Middle Medicine

“A good doctor first makes a diagnosis, and having found out the cause of the disease, tries to cure it first by food. If food fails, only then will drugs be prescribed.”
- Sun Si-Miao (581-682 C.E.)

It has always amazed me how such an important part of convalescence – the food that we eat – is so … well … slummed through … in modern hospitals.
The excuse of funding can be brought up; that hospitals are bare-bones emergency services and not some 5-star hotel…but the fact of the matter is that properly-fed patients heal much faster and recover their status as outpatients quicker.
Knowing that the mean cost of one day in the hospital is about $1,200, it seems that the addition of what amounts to a mid-range restaurant that will serve a meal for 15 to 20 dollars is trivial, if it could help take off days of hospital care.
The obvious question is, of course, how do we know that food would create this effect? Well we have two negative pieces of evidence that we can use to illuminate the positive:
1. It was an understanding of medical science about 40-50 years ago that food has “no effect on the creation or remission of disease”. We are in a greatly different position now, where any food one could care to mention is being researched for its health effects.
2. Many foods have been clearly incriminated in the creation of certain diseases: fatty food and obesity and heart disease; excess sugar and diabetes; fried food and certain cancers; the list continues. We can only assume that not all foods have such strong negative effects – that many foods have equally strong positive effects.

Can you imagine that, one day, the answer to the question, “why were you in the hospital?!??” would be, “Oh, I go there for the food!”