How a Social Media Post Almost Ruined My Day

Recently,  I came across a social media graphic that read, “Nature is my Hobby, Not my Doctor.”

For some reason, that really got under my skin.

Not because I object to doctors. Quite the opposite. I am deeply grateful for physicians, surgeons, pharmacists, nurses, emergency departments, antibiotics, anesthesia, imaging technology, and countless other advances that have improved and saved human lives. If I break my leg, I want an orthopedic surgeon. If I have appendicitis, I want an operating room. If I find myself in a genuine medical crisis, I want highly trained professionals standing between me and a very bad day.

I am equally grateful for nature. I am grateful for sunshine, fresh air, food that grows from the earth, and the simple pleasure of walking outside on a beautiful Colorado morning. I am grateful for forests, rivers, mountains, and open spaces. Most of all, I am grateful for the remarkable human body itself. The more I learn about it, the less ordinary it seems, and the more spectacular it truly becomes.

The graphic, with its false polarizing choice, irritated me.

Do we need more ways to discover what we do not agree upon? Do I have to set myself up in one “camp” or the other? 

The more I thought about it, the stranger the comparison became. One is a profession. The other is the world in which we live. One is made up of people who dedicate their lives to understanding health and disease. The other includes the very bodies they are studying. I had never considered them to be opposing ideas, and yet,  people seemed perfectly comfortable accepting the premise without ever stopping to examine it.

Once that thought lodged itself in my mind, I found myself running headlong down a rabbit trail.

What exactly does a doctor do? When I am irritated, I go straight to the dictionary. It’s a funciton of my childhood. Word games were BIG in my household. Gramma was always looking up some obscure little word with a “Q” in it so she could beat everyone at anagrams. 

But, I digress.

The more I considered the bumper sticker philosophy “Nature is my Hobby. Not my Doctor” the more I thought…What? So, for grins, I looked up the word doctor:  it comes from the Latin docere, meaning “to teach.” Historically, physicians were not simply people who intervened when something went wrong. They were students of the human body, observers of disease, teachers of health, and guides through some of the most difficult moments of life.

Their purpose was never simply to treat illness. The overall purpose is to help people live well.

And that realization led me to another question.

If helping people live well is the goal, then what is the larger framework that connects prevention, treatment, recovery, education, and care?

The answer, of course, is medicine.

Curious, I began looking at historical and modern definitions of the word “medicine”…Okay, I am  giving away that I am a total geek. Anyway, I expected to discover that medicine once meant something much broader than it does today. Instead, I found something surprisingly consistent.

In 1828, Noah Webster defined medicine as “the art of preventing, curing or alleviating the diseases of the human body.” Nearly two centuries later, Merriam-Webster describes medicine as “the science and art dealing with the maintenance of health and the prevention, alleviation, or cure of disease.”

My take away: the definition includes  “the prevention of disease”

The definition of medicine has NOT been reduced to intervention. The definition of medicine has not become synonymous with prescriptions, procedures, or emergency care. The definition still contained a much larger, richer vision– one that included not only the treatment of illness but the preservation of health itself. It’s just WE who have reduced it to “medical interventions.” Thankfully, our dictionary still hasn’t caught up with the culture. LOL.

Like many people, I have gradually come to associate medicine with what happens after something goes wrong. We get sick. We seek care. A diagnosis is made. A treatment is applied. Yet the definitions kept pointing me back toward something broader. They described medicine as an ongoing effort to understand health, maintain function, prevent disease when possible, relieve suffering when necessary, and restore well-being whenever we can.

That feels like a very different conversation from the one taking place beneath that social media post.

The more I thought about  it, the more I realized that medicine may be one of the few places where people who disagree about almost everything else still share a common goal. Researchers, physicians, nurses, pharmacists, physical therapists, public health professionals, and countless others may approach problems from different directions, but they are all participating in the same project. They are trying to understand the human body a little better than they did yesterday and use that knowledge to help people suffer less tomorrow.

That is a beautiful undertaking. A humbling one that I know those in the health care profession take very seriously.

The more we learn about the human body, the more complexity we uncover. Systems influence one another in ways we are still discovering. Sleep affects hormones. Hormones affect mood. Stress influences digestion. Movement influences metabolism. Genetics, environment, relationships, habits, and circumstances all become part of the story. Every answer seems to reveal three new questions waiting behind it.

Perhaps that is why medicine has always been described as both an art and a science.

Science helps us identify patterns, understand mechanisms, and test our assumptions. The art emerges when that knowledge meets a real human being whose life cannot be reduced to a chart, a diagnosis code, or a statistical average. Every clinician eventually learns that people are wonderfully predictable in some ways and endlessly surprising in others.

Far from weakening medicine, that complexity is what makes medicine necessary in the first place.

As I reflected on that da*n graphic that started me down this rabbit hole,  I realized that my objection has very little to do with nature or doctors. What bothered me was the assumption that I should view them as competitors. The choice felt artificial from the beginning, and the more I explored the idea, the less convincing it became.

The history of medicine is not the story of opposing camps. It is the story of human beings trying to understand themselves. It is a story of observation, discovery, failure, insight, prevention, treatment, recovery, teaching, and learning. It is a story that stretches across centuries and continues to unfold every day.

Most of all, it is a story that is far too rich to be reduced to a bumper sticker focused on click bate.

Well, that was a lot of words  over just being irritated about a post while perusing the Internet for something interesting to comment on. But I feel better. 

Can we all just take a minute to appreciate the incredible depth and breadth of life and health and just get along? 

Have a great day!!