On Medicine
The word shows up everywhere now. Food is medicine. Movement is medicine. Sleep is medicine. Nature is medicine. Community is medicine. Music, art, gardening, breathwork, cold plunges, sunshine—medicine.
Something is happening in this linguistic expansion. The word medicine is doing conceptual work that we may not fully recognize, and that work may not serve us.
I want to think through what we actually mean when we call something medicine, what we’re hoping for when we seek it, and whether the word itself has become a barrier to clearer thinking about health and healing.
The Root
“Medicine” comes to us from Latin medicina, derived from mederi—to heal, to cure, to remedy. But the deeper root is more interesting. The Proto-Indo-European med- meant something like “to take appropriate measures.” It’s the root behind words like meditate (to reflect, to consider carefully), and a cluster of terms about moderation and fittingness—mode, modest, moderate.
There’s a useful nuance here: English also has a separate measuring root (the me- family) that gave us “measure” in the sense of quantifying. These roots live next door to each other conceptually—one about discernment and appropriateness, the other about calculation and proportion—and our language inherited both. That pairing matters. Medicine, at its oldest depth, isn’t just about treatments. It’s about discernment. What is fitting here?
This older sense is harder to hear now. When we hear “medicine” today, we tend to think of pills, procedures, prescriptions, hospitals, white coats, insurance claims. Something administered to us—external, targeted, and meant to fix a defined problem. The word often narrows from “appropriate measures” to “therapeutic interventions for pathology.”
That narrowing matters. It shapes what we think healing is, who gets to provide it, and what counts as a legitimate response to suffering.
Four Medicines
The word now carries at least four distinct meanings that blur together in everyday speech:
First: medicine as substance — the pill you swallow, the tincture you take, the injection you receive. “Take your medicine” refers to this concrete, material sense.
Second: medicine as practice and knowledge — the accumulated understanding of how bodies work, what goes wrong, and how to intervene. “She studied medicine” points to this disciplinary sense.
Third: medicine as institution — the vast system of hospitals, insurance companies, professional licensing, pharmaceutical corporations, research universities, regulatory agencies, and clinical protocols that organize healthcare in modern societies. “Medicine has failed these communities” uses the term this way.
Fourth: medicine as metaphor — anything with healing properties or beneficial effects. “Laughter is the best medicine” operates here. It doesn’t mean laughter is literally pharmaceutical; it means laughter helps.
When someone says “food is medicine,” which sense do they mean?
That specific foods function as therapeutic substances?
That nutrition should be part of clinical practice?
That our food system needs integration with healthcare institutions?
Or simply that eating well makes us healthier?
The ambiguity isn’t incidental. It borrows authority from the more concrete senses while operating primarily in the metaphorical sense.
This borrowing has consequences. It can legitimize something important (nutrition deserves serious attention). But it can also confuse (eating vegetables isn’t usually “treating a disease” in the same way insulin treats diabetes). And it often leaves unexamined whether the metaphorical sense actually captures what’s happening when food promotes health.
What We Want
When a person seeks medicine—in any of its senses—what are they actually after?
After sitting with patients wanting more than Medicine has to offer for 25 years, I think the honest answer involves several distinct desires that often interweave
We want relief from suffering. Pain, discomfort, distress, limitation—we want these to diminish or stop. This is the most primal dimension of seeking help.
We want restoration of capacity. Illness takes things from us—energy, function, ability, possibility. We want back what we’ve lost, or we want to build what we never had.
We want understanding. What’s happening to me? Why do I feel this way? Is this serious? What does it mean? The uncertainty of illness is itself a form of suffering.
We want validation. We want acknowledgment that our suffering is real, that we’re not making it up, that our experience deserves attention and response. For people whose pain has been dismissed or minimized, this can matter as much as any intervention.
We want hope and a path forward. Even when cure isn’t possible, we want to know that something can be done, that we’re not trapped. We want options, agency, a sense that our situation isn’t hopeless.
Notice what these desires have in common. They’re fundamentally phenomenological. They’re about lived experience—how it feels to be in this body, what this body can do, how we make sense of what’s happening, whether we feel seen and supported.
What Institutions Provide
The institution of medicine is organized around a different set of goals. I don’t mean this as condemnation—there are good reasons healthcare systems evolved the way they did. But the gap between what people want and what institutions optimize for is real.
