Medicine is Disease
- Madhukar Dama
- 4 hours ago
- 10 min read
1. Understanding Disease
Disease is not always an enemy—it is the body’s w
ay of talking to us.
A fever is not just “heat”; it is the immune system raising temperature to kill germs.
A cough is not only irritation; it is the lungs clearing waste.
Inflammation is not punishment; it is the body sending help to repair tissues.
When we rush to suppress these signals, we silence the very language of healing.
2. The Body’s Perfect System
The human body is built with a flawless defense.
White blood cells hunt and destroy invaders.
Antibodies memorize threats for the future.
The liver detoxifies poisons.
The gut trains immunity daily with the food we eat.
Even the skin and sweat act as protective shields.
This system has evolved for millions of years—it knows what to do if we allow it to work.
3. Immunity: The Body’s Shield
Every small challenge builds protection.
A child's bodywho recovers from a fever learns how to fight better next time.
A scrape on the knee trains the body to close wounds and prevent infection.
Seasonal colds prepare the immune system for harsher battles ahead.
Each illness is a lesson, each recovery a step toward strength.
4. Childhood: Lessons Over Pills
When a child has a fever, the body is often practicing defense.
But parents, out of fear, give medicines to cut the fever immediately.
Relief comes, yes, but the immune system is robbed of its chance to learn.
A stomach upset after eating roadside food might train digestion, but instead, syrups shut it down.
A cough could cleanse the lungs, but syrup silences it.
Thus, childhood—which should be the training ground of immunity—becomes the starting point of dependence on medicine.
5. Adolescence: Subtle Suppression
At this stage, the body is adjusting to growth and hormones.
Acne appears, but instead of letting the body find balance, strong creams and tablets are applied.
Minor headaches from study stress are treated with painkillers instead of rest.
Natural tiredness is covered up with tonics or supplements.
The body is capable of self-correction, but constant intervention teaches it weakness.
The lesson becomes: “The body is not enough—you need medicine.”
6. Adulthood: Chronic Intervention
This is when modern life shows its impact.
Long hours at work, fast food, and constant stress weaken the system.
Blood pressure rises.
Sugar levels climb.
Sleep disappears.
Instead of changing lifestyle, people reach for pills.
For example:
A man with high BP takes tablets daily but never reduces stress.
A woman with acidity swallows antacids but continues junk food.
A professional with sleepless nights depends on sleeping pills instead of balancing routine.
Here, medicine does not heal—it maintains a cycle of dependence, while the root causes remain untouched.
7. Old Age: Dependence Intensifies
By old age, decades of suppression catch up.
Every organ is tired, not only from age but also from years of drugs.
Medicines multiply: tablets for heart, bones, digestion, memory, mood.
An old person’s day often begins and ends with pills.
Instead of listening to the body gently, adjusting food, rest, and routine, intervention becomes the only language.
The body’s natural wisdom is drowned out completely.
8. Mental Health: Invisible Battles
The mind too has immunity.
It knows how to adjust to sadness, pressure, and failure.
Reflection, rest, silence, conversation, or nature can heal mental wounds.
But now, every mood swing is labeled.
Stress becomes “anxiety disorder.”
Sadness becomes “depression.”
Sleeplessness becomes “insomnia.”
Pills are given quickly.
Instead of growing stronger, the mind becomes dependent.
The ability to heal itself—its natural resilience—is slowly lost.
9. Observation Over Obedience
Medicine saves lives in emergencies.
A broken bone, a severe infection, a dangerous injury—these need medicine and technology.
But in everyday life, blind obedience to prescriptions has made us weaker.
The pill is not the enemy; forgetting our inbuilt system is the real danger.
10. True Healing: Awakening the Body
True healing is simple.
It begins by listening to the body.
A mild fever? Rest, fluids, patience.
A stomach upset? Fasting and simple food.
A headache? Sleep, fresh air, less stress.
Low energy? Sunlight, good diet, movement.
Medicine should support only when necessary, not silence every signal.
The body must be trusted to heal, not abandoned at the first sign of trouble.
Conclusion: Medicine is the Disease
Medicine becomes the disease when it silences the body’s wisdom, when it prevents immunity from learning, and when it teaches dependence at every stage of life.
Childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age—all show how the cure often overshadows the cause.
The body itself is the greatest doctor.
Immunity is the greatest medicine.
Awareness is the greatest healing.
Medicines are tools, not masters.
The moment we forget this, the cure itself becomes the disease.
The Body is the Real Doctor
A Morning Dialogue with Madhukar
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Characters
Madhukar – living off-grid near Yelmadagi. Calm, sharp, with a disarming presence. Speaks slowly, in simple but layered language.
