaigns to convince everyone of the indispensability of leeches in preserving human life and rubbishing new "crackpot" branches of medicine such as penicillin and hygiene, just as they rubbished as superstition the herbal cures and remedies that had served man well for thousands of years.
If it ever got out that leeches were not only not needed but actually made people even more ill, the leech farming corporations stood to lose a packet and as they were far more concerned with preserving a profitable monopoly than advancing the cause of human longevity they were, in my fictitious scenario, mighty determined to prevent real healers muscling in on their racket.
Well, the real healers won that particular battle, much to Man's advantage. Advances were made in medicine and nutrition that were to the benefit of all, while the leech lingered in the ancestral memory merely as a symbol of past ignorance vanquished.
The battle may have been won but the war still progresses and human knowledge continues to carve out its arduous advance, sometimes against entrenched resistance. One area that is making heroic strides is the field of nutrition, both as it affects physical health and as it affects one's state of mind and emotional condition.
And in its way, lo and behold, stand the modern equivalent of leech farming corporations, the wealthy vested interest groups known as pharmaceutical manufacturers and psychiatrists. They are very happy for one particular "everybody knows" to continue: that psychiatric medications are necessary to cure mental disorders.
Actually, they don't say "cure" because they don't believe cure is possible, they say "alleviate" or "manage," which is another way of saying that the patient needs to take their medications for life and this is immensely profitable.
However, the whole "I've got a mental disorder but a psychiatric pill will fix me up" routine is a complete myth. The myth is very profitable for the pill manufacturers and pushers and so they spend more on marketing than they do on research in order to get as many people people as possible popping their pills from as young an age as possible and on every pretext imaginable.
Unfortunately the pills often debilitate, harm and kill human beings and if the psychiatric drugging pandemic continues, with the evident acquiescence of our governments, to cut broad swathes through the citizenry there will be no-one left sufficiently clear of mind and endowed with vigour to run things and the whole civilization will stagger drunkenly into its own fog and, with a stultified whimper, perish.
So let's begin the process of dispelling our very own Twenty First Century leech myth and examine whether we actually need the psychiatrist's pills at all.
About The Author
My main blog is at McFadden Avenue
