You Are Your Own Apothecary

October 30, 2023

You Are Your Own Apothecary

An apothecary is a pharmacist. Or you might say, an apothecary is your compounding pharmacy and liquor store combined. Within your body, you have one of the most active apothecaries ever made! You have access to all that you need.

Your body has intelligence beyond what you can imagine. Today, let’s look at one aspect of this intelligence that exceeds our powers of comprehension. You are capable of producing the health and healing that you need on a moment-by-moment basis without much effort at all.

Today, let’s learn about hormones. Scientists have identified and studied over fifty hormones in the human body so far.

What are hormones?

Hormones are chemical messengers that transmit messages through your blood to your organs, skin, muscles, and other tissues in your body. In response to these signals, your body knows what to do and when to do it. Hormones are essential for life and for your health.

Our endocrine system is composed of hormones and the tissues (primarily glands) that produce and release them. There are many different bodily processes controlled by hormones:

Metabolism.
Homeostasis (constant internal balance), such as blood pressure and blood sugar regulation, fluid (water) and electrolyte balance and body temperature.
Growth and development.
Sexual function.
Reproduction.
Sleep-wake cycle.
Mood.

You didn’t know you were so clever to do all these things naturally without conscious thought, did you?

In western, allopathic medicine, the placebo effect is something that has to be overcome in clinical trials. Why? In scientific trials, chemical medicines are studied to learn how adding certain medications will affect the outcome of a group or population. This little device called a placebo gets in the way of these experiments. About 30% of patients who receive the placebo “treatment” get better, but not due to the chemical treatment, only the power of the mind over medicine or a person’s belief system.

So what of the 70% of those who receive the placebo do not have a better outcome? Dr. Lissa Rankin shared an answer to this query at about minute 21 of this video. Watch this:

In essence, the healing that takes place from a placebo only seems to work when the subject is viewing life from a calm and relaxed perspective. Maybe we can say that the person who receives such benefits has a belief system not shared by the 70%.

If we are in a “fight or flight” response, the messages the brain sends out may not reach the intended target. The messages go awry or get garbled in transmission. It could be too much stress from the anxiety of being sick. If a patient is in a relaxed state of “rest and digest,” then the messages and the healing have a chance to take place. This is how Dr. Rankin hypothesizes.

Now, this autonomic response whether you are living a stressed-out life or if you are in a place of peace and calm is what is called the sympathetic or parasympathetic response. It’s an on/off switch that centers around the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is “the wanderer.”

The (vagus) nerve travels widely throughout the body affecting several organ systems and regions of the body, such as the tongue, pharynx, heart, and gastrointestinal system. Because of the wide distribution of the nerve throughout the body, there are several clinical correlations of the vagus nerve. Pubmed reference

Truly, this is the connection that we call the gut-brain axis. This is why we have “gut feelings” about the truth of an issue or the feeling of dread when we are approaching danger! It’s the basis of what some might call extra-sensory perception.

When you are facing illness or a diagnosis of a severe condition, the belief in that diagnosis is pertinent. In many cases, it’s important to get a second or third opinion.

The pharmacy in your body can supply you with almost anything you need as long as you are taking good care of yourself to the best of your ability. The raw materials are either already within us or available to us from our environment. It’s difficult to make vitamin D without sunshine. It’s impossible to utilize the well-known benefits of omega-3 unless ingested in some manner or form. Our bodies don’t make omega-3. If you don’t like fish, or can not trust the sourcing of safe-to-eat, mercury-free fish then supplements that are guaranteed purified are on option. See True Omega-3.

The psychology of the human body and the physiology of the human body are linked in ways we may not realize. You may have heard that your body is a temple. This simply means that we should treat our bodies with the highest respect.

One practice that can help us do this effectively is a meditative body scan. Here’s how.