Modern healthcare is exceptionally good at identifying and treating disease. A patient presents with symptoms; the clinician tries to determine what disease process might be causing them and chooses an evidence-based intervention. For many acute conditions, infections, injuries, and many specific pathologies, this is life-saving. But it’s organized around pathology more than the phenomenology of suffering or the restoration of human functioning.
It also practices inside courts and ledgers. Every clinical encounter sits inside a legal, regulatory, and reimbursement framework. Documentation, informed consent, standard of care, defensive testing, coding, billing... These shape what can be offered and how. Time spent listening, continuity of relationship, attention to context and meaning—these are harder to bill for and therefore harder to sustain.
And it runs on what can be measured and standardized. Systems measure disease incidence, mortality, complication rates, readmission rates, length of stay. These matter, but they aren’t the same as what patients want. Standardization improves consistency, training, and quality control. But it also abstracts away from the particularity of individual lives—constitution, context, values, experience. Protocols are powerful tools, but they can’t hold the whole person.
The Gap
There’s a substantial gap between what people want when they seek medicine and what institutional medicine is organized to provide. This isn’t because clinicians don’t care. Many care deeply and struggle against systemic constraints. It’s because the institution and the person seeking help have different goals and different categories of concern.
The person wants relief from suffering; the institution is organized around treating disease. These overlap, but they aren’t identical. Disease without suffering and suffering without an identifiable disease are both common, and the gap between them is where a lot of frustration with healthcare lives.
The person wants understanding and validation; the institution is organized around diagnosis and documentation. A diagnosis can offer understanding, but often it doesn’t. It can name without explaining, categorize without meaning. And the time pressure of modern clinical encounters leaves little room for the deeper kind of understanding people often seek.
The person wants to be seen as a whole person in context. The institution is built for standardized treatment of conditions. The same depression protocol whether you’re a new mother in isolation, a teenager facing social threat, or an elderly person grieving multiple losses. Context isn’t irrelevant to institutional medicine, but it isn’t central either.
This gap is why people leave clinical encounters unsatisfied even when they received technically competent care. It’s why people turn to alternative practitioners like me, who often provide more time, more attention, and a broader frame. And it helps explain why patient satisfaction is often only loosely aligned with technical quality—sometimes tracking it, sometimes not, depending on what’s being optimized.
The Expansion
Against this backdrop, the “X is medicine” expansion starts to make sense. It’s an attempt to fill the gap—to claim healing relevance for domains that institutional medicine doesn’t recognize or provide.
When someone says “community is medicine,” they’re pointing to something real. Social connection has measurable effects on health outcomes, and loneliness shows up in physiology, not just mood. And yet, institutional medicine doesn’t prescribe community. There’s no billing code for connection. The healthcare system isn’t structured to provide what might be one of the strongest determinants of health.
So people reach for the word “medicine” to legitimize what they know matters. If community is medicine, then it deserves seriousness, attention, resources—something closer to the weight we give pharmaceuticals and procedures. The word becomes a bid for recognition.
The same logic gets applied to food, movement, sleep, nature, meaning, creative expression. All of these have documented effects on health. Most fall outside what institutional medicine reliably provides. Calling them medicine is a way of saying these matter, these count, these belong in our picture of healing.
There’s something valuable in this move. The reductive biomedical frame that treats disease as purely biological malfunction occurring in isolated bodies has serious limits. Health emerges from the interaction between organism and environment—what we eat, how we move, whether we sleep, our relationships, our sense of meaning, our connection to place and community. Insisting on the health relevance of these domains pushes back against a narrow view where pills and procedures are treated as the only legitimate responses.
But there’s also something problematic in the move.
The Confusion
When we call health-building practices “medicine,” we import a disease-treatment frame into domains that work by cultivation. Pesticide thinking in fertilizer territory.
Medicine, in its institutional sense, is oriented around treating pathology. You have a disease; medicine intervenes. The relationship is therapeutic. Something is wrong, and medicine fixes it.
Food, movement, community, sleep build health through cultivation. Eating well creates adaptive capacity. Exercise develops strength and metabolic flexibility. Community provides relational context in which a nervous system can settle and meaning can be made. None of this works like an antibiotic clearing an infection—and the word ‘medicine’ carries that antibiotic logic with it.
