My ancestors would have wanted pasteurization, vaccines, antibiotics, disinfectants, birth control, psychiatric medications, pain management, anesthesia. My ancestors would have wanted to be able to keep their loved ones around longer, and not lose them too early/too soon to childbirths, injuries, bacterial infections, mental illnesses, and diseases that are curable and/or preventable in our modern day life.
Modern medicine saves lives.
In fact, we know they did want these things, because they invented them. They gave them to us out of generations of struggling to understand and make use of nature itself. “Ancestral knowledge” includes the unglamorous things like germ theory, the functioning of the immune system, and how to manufacture lifesaving vaccines. It’s not just magical or mystical or remote, it’s present in our lives at every moment. It’s the reward of human connection: the sum total of human discovery and the boundless ingenuity of human invention, surrounding us at all times with absolute miracles made banal by their familiarity.
If we reject modern medicine, then we reject all the labors and trials our ancestors went through for us; we reject our very nature.
Please, for your ancestors’ sake: vaccinate your kids, and take your goddamn medicine.