Raghav – father, mid-40s, IT employee from Hyderabad. Rational, fearful, tied to social norms.
Anitha – mother, early 40s, homemaker. Loving, anxious, constantly worried about health and social judgment.
Meera – their teenage daughter, 14. Sensitive, observant, caught between parental fear and her own curiosity.
Setting – Madhukar’s forest home near Yelmadagi. Early morning. Mist in the fields, birds calling, a faint smell of woodsmoke and wet earth. A stone bench outside the veranda. The family has arrived the previous night and stayed over. Now they sit together for a morning conversation, one sitting, unbroken.
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Scene One: The Morning Silence
The sun is just rising. Mist still clings to the tamarind trees. Buffalo bells echo from far fields. Meera chases a chicken playfully, then returns to sit beside her mother. Raghav and Anitha look restless, holding a pouch of medicines they carried from Hyderabad. Madhukar sits on the veranda floor, sipping hot black tea from a steel tumbler. He looks at them without hurry.
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Raghav (clearing throat): Madhukar… thank you for letting us stay here. We came because… well, we are worried about our daughter. Meera often gets fevers, coughs, stomach problems. Doctors say her immunity is low. We give antibiotics, multivitamins, tonics. But still… she falls sick again. We are confused.
Anitha (nervously, clutching Meera’s hand): Yes… every time she gets fever, I panic. If I don’t give medicine quickly, people say I’m careless. Relatives scold me. Schools demand certificates. What else can I do?
Madhukar (calmly): Tell me, Anitha—when Meera gets fever, do you see it as an enemy or as a message?
Anitha (surprised): Fever… a message? But isn’t fever dangerous?
Madhukar (soft smile): Fever is the body’s weapon. Not the enemy. When invaders come, the body raises heat to burn them. Suppressing fever immediately is like cutting the wires of an alarm while the fire still burns. You silence the signal, but the threat remains.
Meera (curious): So… my fever is not bad?
Madhukar (turning to her gently): No child. It is your body practicing defense. Each time you recover naturally, your immunity becomes stronger. But if each time you take tablets, the body forgets its own power.
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Scene Two: Fear and Conformity
Raghav (frowning): But what if the fever goes too high? What if something bad happens? Doctors say we should not take chances.
Madhukar (looking at the horizon, speaking slowly): Fear itself is the real disease. You don’t trust the body. You don’t observe its rhythm. You imagine the worst, so you rush to interfere. How many times has fever in your family truly been life-threatening? And how many times did the body heal on its own—if you only gave rest, fluids, and patience?
Anitha (hesitant, voice low): But society says… good parents act fast, give medicines. If we don’t, people call us irresponsible.
Madhukar (sharp now): That is the sickness of conformity. You don’t listen to the body—you listen to neighbors, relatives, school rules, doctors who write in English you don’t even read fully. You live by fear of judgment, not by awareness.
Meera (whispering): Amma… remember Ajji scolded you when I had stomach upset? She just gave me buttermilk and rice. No medicine. I got better.
Anitha (half-smiling, half-guilty): Yes… but I thought she was being careless.
Madhukar (chuckling): Your Ajji knows more than a pharmacy. Her wisdom is older than your prescription slips.
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Scene Three: Across Life Stages
Madhukar (settling deeper, voice steady): Let me show you how medicine becomes the disease, stage by stage in life.
Childhood – Every small fever or cold is a lesson. If you suppress it, the immune system never learns. The child grows weaker.
Adolescence – The body changes naturally. Acne, small pains, mood swings are part of growth. But you rush to fix them with creams, tablets, tonics. You silence nature’s balancing act.
Adulthood – Stress, junk food, pollution cause problems. Instead of changing life, people swallow pills for blood pressure, cholesterol, sleep. The root cause remains, but medicine gives false security.
Old Age – By now, the body is tired not only from age, but from decades of over-medication. Pills multiply. People live not by their breath, but by their prescriptions. Life becomes survival, not living.
Madhukar (pausing): Do you see the pattern? At every stage, medicine silences the body instead of teaching us to listen. Slowly, medicine itself becomes the disease.
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Scene Four: The Invisible Mind
Anitha: But what about stress, sadness, sleeplessness? Everyone in the city takes medicines for that now.
Madhukar: The mind also has immunity. It knows how to digest grief, adapt to failure, rest after pressure. But society has no patience. Sadness is called depression, restlessness is called anxiety, sleeplessness is called disorder. Tablets are given. The mind forgets its own resilience. Dependence replaces strength.
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Scene Five: Breaking the Taboo
Raghav (quiet, almost ashamed): Madhukar… you are saying we have made medicine into God, and forgotten that the body itself is God?
