More Chiron: The War on Healing
The Illusion of Functional Medicine
Chiron's journey through Aries since February 2019 has highlighted our immaturity in managing our health and healing. This transit has coincided with the rise of Functional Medicine, a healthcare approach focused on identifying and addressing root causes of disease. However, this movement's agenda reveals a hidden conflict within the healing process, omitting a crucial step in the healing process and it’s influencing naive healers and seasoned practitioners alike.
Chiron, known as the wounded healer, is currently transiting Aries, the sign of war. This transit of the wounded healing going through Aries has amplified themes of identity, individuality, and the healing journey. Since 2019 we have seen an increase of telemedicine and wellness, and it even accompanied us through a pandemic. However, Chiron brings up wounds for healing, past pains and hurts that we have ignored or not dealt with.
Chiron has been key in exposing the illusion of "natural healing" that often bypasses the deeper need for spiritual empowerment—the true path to recovery. In a similar way, Functional Medicine is doing to wellness what the New Age movement has done to spirituality: undermining its own goals by fostering disconnection rather than true transformation. The New Age movement has proven to be a "circus" of superficial practices, entertainment, and commodification, popular because it gives the illusion of spiritual connection while keeping people trapped in an endless cycle of seeking. Instead of guiding individuals toward true spiritual empowerment, it offers feel-good distractions that can leave them disconnected from the depth of their own inner wisdom and spiritual power.
Similarly, Functional Medicine taps into our deeply rooted fear of illness, using that fear to anchor us in a perpetual state of striving for health, rather than truly embodying it.
Dysfunctional, as we call it, medicine, promises to address the "root causes" of illness, it has gained a devoted following among those disillusioned with conventional healthcare. But functional medicine is not truly the revolution it claims to be. It is another transparent layer of deception, subtly pulling people away from what is most needed for healing—true spirituality.
The way this is going, Dysfunctional Medicine is serving as a covert operation, much like the New Age movement, which diluted and commodified ancient spiritual practices. At its core, functional medicine appears to appeal to the ego, creating a culture of spiritual vanity and consumerism while keeping people tethered to materialist frameworks of health.
Functional medicine is marketed as a holistic approach, often borrowing from naturopathy, herbalism, and even elements of Eastern medicine. It claims to go beyond the symptoms to address the "root causes" of disease. On the surface, this seems revolutionary—bridging the gap between reductionist Western medicine and ancient wisdom.
But dig a little deeper, and cracks begin to show. Functional medicine remains fundamentally rooted in Western paradigms of pathology, focusing heavily on lab tests, supplements, and shaky protocols. It uses the language of holistic healing without fully aligning its spiritual or energetic aspects. The result? A cleverly disguised extension of the same materialist mindset that plagues conventional medicine.
This "holistic mask" creates a seductive appeal for those seeking alternatives to traditional healthcare. Yet it often redirects attention away from the deeper spiritual and energetic roots of illness—keeping people focused on the body and biochemical mechanisms, rather than the spirit’s role in healing.
One of functional medicine’s most insidious parallels to the New Age movement is its ability to appeal to the spiritual ego. The New Age movement commodified spiritual traditions, offering surface-level practices that fed a sense of exclusivity and superiority. Functional medicine does much the same for health, creating a culture of “biohacking” and optimization that plays directly into the ego’s desire for control, validation, and specialness.
How Functional Medicine Feeds Spiritual Vanity:
Personalized Protocols: The focus on customized solutions makes patients feel unique and special, reinforcing the ego’s narrative of being on an enlightened or elite path to healing.
Perfect Health as a Goal: By emphasizing "optimal health," functional medicine turns healing into a performance of perfection, distracting from the messy, humbling work of true transformation.
Validation Through Metrics: Lab results, biomarkers, and symptom-free living become the benchmarks of success, feeding the ego’s desire for external validation rather than fostering inner growth or self-reflection.
This dynamic mirrors the pitfalls of New Age spirituality, where enlightenment is often reduced to a checklist of feel-good practices, expensive retreats, and spiritual materialism. In both cases, the deeper work—be it spiritual or healing—is bypassed in favor of a surface-level pursuit of “progress.”
Functional medicine’s focus on biochemistry, gut health, and inflammation certainly has its merits. Yet by framing health primarily in material terms, it risks keeping people anchored in a materialist worldview. This subtle emphasis on physical mechanisms diverts attention from the non-material dimensions of healing, such as emotional, mental, or karmic factors.
