Healing Traditions

Healing Traditions is an unsentimental tour through how humans have tried to heal themselves—long before wellness became a marketplace and medicine became industrial.

This book looks at traditional healing systems not as mystical relics or alternatives to science, but as early pattern-recognition tools: attempts to make sense of pain, illness, fear, and recovery using the best frameworks available at the time. Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine, humoral theory, shamanic practices, folk remedies—each is examined for what it noticed correctly about the body, and where story, symbolism, and belief filled gaps that biology could not yet explain.

Rather than asking “Does this work?” in a simplistic way, Healing Traditions asks better questions: What problems were these systems trying to solve? What models of the body did they assume? Why do some of their ideas persist—especially when modern medicine feels impersonal, fragmented, or incomplete?

The result is neither endorsement nor dismissal, but translation. This is a guide for readers who want to understand why ancient healing ideas still resonate, how meaning and ritual affect physiology, and how modern evidence-based medicine can coexist with older ways of thinking—without surrendering rigor or clarity.

Not a defense of the past. Not a rejection of the present. A map of how humans have always tried to make sense of suffering, and why that impulse hasn’t gone away.