Excerpted from "The Real Astrology Applied" by John Frawley
As is well-known, the approaches of modern and traditional medicine are quite different.
In terms that are not so very over-simplified, modern medicine aims to label the particular set of presenting symptoms as specifically as it can, and then suppress them. Traditional medicine, which has what seems to the modern ear a careless lack of concern for labelling, aims to restore the natural balance the failure of which is causing the presenting symptoms. To the modern doctor with, again, only a slight over-simplification – the symptoms are the problem that needs to be resolved; to the traditional physician the symptoms are a warning that something has fallen out of balance. From the traditional perspective, the modern habit of treating the advent of such a warning by swallowing an anodyne is no different from shooting the messenger before he can tell his message. With the warnings so widely ignored, it is no surprise that the constitutional imbalance becomes ever worse, until it manifests in a chronic and incurable ailment.
Much that masquerades as holistic medicine by paying lip service to the above is in reality anything but.
Treatment does not become any more holistic or any less symptomatic merely because you buy your potions from a health-food shop of a pharmacist. A good proportion of so-called holistic medicine concerns itself with the illness rather than the patient in exactly the same way as does its conventional brother. Moving now from diagnosis to prescription, it is worth correcting the common belief that ‘you can’t do any harm with herbal remedies’. If you couldn’t do any harm with them, it is unlikely you could do much good with them. Traditional medicine regards even herbal prescription as a drastic intervention that is best avoided if at all possible. If the native is looking after himself at all well, the condition should not have become so serious that it needs treatment with herbs.
The native is usually, of course, not looking after himself at all, and will do his utmost continue with the same unsatisfactory habits that have led to the symptoms of which he complains. Dietary modification, then, which is at once the most effective and the most benign of treatments, does usually need the short, sharp shock of herbal support.
