Earth Medicine

What traditional medicine can teach us about nature and ourselves

We’re in the middle of a pretty epic heat wave here in San Francisco. It usually happens at this time of year, although we always seem to meet it with a certain alarm.

Extreme heat, after our typically dry summer, presages wildfire, and in the past decade, those have been intense. Heat is also plain dangerous in a city where nobody has an a/c.

I went to a cafe for the relief of the a/c, and obviously for coffee, and the barista surprised me by revealing that he has a spiritual belief around coffee: it is meant to put us into alignment with our inner selves.

He suggested that it was even more important to do this during the heat wave, because heat messes with our circadian rhythms, which makes everybody feel a little bit off.

The phrase “circadian rhythm” made it sound profoundly biological.

I find it interesting to encounter these places where we’re leaning into scientific concepts to support old, even ancient ideas about how our bodies relate to the environment.

I think if you ask the average physician today about how weather affects health, they might point to “flu season”—and that’s about it.

Historically in Europe and the Middle East, there was zero doubt: the environment had so much impact on your health that it was one of the standards of care by which a physician would treat you.

And not just during a heat wave.

It also governed how you treated yourself—what foods you ate, what amount of exercise or rest you got, and every other thing you might do with your day.

And it all sprang from the idea that we are all profoundly entangled with the natural world, not just biologically, but energetically as well.

Your Tiny Conductor

Your circadian rhythm is a mysterious beast. According to the Cleveland Clinic, it’s “like you have a tiny conductor inside your body, orchestrating a 24-hour symphony of biological processes.”

This includes sleep, hormones, temperature regulation, eating, and digestion. It can also influence your emotions in a pretty significant way.

So does the weather affect your circadian rhythm?

It makes sense, right? The circadian rhythm is aligned with the Earth. Biology acknowledges that our bodies have evolved on this planet, and that they respond to its climates in the most fundamental way: We all have a 24-hour “body” clock, just like the Earth.

It seems to follow that our moods might thus be affected by Earth’s “moods”—it’s fluctuations of light and dark, cold and hot, wet and dry.

From ancient times, physicians all over the world have asserted that this is true.

They also posited that that “tiny conductor” inside you was not merely a set of material processes but an energetic movement of some kind, and that this energy inside you—your spiritus—was intimately connected to the energy of the Earth.

This meant that every season could have a different impact on your health.

In Salerno, physicians classified everything as either hot, cold, wet, or dry, or some mixture thereof. These categories were both specific and broad. Something that was hot and dry, for example, didn’t have to be hot or dry in actual fact—it only had to affect the human body that way.

Something “hot” might stimulate circulation, for example. Something “dry” might halt the production of fluids.

Summer was traditionally hot and dry for the human body. Too much of this could cause anger and irrational behavior.

So here we are, at the end of a warm summer, being topped off with even more intense heat. It’s almost like it’s designed to push us straight over the edge. I have spent the past few days sitting sluggishly at my desk. When I go out—and only when I have to—I do start to get angry at the sheer discomfort of it all.

Moody Days

From at least the 12^th Century on, physicians in Salerno also believed that the day had different moods.

Here is an example of a medieval orarium, a breakdown of the “moods” from a Salerno day.

3 P.M. - 9 P.M. Warm and Dry

9 P.M. - 3 A.M. Cold and Dry

3 A.M. - 9 A.M. Cold and Humid

9 A.M. - 3 P.M. Warm and Humid

This doesn’t mean that from 9am to 3pm the weather was always warm and humid. It meant that this time of day tended to affect the human body by warming and/or moistening it.

Ayurveda has a similar concept of how doshas affect one throughout the day. In Traditional Chinese Medicine there is the Body Clock.

I like tuning into this concept, especially during unusual events like our current heat wave, by listening to what people have to say about how the weather is affecting them.

However, what really interests me is that all of these ideas about seasons and times of day—from every tradition—are tied to nature, and as we all know, nature is different everywhere. The day’s moods of Salerno may be different from those of San Francisco.

Your body in San Francisco may need something completely different in Salerno.

So while we might love to respect ideas from many traditions, the underlying principles of all of these traditions really teach us to pay attention to where we are right now.