Madhukar (softly, sipping the last of his tea): Exactly. The body is the real doctor. Medicine is only a tool. When you mistake the tool for the master, you become a slave. And a slave can never be healthy.
Anitha (eyes moist): But what if people blame us? What if schools demand certificates? What if neighbors call us careless?
Madhukar (gentle, but firm): Let them. Health is not democracy. Your daughter’s immunity is not decided by votes. Silence the noise outside. Listen to the voice inside. That is real care.
Meera (smiling now): Amma, Appa… can we try? I don’t like those bitter tablets anyway.
They laugh together. The weight lifts. The mist has cleared; sunlight spreads across the fields. The family looks calmer, lighter, as though they have been given permission to trust what they always suspected but never dared to believe.
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Closing
The dialogue ends not with slogans, but with silence. The birds are louder now, the earth warmer. The family sits quietly, absorbing the shift. In this early morning at Yelmadagi, a simple truth has been revealed: the body is the real doctor. Medicine is only the last step, never the first. The cure can easily become the disease if one forgets this.
Medicine is the Disease
disease is not always the villain,
sometimes it is just a knock on the door,
a whisper from the body:
"hey… slow down, rest,
listen to me,
I am burning the garbage inside you."
fever is not the enemy,
it is the firewood stove in your village kitchen,
burning germs into smoke.
cough is not weakness,
it is the throat’s way of sweeping dust,
like your grandmother’s broom in the courtyard.
the body is a temple
with its own priests:
white blood cells chanting in silence,
the liver washing sins like a tank in Tirupati,
the gut learning lessons every time you eat
rasam, curd rice, or pickle.
this system is old,
older than any pharmacy,
older than any clinic in Hyderabad,
older than your fear.
but we forgot.
we see fever and panic,
run for paracetamol,
as if the body cannot manage
what it has managed for a million years.
we see a child sneeze,
and stuff syrup down her throat,
robbing her immunity of its childhood.
we see pimples on a teenager’s cheek,
and rush for creams and antibiotics,
instead of letting hormones
find their rhythm like a mridangam.
in adulthood we worship tablets:
one for sugar,
one for pressure,
one for acidity,
one for sleep.
we hide bad food with antacids,
we hide bad lifestyle with statins,
we hide sleeplessness with pills,
we hide fear with vitamins.
the root stays,
the leaves are chopped.
medicine becomes gardener and butcher,
but never healer.
in old age,
we swallow a rainbow of tablets,
morning and night.
bitter ones, sweet-coated ones,
ones with names longer than train stations.
grandmother in Kurnool
keeps a steel dabba full of pills
next to her pickle jar.
her real meals are not idli, not upma,
but the line of tablets before and after.
is this living?
or is this slavery with water to swallow?
and the mind?
don’t forget the mind.
in the city, sadness is not sadness,
it is “clinical depression.”
restlessness is not restlessness,
it is “anxiety disorder.”
sleeplessness is not a long night,
it is “insomnia.”
each mood gets a label,
each label gets a pill.
the mind loses its muscle
to wrestle with life.
medicine takes away
the poetry of human struggle,
the body forgets how to heal itself.
we obey—
not because we believe,
but because society tells us.
neighbors ask,
“what did the doctor say?”
not,
“what did your body teach you?”
schools demand certificates,
offices demand reports,
relatives demand proof
that you are a “responsible parent.”
so you feed your children tablets
before you feed them rasam rice.
that is not love,
that is fear.
fear wrapped in aluminum foil.
medicine is not evil.
in emergencies,
it is God.
a broken bone,
a poisonous bite,
a raging infection—
yes, bring the doctor,
bring the needle,
bring the knife if needed.
but for every sneeze,
every cough,
every small ache?
you do not need a temple bell
to chase away a housefly.
listen—
your grandmother knew it.
ginger tea for cold,
castor oil bath for heat,
buttermilk for stomach upset,
turmeric paste for wounds,
neem smoke for mosquitoes,
sambhar with drumstick leaves
for weak bones.
none of it came in strips,
none of it came with side effects,
none of it made you dependent.
but we traded that wisdom
for air-conditioned clinics,
and packets of colored tablets,
with names we cannot pronounce.
we became slaves,
and called it progress.
medicine is the disease
when it silences the body’s voice.
medicine is the disease
when it creates dependence.
medicine is the disease
when fear replaces observation.
medicine is the disease
when society calls obedience
the same as health.
health is not in the tablet box,
health is in sunlight on your skin,
in walking barefoot on red soil,
in eating ragi mudde with curd,
in sleeping early without a screen,
in laughing with family after meals,
in letting the body burn, sweat, cough, cry,
and rise again—
like it has done for ages.
the body is the real doctor.
medicine is only a tool.
forget this,
and the cure
will quietly become
the disease.