This is the difference between pathogenesis (how disease develops and how we treat it) and salutogenesis (how health is built and sustained). They’re related, but they aren’t the same frame. Pathogenesis starts from disease and asks about causes and cures. Salutogenesis starts from health and asks about sources and cultivation.
When we call everything medicine, we collapse that distinction. We smuggle a pathogenic orientation into domains that are mostly salutogenic. The word carries its disease-treatment connotation into places where it doesn’t quite fit.
This creates subtle distortions.
If food is medicine, then eating becomes a therapeutic intervention—bringing performance pressure, optimization anxiety, and moralizing (“good foods” and “bad foods”) into what could be a more humane relationship with nourishment.
If movement is medicine, then I’m supposed to exercise “for my health” even when what might keep me moving for decades is enjoyment, competence, play, and the simple pleasure of inhabiting a body.
If rest is medicine, then sleep becomes a health behavior to perfect rather than a biological rhythm.
The medicalization of life has costs. It turns basic human activities into interventions requiring expertise. It creates anxiety around doing them correctly. It positions us as patients managing our health rather than people living our lives. It also invites an industry to sell us products and programs for things our ancestors just called living.
And perhaps most subtly, it keeps us inside an institutional frame even as we’re trying to escape it. By reaching for the authority of “medicine” to legitimize what we already value, we implicitly accept that medicine is the arbiter of what matters for health. We’re still asking the institution to validate our experience—just trying to expand what it validates. That may be strategically useful, but it isn’t freedom.
What We Might Say Instead
If medicine has become too narrow and “X is medicine” is both useful and problematic, what vocabulary might serve us better?
I don’t have a perfect answer, but I see some directions worth exploring.
Recover medicine as discernment. If we rehabilitate the older sense—appropriate measures in response to situation—the emphasis shifts from substances and institutions to judgment and fit. What does this situation call for? What would be fitting here? Sometimes the answer is antibiotics. Sometimes it’s rest. Sometimes it’s herbs. Sometimes it’s community. Sometimes it’s a walk outside. The question isn’t “is this medicine?” but “is this appropriate?”
Be more precise about what we’re doing. Building health is not the same as treating disease, and our language can honor that. Cultivation, nourishment, tending, strengthening—these words capture salutogenic practice better than “medicine” does. I’m not treating myself when I eat well; I’m nourishing myself. I’m not medicating when I move; I’m tending my body.
Put lived experience back at the center. Much of what people want when they seek help is relief from suffering, restoration of capacity, understanding, validation, hope. A vocabulary that centers experience rather than pathophysiology may serve the actual goals better: care, attention, presence, accompaniment, witness.
Rebuild the concept of health. Health in a robust sense isn’t the absence of disease. It’s dynamic adaptive capacity: resilience, flexibility, the ability to respond to life’s demands, the felt sense of vitality, the ability to engage with what matters. If we had a richer understanding of health, we might not need to call everything medicine. We could talk plainly about what builds health, what sustains it, what threatens it—without forcing it into a disease-treatment frame.
Name the plural nature of healing. What helps people heal is diverse: biological interventions, psychological support, social connection, meaning, environmental conditions, political realities. Medicine names one important domain, but it isn’t the whole territory. Healing exceeds medicine.
The Invitation
I’m not arguing that we should stop using the word medicine, or that the “X is medicine” formulation is simply wrong. Language shifts to carry the meanings we need it to carry. If calling food medicine helps people take nourishment seriously, that matters.
But it’s worth thinking more carefully about what we’re saying when we say it. The word carries baggage—institutional authority, disease-orientation, expert dependence, optimization pressure—that may not serve our actual goals. And there are other ways of talking about health and healing that may fit better.
The older sense of medicine as “taking appropriate measures” is worth remembering. It puts discernment at the center rather than intervention. It asks what the situation calls for rather than what treatment to apply. It’s humble about expertise and generous about what might help.
What do you actually need right now? Not what intervention, not what protocol. What's called for? Sometimes the answer is medicine. Sometimes it's something else entirely.
-Thomas
P.S. If this way of thinking about health resonates with you—and you want a framework that treats herbs as one tool inside a larger ecology of healing—you’ll probably like the Foundational Herbalism program at Eclectic School of Herbal Medicine.