I remember medical school classmates and other colleagues who went into medicine for reason of the suffering and death of others, perhaps a parent who was ill or died young, and who were true blue in their motivation to serve patients. I also saw people who were trapped by massive loans, fear of lawsuit, fear of poverty, or other reasons that allowed others to own them. My own life fell out of the salary game, leaving me free to do the right thing. This is a time for crusaders. If you went into medicine to make a difference, this is your chance to use your wits to do the right thing now.

I cured myself, and I want to leap the walls that separate me from helping others who yet languish in pain, unattended for reasons of industrial madness. Am I mad? No. But, as the line in the film Iron Jawed Angels has it, “courage in women is often mistaken for insanity.” You may be toxic now, but you went into medicine. You have courage, and it may well up at any time and give the rest of your life a meaning and purpose like no other.

You have an epochal opportunity to lead your profession to its redemption by standing on my shoulders. If you have character and ethics, or want to develop them for this purpose, this is the opportunity you should take.

You can also stand on the shoulders of people in many fields who are converging to create the emerging paradigm, each by transforming a métier that has been doing harm into one that is doing good by cooperating with evolution. You can see this in the work of author and tree-farmer turned forest-lover Peter Wohlleben. If you need to take it on faith, just know that foresters may be the most blockheaded, stuck-in-their-ways, know-it-all professionals on the planet: they have done more to create this era of rapid desertification by fire than any other profession on the planet, and that is saying something. At the same time, scientist lovers of nature who are also authors have been moving on from the bad old days, and the publishing industry has caught on to the fact that the reading public loves the body of life. See books by authors like Suzanne Simard, Merlin Sheldrake, Christopher Preston, Jennifer Ackerman, Ed Yong, Tom Mustill, Janine Benyus, Scott Freeman, Robin Wall Kimmerer, etc.

Where you are concerned, the opportunity is this: medicine needs to be rescued from managers, especially money-managers who have no idea what medicine is; at the same time, you and your species need to be rescued from accelerating problems like chronic ambient poisoning. Restoring shoestring Hippocratic medicine now would do more for life on earth than the entire biotech and tech industries, for Hippocrates understood much that we need to recover. Reading Airs, Waters, Places, Nutriment, and Epidemics I and II will, over time, reveal that medicine belongs to its living context—and depends on clean food, air, water, and “ether” (the “element” through which the geosphere that influenced evolution is now polluted by electro smog (i.e., artificial non-ionizing radiation).

By leading emerging change in medicine, you can participate in the ongoing work in other fields as well as change with your able patients, who must also step up to bring all that they have to the problem of co-creation of a living future. The passivity that has been imposed on doctors and patients in the name of science and technology must go.

I hope that still-vigorous doctors who are not too conditioned to apply reason to what is often an unconscious set of behaviors will step up to be wise elders to their younger colleagues. More is said in my book Medical Eldering.