Nature wants you dead

Once upon a time in Utah, a deer survived what normally would have been a lethal arrow strike.

(photo credit: Robert Stegall. Trophy credit: his dad)

It miraculously evaded death via hemorrhage, pneumothorax, and infection -even growing a thick coating of bone over a broad-head and part of its shaft, which bridges five of its ribs. Somewhere, there was a very disappointed hunter, thanks to the exceptional luck and constitution of this four-legged catcher of pointed projectiles.

We know for certain that this animal survived for quite a while after its gruesome injury, because ossification of foreign bodies is a slow process. Encasing something in bone involves numerous variables, which makes it impossible to say exactly how long it took -but it could be anywhere from a few years to a decade.

So the deer beat the odds and won, right? It led a vigorously inspiring life by bravely overcoming adversity, outdoing the best efforts of man and all that.

But did it really? Let’s imagine that you were the one who was shot, and see how awesome the power of natural healing is when you serve as the fulcrum for leveraging misery -and I promise this is not a sales pitch for PETA.

Dude, where’s my blood?

The initial injury would lead to substantial blood loss, mostly from the artery and vein that pass under the rib of the entry site. Hemorrhage leads to lowered exercise tolerance (problematic because it’s rather important to sprint away when you are being shot at), and a generalized feeling of impending doom from acute anemia -which is entirely separate from the searing sensation of having an arrow shaft in your chest. Inarguably, both sensations are 100% natural (yet shitty) experiences, as they both have natural explanations.

I regret that I have but one lung to give for my freedom!

There is no chance that a penetrating injury like that didn’t lacerate the lung, leading to its collapse. While this can be a fatal condition when untreated (watch Ridley Scott’s Gladiator for a portrayal of what a slow miserable death that can be), some pneumothoraxes can heal on their own after about 8 weeks. In the intervening two months, you will feel like you can’t breathe because you only have one working lung, will experience frequent chest pain, occasional fainting, and even a cardiac arrhythmia here and there. These are suboptimal conditions for streaming Netflix and ordering DoorDash, which means it’s even worse when foraging in a forest while avoiding predators.

Does this look infected?

Yes it does. Infection is the gift that keeps on giving when it comes to foreign bodies. Getting shot with an arrow pushes all the healthy bacteria on your skin into the soft, wet parts of your body where they are free to settle down and start a big thriving family that is anything but healthy for you. The initial infection will set up after a few days and will be hard to clear because your immune system only works on the parts of you that have a functioning circulatory system -and that does not include foreign bodies.

The systemic effects of infection are highly unpleasant if you recall any prior experience with an abscess, a kidney stone, or a non-healing wound. This would persist for days or weeks, as our boy was busy sealing that arrow off behind a defiant, never-say-die wall of bone. But because the arrow never becomes one with that which it impales, it remains a source of periodic recurrent infections. Anytime the protruding portion of the arrow brushed against something, whenever the deer took a swim, or if it ate something that gave it the runs… that and many other routine exposures could set off another round of painful, pussed-out infection in its chest. Pretty awesome, huh?

Death is the single most surprising inevitability in all of nature

Eventually this absolute Terminator of a deer died. Not of the medical calamities I just discussed that would kill most of the deer shot in a similar way -but via another hunter (Mr. Stegall), who had much better aim than the first. PETA would be quick to point out that the deer died an unnatural death -but that is wildly incorrect. Death by predation is supremely natural. This only sounds odd because we have grown accustomed to constantly hearing that “natural is better,” even though being torn apart by wolves is the most natural thing that wolves do in the all-natural wild. Everything that is alive dies, and it is often very naturally undignified and miserable.

One creature killing another is a means of mortality that is as old as life itself, and is as commonplace as the last chicken nugget your kid devoured, so I’m not casting any shade on the hunter. If it wasn’t for him, we never would have come across this miracle of natural healing when he discovered it while dressing his kill.