True healing often requires addressing the spiritual roots of illness—acknowledging disease as a messenger, a teacher, or even a manifestation of soul-level misalignment, for which we have to take responsibility should true healing occur. Functional medicine’s material focus risks silencing this message, replacing it with a checklist of lab tests and supplements.
Illness as a Spiritual Wake-Up Call
In many spiritual practices, illness is seen as a call to deeper alignment with the journey. It pushes us to confront unresolved trauma, imbalances in our energy, or disconnection from the Divine. Functional medicine may help alleviate symptoms, but its biochemical lens often bypasses this profound opportunity for spiritual growth, leaving patients caught in a cycle of physical optimization without true transformation.
Like the New Age movement before it, functional medicine has become a lucrative industry. From expensive lab panels to high-priced supplements and personalized protocols, it monetizes the healing journey in ways that can create dependency rather than empowerment. Healing becomes a consumer experience, with patients encouraged to purchase external solutions rather than cultivating inner resources.
This commodification mirrors how New Age spirituality turned enlightenment into a marketable product, diluting sacred traditions and reducing them to objects of consumption. Functional medicine risks doing the same for holistic healing—borrowing from ancient wisdom while stripping it of its depth and context.
Perhaps one of the most troubling aspects of functional medicine is how it displaces authentic healers—those who work at the spiritual, energetic, and emotional levels. By positioning themselves as modern-day naturopaths or holistic healers, functional medicine practitioners risk marginalizing traditional wisdom keepers and energy workers, relegating their practices to the fringes.
This echoes how New Age gurus overshadowed traditional spiritual teachers, often appropriating their practices while stripping them of their cultural and ceremonial significance. The result is a dilution of true healing practices, leaving patients disconnected from the deeper wisdom they need.
The parallels between functional medicine and the New Age movement are striking. Both claim to offer alternatives to mainstream systems, yet both often fail to deliver on their promises of transformation. Both commodify ancient practices, appealing to the ego while sidelining deeper truths. And both risk keeping people tethered to external solutions, whether in the form of supplements or crystals, rather than guiding them inward.
Reclaiming True Healing
If functional medicine is indeed a covert operation—whether intentional or unintentional—the question becomes: How do we reclaim the path to true healing?
Expose the Illusion: Educate people about the limitations of functional medicine and its potential to distract from spiritual healing.
Recenter Spirituality: Emphasize the importance of addressing the spirit’s role in healing, moving beyond the physical body to explore emotional, mental, and karmic dimensions.
Uplift Authentic Healers: Support and protect traditional, energetic, and spiritual healers who offer genuine, transformative approaches.
Challenge the Ego: Encourage humility and self-reflection in the healing journey, moving away from the pursuit of perfection or validation.
A Call for Deeper Healing
Ultimately, healing is not about perfect lab results or symptom-free living. It is about alignment—with oneself, with the Divine, and with the deeper truths of existence. Functional medicine, for all its promises, may offer tools for physical well-being, but it cannot replace the spiritual and energetic work that true healing demands.
Just as the New Age movement diluted the essence of spiritual practice, functional medicine risks doing the same for holistic healing. The challenge for all of us is to see through these distractions, resist the pull of ego-driven solutions, and return to the deep, humbling work of reconnecting with our souls. True healing is not found in a lab test or a protocol—it is found within.
This is why, Arik Xander, the healer is going to Med School to stop this shit.
HIGHLIGHTS
Performance vs. Transformation
The focus on lab results and physical health in functional medicine resonates with Aries' need to appear strong and capable. Chiron challenges this by asking: Is the performance of health masking unhealed spiritual and emotional wounds? This echoes the New Age tendency to commercialize spiritual practices, reducing profound traditions to surface-level engagements.
Root Causes vs. Root Wounds
Functional medicine prides itself on addressing “root causes,” yet often stops at the biochemical. Chiron in Aries pushes us to dig deeper—into emotional traumas, karmic patterns, and spiritual disconnections that manifest in physical symptoms. By focusing solely on the material, functional medicine risks bypassing the non-material lessons illness offers.
Spiritual Vanity as an Aries Trap
Just as Aries can fall into the trap of ego-driven individuality, functional medicine appeals to the ego’s desire to feel special or enlightened. Biohacking, personalized protocols, and the pursuit of perfect health can become markers of status, distracting from the humility and surrender required for true healing.
