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Medicine Men and Materialists Mash-up

Medicine Men and Materialists Mash-up (4Ms) is a project in the Explorers Theme of Mágoulo’s School for the Spiritually Gifted. The title plays on the struggle between Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) — some equate with traditional and faith healers sometimes called “Medicine Men” — and Conventional Western Medicine (CWM) based on Scientific Reductionist Materialism (Materialists). This project is a “Mash-up” because it intends to study both viewpoints and produce a practical synthesis of the strengths of both.

Big Question: How do you find your strategies for health with so much contradictory information and clashing underlying philosophies?

This project was inspired by MagSchool’s conversations about family health practices, often centering around changing our diets to deal with allergies, food sensitivities, and food-related long-term health issues. We, like most people, encounter certain realities in the “information economy of health” which is currently very complex and sometimes lacks clarity.1

We can use the Explorers theme to metaphorical explore this topic during The Age of Discovery (1500s to 1750s) and Age of Revolutions (1760s to 1860s), using the following questions:

  • What was the relationship of explorers and settlers to the health systems and traditions of the native people they encountered?
  • Did the native health system present an opportunity to access systems well suited to the settler’s new environment (is earth-care and healthcare strongly related)?
  • As developments in science and scientific thinking took root from the Enlightenment (1600s – 1800s), often mixed with new religious ideas, what was the conflict between traditional medicine and newer models?2
  • The ratification of the Bill of Rights in 1791 gave states the right to regulate health care and by the 1800s, many states had created medical licensing systems governed by medical health boards. Who controls these boards, and how has this effected the practice of medicine?

Parable: Abraham Flexner didn’t like the American education system of the Gilded Age (1870s-1880s). He advocated for education reform, eventually creating his own school that gave no grades, took no tests, had no curriculum, but focused on students learning in small groups through hands-on practice. His method was so successful, he could afford to fund his own research into the education system, eventually producing The American College on 1908 which advocated for wide reforms of our system.

This work attracted the attention of Henry Pritchett, president of the Carnegie Foundation. Pritchett funded Flexner to study American medical colleges using the same disciplines and ideas for reform. The resulting book, published in 1910 was called the Flexner Report. It was very critical of the status of many schools of medicine — some of which had courses of study less than one year and did not even require a high school diploma to enter — and advocated closing many schools Flexner viewed beyond the hope of reform.3 Later in life, Flexner described the condition of American medicine as “a patient had a 50-50 chance of benefiting from visiting a physician as of 1910. Medicine was more like voodoo than science until the 20th Century.”4 The report, which may have been covertly funded by the American Medical Association,5 was used in the proceeding reforms to close 82 of the 148 American medical schools. While this set the foundation for America’s modern medical system, critics have pointed out that Flexner’s work also set back many aspects of medicine, especially for the Black community that lost 5 of their 7 colleges.6

Case Study: The Case for Carnivore

Our current case study: In late 2024, @suzyhomemaker began experimenting with The Carnivore Diet to control symptoms possibly related to food sensitivities and insulin insensitivity. Issues included a recurring ear infection (ENT recommending surgery), stubborn baby weight, and immune system performance. In 2025, ProfMag’s father also joined The Carnivore Diet with good results.

ProfMag has indicated a desire to integrate the family’s diet for two reasons: 1) two separate diet systems is not ideal as a family, 2) as the family members age they may have similar health issues if they continue on their current diet (early correction might avoid later consequences). However, due to past experiences with diets, ProfMag thinks it wise to seek professional help, probably from a CAM-type practitioner in the fields of Integrative Medicine or Functional Medicine.

This case study is a good opportunity for:

  1. Creating and learning a process/system for thinking through issues like this, perhaps based on the [7] Epistemology framework.
  2. Considering using a Mash-up approach that blends the strengths of CWM and CAM and helps diverse opinions feel satisfied with the process and results.
  3. Treat health cases as opportunities for STEM learning, specifically building schema about one’s own health.

Posts specifically related to this case are tagged TCfC (The Case for Carnivore).

Using [7] Epistemology Framework

We’ll use The Case for Carnivore to learn Epistemology — the branch of Philosophy that explores knowledge and it’s nature, origin, and limits — using the [7] Epistemology Framework which outlines a typical process for exploring a particular subject: especially one that you can practically practice (practical knowledge and knowledge by aquaintance7).

Process Outline & Action Steps

NOTE: Actions steps are Forum topics in the MagSchool private forum which requires membership to access with a UK user account.

  1. philalethia: from Greek: lit. “love/affection for truth”, this is the Prime of the process — driving it forward and holding it together. The centrality of philalethia addresses two specific and related aspects of Epistemolgy: 1) that it is the pursuit of knowledge as truth separate from opinion or sentiment, and 2) a key concern of knowing truth is justification — the means of verifying truth-claims. If a truth-seeker no longer loves truth in the process above any other outcome, it is questionable whether the resulting knowledge is true. When more than one person is involved in the process, it will disintegrate if any participant loves an outcome more than pursuing truth.

    Following [3] David’s Bow, in a “natural” epistemological process, people may proceed through testimony and incorporation before they connect to philalethia: i.e. 1) people explore their views, 2) they try to incorporate those views with what they know and believe, 3) the conflict or collaboration that arises from the first two steps will lead them to a partnership based on a mutual love of truth. This means it’s fine to assume that merely engaging in trying to know something implies philalethia and to come back to this step later (after 2 or 3) to focus on it more intentionally and explicitly.

