Biodynamic health
From Bordeaux, France to Sonoma, California, the vineyards of prominent winemakers are foregoing pesticides, tractors and modern farming techniques in favor of a method called biodynamic farming.
Biodynamic farming goes beyond “organic” standards. It is a technique of agriculture where plant, insects, and farm animals are purposely co-mingled to optimize the growth of the crops without the use of chemicals, pesticides, or non-natural fertilizers. While some proclaim a spiritual connection, the practical reality is the balancing of organic materials from multiple sources to optimize the quality of the crops.
Controlling pests by balancing competing large and small living things is exactly what humans did before “modernization”. There is now a significant push in medicine, orthopedics and other specialties to do this same balancing by harnessing the power of microbes, viruses, and more visible viable organisms to promote health and cure disease.
Here are a few of the most recent examples:
In orthopedics, sports and arthritis injuries are being treated with blood derivative injections containing growth factors and native repair cells to stimulate healing, rather than using cortisone and pharmaceutical anti-inflammatories that sometimes inhibit healing. Natural sugars such as glucosamine are being combined with gelling factors and injected into joints to promote cartilage repair. Even a few homeopathic compounds that were once thought to have no measurable amounts of therapeutic agents are now being shown to have some possible effect by the presence of low-level antigens that instigate a healing response.
In gastrointestinal disorders such as infectious C difficile colitis disease, a practice called fecal microbiota transplant (FMT) or fecal transplants, takes stool from healthy family members, concentrates it into a pill, and gives it to the patient with the bowel disorder. FMT has cured a once incurable disease. Many other GI diseases, in which the natural microbes of the body have been overwhelmed by an unfriendly variant, may also fall to probiotic therapies since they may be susceptible to a competing microbial infusion. The most prominent being colitis, food allergies, gluten insensitivity, and many so-called autoimmune disorders. Each of these may be interpreted as a misbalancing of viable organisms within us.
Viruses are now being harnessed to use their invasive powers to deliver foreign proteins to cancers that then are recognizable by the immune system and destroyed. The most recent was the use of the partially inactivated poliovirus injected into the previously incurable brain tumor, glioblastoma, to induce the tumor’s destruction. Even carbohydrates from pigs are being used to label cancers as foreign, again exposing them to destruction by normally circulating antibodies.
The biodynamic health era is upon us again. Working with nature and natural compounds permits the interactive dance of living things. It is a dance developed over millions of years of evolution, which may be applied to the many disorders that humans, animals, and plants experience. By avoiding selective pharmaceuticals manufactured in the lab that focus on one target and using all the components existing in nature, we benefit in extraordinary ways.
And in the case of biodynamic wine, we get to drink the results.
