How Our Ancestors Stayed Healthy Without Modern Medicine

Estimated reading time: 8 minutes

Since the start of the Industrial Age, people have referred to advances in technology as “the miracle of modern” whatever. People have talked that way about communications, travel, and medicine. We seem to have a hard time understanding how people survived without the various miracles of modern life. Yet they did. 

Perhaps the hardest for us to grasp is how people survived without the miracle of modern medicine. We look at some of the things that medicine is able to do today, but we find ourselves constantly amazed by the things they still can’t do. If we’re still dying today, how did people survive before all the medical breakthroughs we take advantage of?

Obviously they did survive, and quite possibly survived even better than we do today. Some diseases which are prevalent today don’t seem to have existed in the past. Or if they did exist, they were much less common.

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Living a Healthier Lifestyle

To start with, the average person lived a healthier lifestyle than we live today. Most people worked at jobs that required moving around, using their bodies to get work done. Although there were people who worked at desks, they didn’t have computers doing everything for them. Most jobs required physical work, rather than pushing buttons. 

The physical part of those ancestors’ lives not only caused them to have stronger bodies and more endurance, it also helped keep their blood pressure down and all but eliminated diabetes. When your body is burning the sugar in it, there isn’t a problem with having too much sugar in your blood. 

Of course, another benefit of regular movement is a lack of obesity. While obesity did exist, it was rather rare. That kept down incidents of weight-related disease, such as the aforementioned hypertension and diabetes. 

Exercise and Diabetes

Simple sugars are essential for our bodies, providing the energy for our muscles to move. But the bodies of diabetics have trouble regulating the amount of sugar in the bloodstream. This can be because the body isn’t producing enough insulin or because has developed an immunity to insulin. 

Diabetics check their blood sugar regularly to make sure it’s within a reasonable range. Depending on the type of diabetes they have and the severity, they will take medicines or inject themselves with insulin; all in an effort to bring their level of blood sugar down.

But there’s an easier, more natural way to bring the body’s blood sugar down. It’s called exercise. People who work in physically demanding jobs, such as the construction trades, are much less likely to develop diabetes, than those who work at a desk all day.

Their bodies are burning up the carbohydrates they consume, breaking them down into simple sugars to provide energy for their muscles. But those who live a more sedentary lifestyle, working at a desk or computer, have trouble using the carbohydrates and sugars, leading to diabetes. 

Even so, those who have type 2 diabetes can lower their blood sugar level with exercise. If they check their blood sugar in the morning and find it high, all they need to do is go for a walk. That will burn off some of the excess sugar in their bodies, temporarily solving their problem. 

Eating Healthier Food

The diet of the average person today is high in sugars, fats, and chemicals. We tend to live on junk food at work and play, and our meals at home aren’t as healthy as they should be. Rather than eating a balanced diet, we’d rather grab a burger or a pizza and call it good. Besides, those burgers and pizzas taste a whole lot better than a plate of veggies or grits. 

Even the “healthy foods” we eat today aren’t as healthy as they were a couple of generations ago. Overuse of farmland has depleted many of the nutrients naturally found in the soil. Farmers only replenish those nutrients needed to make the plants grow well and produce a good harvest, not those necessary for the production of vitamins. 

Add to that the invention of GMOs and none of us have any real idea if our food has any nutritional value at all. We eat and are filled… but are we getting the nutrition we need? We certainly aren’t getting the nutrition that our grandparents did. 

The food industry today is fixed on flavor and large portion size, to the exclusion of any other consideration. Unfortunately, what most people consider “flavor” means salt, grease, and sugar.

Buy a pastry in the United States and the only flavor you can taste is sugar. Buy one in Europe and you get fruit flavors, chocolate, or vanilla, with much less sugar. We feed ourselves some of the most dangerous things and still expect our bodies to be healthy. 

Then there are the chemicals which are included in our food, either for flavor, for coloring, as preservatives, or just to help make commercial food possible. Does anyone really understand the impact of those chemicals on our bodies? MSG, once used all over the place in all sorts of prepared foods, has been deemed dangerous and has been largely taken out of most foods. 

Get Rid of Junk Food and Fast Food

If you want to eat healthy and improve your health, you don’t need to spend a lot of money buying books by nutritionists. All you have to do is cut the junk food and fast food out of your diet.

While a small amount of these foods is okay, as a society, we eat much more of them than we should. Eliminating them and returning to “normal” food would drastically improve anyone’s health. 

They Still Had Medicine 

While we tend to think in terms of pharmaceutical medicines, doctors and especially mothers depended on natural remedies, some purchased and some harvested form nature. The history of medicine goes back millennia; and while it has changed considerably through the eons, our ancestors had a much better idea of the medicinal effect of plants and herbs than we do today. 

The pharmaceutical industry doesn’t really invent things as much as discover things in nature which have a beneficial effect. In other words, they take those herbal remedies and study how they work. Once they understand that, they try to synthesize a chemical that is close enough to what they found in nature, that it will do the same job, but isn’t the same molecule. 

You see, they can’t patent something found in nature. It has to be something that they’ve created. And patents are what the pharmaceutical industry makes its money on. As long as a medicine is still under patent, they can charge whatever they want for it or charge other pharmaceutical companies, around the world, a licensing fee to make their medicine.

Once the patent runs out, smaller pharmaceutical houses are able to copy those medicines, selling them for a lower price. So, the big houses have to make a profit on them while they can, to cover their research costs. 

Living Without Those Medicines

Should a major disaster happen, something along the lines of a TEOTWAWKI event, chances are pretty high that the pharmaceutical medicines we all depend on won’t be available. Either the factories themselves will be shut down or the supply chain necessary to get them to us won’t be working. In either case, we’re not going to have access to those medicines. 

This will be a really serious problem for the 131 million Americans who take prescription drugs for chronic conditions. While some of those conditions might be minor and the people will be able to live without their meds, others are grave, with the prescriptions that they take being necessary for either their survival or their ability to function as normal people.

Even things which may not seem all that serious to you and I could be grave enough to prevent those people from doing the things they need to be able to do in order to survive. 

Even stockpiling medications has its limits, as most pharmaceutical medicines require a prescription. I’ve recommended to people who need those medicines that they can buy them in Mexico, where a prescription usually isn’t required. But just how many years of meds are you going to buy? Eventually they’ll run out. What then? 

We’re going to have to go back to the ways our ancestors did things, using herbal medicines rather than the pharmaceutical ones. The only problem with that is that few of us have the necessary knowledge about which herbs to use, and the available websites really aren’t clear enough. 

There’s another problem to consider as well; many of the herbs used for medicinal purposes only grow in certain parts of the country. While there are others that can be used, those might not grow in your area either.

If you’re going to seriously consider using herbal medicine as part of your survival plan, then you should start planting the herbs you’ll need now, ensuring that you’ll have them when you need them. If you can, harvest them and dry them as well, building up a stock. 

It would also be useful to try using these herbal remedies yourself while you still have a stock of your regular medicines. You’ll need to figure out proper dosage for yourself as herbal medicine books and websites don’t provide much on that. Best to do that experimentation while you have something to fall back on. 

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