Do You Need A Healthicine?

'Healthicines increase healthiness. Medicines decrease illness. It's easy to say, but it can be very difficult to understand clearly. Are "alternative medicines" healthicines or medicines? Are vitamins healthicines, or medicines? Are herbal medicines healthicines or medicines. Let's begin with some simple examples, where the lines are very clear.

An apple a day keeps the doctor away. An apple is a healthicine, not a medicine. You can eat as many as you want. Your children can eat them. Apples don't make you healthy 'quickly', health is created slowly, "an apple a day". Apples don't fight specific illnesses, they improve general healthiness. If you are sick, an apple won't make you well and if you eat too many, you will get diarrhea. But if you are sick, an apple a day will still help you be healthy. You don't need a prescription to buy an apple.'

Read more...

Healthy Medicine #88: Is Cannabis a Medicine?

Dr Zieve explores how cannabis can be used in health care with Dr Julie Holland, editor of The Pot Book, A Complete Guide to Cannabis.

Julie Holland is a psychiatrist specializing in psychopharmacology, with a private practice in New York City. She majored in the Biological Basis of Behavior at the University of Pennsylvania and received her M.D. in 1992 from Temple University School of Medicine. At Mount Sinai Medical Center, she completed a residency program in psychiatry, where she created a research project that treated schizophrenics with a new medication. In 1994 she received the Outstanding Resident Award from the National Institute of Mental Health. From 1996 until 2005 she worked weekends running Bellevue Hospital's psychiatric emergency room, and she's penned an autobiography of this time, Weekends at Bellevue: Nine Years on the Night Shift at the Psych ER.