The Body Is Not Like a Car

…when it heals, it heals. It doesn’t just fix that one thing that first drew your attention. That’s what doctors and Western medicine do: pinpoint a part and patch it, ignoring that the body is an intricate, interconnected whole.

When it heals, it not only addresses what drew your attention, but also mends your skin woes, liver troubles, digestion issues, whatever’s been acting up.

The car is a dominant metaphor of our era. Some things wear out, so you swap the parts. But even the bits that feel purely mechanical can recover. No car can do that.

With patience, therapy, and the right exercises, most body parts can spring back to action. My knees are proof. I couldn’t lower myself. They’d lock up going downhill. In my early thirties, a doctor recommended surgery. I declined and resigned myself to the fact that my serious hiking days were over.

And look at me now! I hike almost every week, and can lower myself from standing to kneeling and back up again smoothly, without using my hands... Not to brag, just a humblebrag. 😉

There’s an overriding "heal" code built into us. We’re not just bags of flesh that need pills to stay functional. As Dr. Goobie, an MIT‑trained neurosurgeon (turned hiker and YouTube sensation), put it in his viral "why I quit medicine" exposé:

When your body heals, it doesn't just heal worn-out joint in your neck or your back, it heals everything, it heals your digestive tract problem, it heals your hair issues...

and so on.

And that’s where Western medicine gets it wrong with its mechanistic view. It tries to fix the car part without considering the rest, never asking, as Dr. Gabor Maté points out, what’s happening in your life right now or what happened a long time ago in your childhood.

All right. It seems like a lot of fitness YouTubers eventually veer into spirituality. What can I say? At least I called it a cult early on. 😉