    Action Steps:
  2. testimony: knowledge is shared from someone’s experience on at least a basic level on a topic, making at least one truth claim (but often a whole system of claims). This naturally loads creative tension between experience (Alpha) and schema (Beta). Experience is lived narrative — a person heard something, read something, did something, or something happened to them. Schema is the structure of what a person or group already knows — knowledge-base. Even a person who experiences hearing a truth claim for the first time will feel a creative tension until they can connect that knowledge to the schema of what they already know. Resolving this tension will be more involved and robust with knowledge that requires higher rigor (either due to a desire for greater specificity or greater risk, etc). The same is true for new truth claims involving a lot of people and increases in complexity with diversity of experience and schema.

    Testimony focuses on the collection and comprehension of the truth claim. What is the experience of the truth-source? What is the particular truth they are claiming? What does the truth-claim mean to them? It can reference schema superficially (for example, to explain what the testimony means), but true connection to schema should be reserved for the incorporation step where the truth-seekers will see how the testimony fits with their knowledge and beliefs.

    Action Steps:
    • Introducing Carnivore: @suzyhomemaker gives testimony about the Carnivore diet.
    • The Vegan Dissent: other MagSchool members give testimony about their concerns or dissenting testimony.
    • SuzyHomemaker’s Sources: listing the testimony sources for Carnivore.
    • Background: What is the Hierarchy of Living Structures?
    • Background: What is the Endocrine System and how does it work?
    • Background: How are hormones involved in communication and regulation in the body?
    • Background: What is insulin and Carnivore’s claims about its connection to body health?
    • Background: What are ketones and how are they produced?
  3. incorporation:
  4. community of praxis:
  5. knowledge mastery:
  6. innovation:
  7. culture change:
  8. embodiment:

Forum Posts

Posts for this project us the 4Ms tag.

  • Discussions tagged with '4Ms'

  • Sorry, there were no discussions found.

Related Entries

References & Notes

  1. Here are some of the realities facing people in the current information economy of health:

    • Popular media is motivated to publish new and sensational findings, often undermining information based on long-term scientific consensus.
    • Conventional Western Medicine (CWM), based on Scientific Reductionist Materialism, isn’t completely satisfying to many because: 1) it often treats symptoms but not causes; 2) it often creates significant side-effects; 3) it hasn’t provided compelling mechanistic explanations to many endemic health issues, although it limits its treatments to such explanations.
    • The apparently predatory or unethical economic behavior of pharmaceutical corporations, insurance corporations, and healthcare corporations adds to the problems people have with CWM — adding a sense of criminal conspiracy and greed-motive to people’s doubts.
    • The internet-based health influencers and health entrepreneurs are providing compelling anecdotal testimony for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) including early-stage CWM research, traditional medicine, and non-science based health modalities — often in some way outside of the institutional CWM system.
    • The CWM model, because it is based on the scientific method, often communicates in problems, questions, and uncertainties. CAM (and the influencers and entrepreneurs who promote this) often communicates in solutions, answers, and certainties (or at least probabilities). This leads many who are not usual users of disciplined “scientific thinking” to feel alternative and traditional health is more reliable, more certain, or more satisfying. On the other hand, some proponents of CWM model then accuse people who don’t hold exclusively to the CWM as engaging in superstition, “magical thinking”, or other non-scientific views.
    • With the rise of political and social polarization around the Triple Crisis which included the COVID19 Pandemic, different philosophies of health and access to different health modalities has become heavily politicized and resulting in information wars and struggles over health regulation.
    • Because the CWM model is focused on highly-structured and professional rigorous solutions derived from sick populations, it tends to yield more certain yet very specific answers over very long periods of time (related to individual lifetimes) — you have to wait until research is completed, a product is produced, it clears regulators, it is adopted by consensus medical associations, it is approved by health insurance companies for treatment, and it is distributed to healthcare systems, often taking years or decades. Because a significant amount CAM is focused on functional strategies derived from healthy populations, it yields less certainty or specificity but more generally applicable answers over very short periods of time — you can participate today.

  2. For an interesting source, see the “Witchcraft, Women & the Healing Arts in the Early Modern Period” collection at The University of Alabama at Birmingham Library. This collection shows attitudes about health and medicine in the Early Modern Period and conflicts that arose as attitudes shifted including witch trails that punished traditional healers, many of them women.
  3. “Abraham Flexner” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Flexner.
  4. https://www.azquotes.com/author/21489-Abraham_Flexner
  5. See MILLER, LYNN E., and RICHARD M. WEISS. “Revisiting Black Medical School Extinctions in the Flexner Era.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 67, no. 2 (2012): 217–43. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24632042. Miller and Weiss have suggested a motivation by the elite of the AMA to concentrate medicine and medical education into fewer hands, thus increasing profits. Along that line, some are troubled by Flexner’s view in his report that society should limit the number of professionals to a certain ratio.
  6. See Jesse Wright-Mendoza, “The 1910 Report That Disadvantaged Minority Doctors” Jstor Daily, May 9, 2019. https://daily.jstor.org/the-1910-report-that-unintentionally-disadvantaged-minority-doctors/.
  7. The third main type of knowledge, according to classical Epistemology would be propositional knowledge which deals the the development or theory and facts. If the truth-seeker doesn’t intend to experiment or explore the subject through direct experience, the [7] Epistemology process must be altered.