In ongo­ing research I’m doing, I stum­bled across a few inter­est­ing facts. For those of you who may not be aware, I’m a huge nat­ural health pro­po­nent. I think that mod­ern med­i­cine has its place and that place is in trauma. Trauma sur­geons can patch peo­ple back together fol­low­ing a car acci­dent or insur­gent attack bet­ter than ever, and with almost mirac­u­lous results.

It has, how­ever, no place in pre­ven­tion or cure of any­thing. Don’t believe me? Read the mis­sion state­ment of the AMA. Bet­ter yet, ask your­self a series of ques­tions. First, in what kind of soci­ety do we live? Every­thing we do is dri­ven by profit motive. Next, are healthy peo­ple a source of income for the med­ical estab­lish­ment? Finally, what is the name of the last dis­ease cured by mod­ern med­i­cine? I’ll bet you don’t have an answer for that. You wouldn’t be alone.

The final ques­tion has an inter­est­ing answer. Would you believe that the answer goes back to malaria? More inter­est­ing than that is the method used to invent Qui­nine. This arti­cle is not a his­tory les­son. If you want to know some­thing about qui­nine or malaria, get off your lazy butt and look it up (by the way, when I say some­thing like that, it is meant to anger those who are guilty of lazi­ness. I mean that you who don’t bother to edu­cate your­selves are the lazi­est sort. The Inter­net gives you lit­tle excuse).

This arti­cle is about sym­bols. They all have mean­ing, and some, though veiled by a thin layer of igno­rance, are eas­ily uncov­ered. Most of you will look at the num­ber of para­graphs in this whole arti­cle and decide that it is too much work to fin­ish. Sadly, some of you haven’t made it this far. It is for this rea­son that I’m los­ing faith in Amer­i­can cul­ture and the Amer­i­can people.

All sym­bols orig­i­nate with an idea. They are a sys­tem of invok­ing a thought in the viewer of the sym­bol. The glyphs that make up the words you are read­ing are sym­bols which loosely equate to sounds made in speech. The giant golden M that is so famil­iar at nearly every busy inter­sec­tion in the United States is also a sym­bol, eas­ily rec­og­nized and famil­iar. Even the sym­bol that shows which restroom should be used by which per­son is under­stood to mean what it represents.

Most peo­ple never stop to con­sider the ori­gins of sym­bols, but due to famil­iar­ity come to under­stand what they mean.

The sym­bol used to rep­re­sent med­i­cine is no excep­tion. The vast major­ity of us have seen the winged staff encir­cled by two snakes. While many of us don’t know what it is called, we still asso­ciate it with hos­pi­tals and medicine.

Never trust a snake. Cer­tailny never two…

The name of this sym­bol is the caduceus (ca-DOO-see-us). The caduceus, like most of the clas­si­cal sym­bols with which we are famil­iar, comes from Greek and Roman mythol­ogy. It is sup­posed to be the staff of the mirac­u­lous healer and demigod, Aes­cu­lapius also spelled Escu­lapius (Es-qu-LA-pi-us). The prob­lem with this assump­tion is that there is another, more famil­iar, god from this pan­theon who also car­ried a staff encir­cled by serpents.

While not a mythol­ogy les­son, a dose of mythol­ogy will be nec­es­sary to under­stand the ulti­mate point of this article.

Aes­cu­lapius was a fairly impor­tant fig­ure in the Greek pan­theon. He was the son of Apollo and Coro­nis (a nymph), and was taught heal­ing by Chi­ron, the cen­taur, when he was young. He got so good at heal­ing, he was able to restore life to the dead. His sym­bol was and remains a sin­gle snake, entwined around a euca­lyp­tus branch. Seems fit­ting that his sym­bol should become that of the med­ical pro­fes­sion, doesn’t it? Read on…

Mer­cury, as many are aware, is the mes­sen­ger god of the Olympians. Like most Olympic gods, how­ever, he car­ried sev­eral attrib­utes. In addi­tion to deliv­er­ing mes­sages, he was also asso­ci­ated with trick­ery, greed, wealth and on occa­sion, death. He was also known as the pro­tec­tor of thieves. His staff became one of his sym­bols. Mer­cury, fleet of foot, and swift, is far more com­monly known by the winged foot than the winged staff encir­cled by two vipers.

The vipers are a sym­bol of trick­ery, deceit, stealth and death. This in con­trast to com­mon grass (or non-venomous) snakes, which were the sym­bol of every­thing from throw­ing off the past to live again (as a snake shed­ding its skin), to wis­dom, health and vitality.

This begs the ques­tion, why would the mod­ern med­ical com­mu­nity use the sym­bol that means deceit, trick­ery, greed and death instead of the one that means heal­ing and wisdom?

Even the names of the gods of the Greeks and Romans have mean­ing today. The name of Mer­cury is where we get the words “mer­ce­nary,” “mer­can­tile” and “mercurial.”

Mer­ce­nary, while most often asso­ci­ated with sol­diers for hire, sim­ply means, for sale to the high­est bid­der, and implies an evil nature. Mer­can­tile deals with trade for profit. While not nec­es­sar­ily evil, the con­no­ta­tion is profit over ser­vice. Mer­cu­r­ial, while not pop­u­larly used these days, means unsta­ble or fickle.

It would be dif­fi­cult to believe that the con­trol­ling inter­ests in “Merck” are not aware of the ori­gins of the name they chose. Throw­ing a “k” on the end of a word does lit­tle to change its meaning.

Knowl­edge of the sym­bols, while not answer­ing any ques­tions about the med­ical estab­lish­ment, cer­tainly begs a few. Are they aware of their faux pas? Does the caduceus expose the industry’s true inten­tions, or are they sim­ply liv­ing up to the per­son­al­ity rep­re­sented by the sym­bol they’ve adopted?

One thing is cer­tain. Remov­ing the shroud of mys­tery from a sym­bol stands to make one won­der what else he may not under­stand about famil­iar sym­bols and their ori­gins. Fail­ure to under­stand sym­bols could lead to an embar­rass­ing sit­u­a­tion when using a restroom. It could also lead to a life threat­en­ing sit­u­a­tion when seek­ing health care.

Sym­bol­ism is a power method of pop­u­lar mind con­trol. The fact that most peo­ple of my gen­er­a­tion refuse to read, and the vast major­ity of the fol­low­ing gen­er­a­tion have a vague notion of what books are, scares the hell out of me. We don’t study the his­tory of the world, so we can’t see it repeat­ing itself right before our very eyes.

At the very begin­ning of the movie Apoc­olypto, there are a few quotes which ring true. The most impor­tant of these is the first one. William Durant was quoted as hav­ing said, “A great civ­i­liza­tion is not con­quered from with­out until it has destroyed itself from within.” This is in ref­er­ence to the civ­i­liza­tion in the film, Mayans, but rings true to any stu­dent of rise and fall of the great civ­i­liza­tions of history.

This one is no excep­tion (and by that I mean, the one in which we live). We’re track­ing Rome in her fall almost to the day. The voice of the minor­ity is the one that is try­ing in vain to make the pseudo-educated masses see the light of rea­son, and to no avail.