Nathaniel Perrin

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Medicine is rooted in the notion of *vis medicatrix naturae*. Nature is the healer. We merely aid or inhibit its process.

An organism possesses an internal equilibrium which exists in relation to an external equilibrium of its environment. Given water of a suitable composition and temperature, a fish may survive with an internal equilibrium through metabolic, circulatory, and other physiological systems.

Disease is the disruption of such internal equilibrium, whether from internal or external causes.

Medicine is the corrective process which seeks to re-establish this homeostasis of the organism.

For the history of our species, humanity has existed with a relative homeostasis compatible with many different climates and biomes, often through the medicinal adjustments of clothing and shelter for more extreme weather conditions.

However this relative environmental stability has come under threat in recent centuries with the advent of industrial technologies and its ecological impacts.

Many attribute simple phenomena changes such as regional temperature fluctuations to this through the rhetoric of climate change. Perhaps a helpful phrase but unfortunately excessively reductionistic.

Consideration of ecological change should not be restricted to temperature or vague symbology of pollution. Prudence requires more targeted investigation of the causes and effects industrial civilization makes upon human ecology and consequently physiology.

One such pollutative phenomenon which is only beginning to gain widespread notice is the effect of plastics and its radical metabolic impacts on animal and human populations. There are others to be sure, but these are not to be documented here.

Humans now suffer internal disequilibrium as part of the fruits of industrialism and man's war on both God and nature. The external environment has been poisoned against us by our own machinations.

Unfortunately, the instruments of power do not lie with us to holistically and cohesively revert external ecologies to a more suitable equilibrium.

This means that medicine has acquired in our time an additional responsibility: to protect our internal equilibrium against the poisons invading us from industrial society.

We must counter-act the damages wrought upon our bodies by sedentary lifestyles, the screens, the pharmaceuticals, the various electrical and chemical alterations flooding through us, the stressors baked into modern life.

To return to pre-industrial cortisol baselines, we unfortunately do require the use of medication.

This I view as the first object of the science of nootropics. To correct and counteract the technological miasma pervading us and slowly corrupting and degenerating the human organism. Rather than a transhumanist project, it should fundamentally be a humanist one.

We cannot in total prevent industrial society from poisoning our bodies, but we can certainly mitigate it. That is where the fight begins. The fight for life, vitality.

Brief thoughts on self-medication