...I learned a Slow Medicine lesson: how individual medicine was. It wasn't true that one size fits all, that everyone or no one should have that tre… - Victoria Sweet

...when you're on your pilgrimage, you don't even need to know where you're going. You just have to know when you're off your path.

Every time a new drug comes out, I read what the side effects are and how many people really get better, and I add in the side effects and the adverse reactions. When you do that, and subtract out the placebo effect, not many new medications make a difference.

What I discovered was that the two ways of looking at the body—the modern and the premodern, the Fast and the Slow, as a machine to be repaired and as a plant to be tended—are both effective when they are applied to the right patient at the right time. For illnesses that come on suddenly—an inflamed appendix, a rip-roaring infection, a car accident, a heart attack—it is best to think like a mechanic—boldly, reductively. What is broken? What should I do to fix it? Desperate illnesses require desperate remedies. But not-desperate illnesses do better with not-desperate remedies. Diseases that come on slowly—chronic infections, complex medical conditions, the aftermath of the appendectomy, the heart attack, the chemotherapy—are best approached like a gardener, asking myself as Hildegard would have done, not what is broken but what is working? What are my patient's strengths and how can I support them? What can I do to nurture viriditas, the natural power of healing?