My granola is 100% natural (except for all of the selective crop breeding and grain processing required to make it)

All medicine and surgery is unnatural. The medical attention the deer received was… none at all. Its healing journey was far more natural than your kombucha, essential oils, or band-aids -all of which take a lot of unnatural work to make.

Does this mean that the deer had a better experience overall, owing to its 100% natural lifestyle? Was a life of constant, unyielding suffering with each breath and every brush against any object a life worth living? Is unfettered exposure to nature really a better path to health than unnatural, rational intervention based on evidence? Is the animal now more resistant to injuries given its brisk exposure and robust immune response?

The answer to all of those questions is No.

Humans seek medical attention for trauma far less severe than this. For every stoic farmer who walks off a ruptured bicep or an auger-amputated toe, there are thousands of people who seek emergency care for bad breath and the common cold. Living with an arrow imbedded in and protruding from one’s chest is simply not within the realm of modern human experience. Even early humans would have tried to pull it out, rinse it off, and hope for the best. No gym rat can honestly argue that these pains are needed for gains. What is true of calisthenics is not true of penetrating thoracic wounds.

While the seemingly obvious point that nature is usually worse than manmade comforts and remedies -stop and consider the ubiquitous messaging from health influencers, charlatans, and politicians on matters of health:

• You don’t need insulin, you need CBD gummies.

  • Not true, and neither gummies nor processed CBD oil are natural, nor is the celebrity endorsement for this claim real. It’s uncommon to reverse insulin-dependent type II diabetes, and it is impossible to avoid insulin with type I diabetes with supplements or lifestyle changes.

• You don’t need antidepressants, you need to hike in the forest (where you hopefully won’t catch an arrow in your chest, because that would really suck and make your depression worse).

  • Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE a good wilderness hike but there is an entire forest in Japan that people specifically go to commit suicide. Not a strong endorsement. While it can be a helpful adjunct to improving your mood, hiking has no evidence-based claims to cure clinical depression.

• You don’t need vaccines, you and your children can safely endure natural polio infection.

  • One of the most infuriating claims here, because aside from being false, it is offered by a group that pretends at being endorsed by physicians. Its not. It’s run by mostly non-physicians, and spends the majority of its existence on LinkedIn getting roasted by credible physicians who don’t like a handful of our most reality-separated fellows speaking drivel on our behalf.

• You don’t need chemotherapy, you need an injection of bleach.

  • Bleach kills cancer cells, but it also kills all cells. If that is valid treatment, then drowning or being flung into a hydraulic press also kills cancer. Heck, that arrow could have killed cancer if the aim was better. The truth is, you don’t need bleach or any other snake-oil: you are just being taken advantage of by people who understand that desperation really sells product. Chemo sucks, but it has more evidence than I can post here to prove that it’s worth the suck if you want to live longer.

• You don’t need treatment for a stroke or a heart attack, you need cayenne pepper.

  • I am not going to bother sourcing this one to evidence -because it’s just too stupid. Suffice it to say, you will suffer and possibly die if you ignore the signs of a stroke or a heart attack, and taking cayenne pepper is akin to ignoring those signs -as it serves only to delay effective treatment when time is of the essence.

There are many more examples, but they are all equally wrong, inappropriately confident in their wrongness, and share a fallacy in common:

The Appeal to Nature Fallacy

Simply put, this fallacy states that natural is healthy, and manmade things are not.

In truth, there is little to no relationship between the two:

• Eating the fruit of an apple tree is natural and healthy.

• Eating the fruit of a manchineel tree is natural and deadly.

• Eating tofu is unnatural and healthy.

• Eating the plastic your tofu came in is unnatural and unhealthy.

There are even examples that simultaneously fit into categories of healthy and unhealthy, chief among them -sunlight.

Sunlight is essential for life on earth, and yet it eradicates bacteria and poisons animals under intense exposure. That which you need for a healthy mood and endogenous production of vitamin D -is also a notorious carcinogen. The nature fallacy is a deadly oversimplification of reality.

Gravity, frostbite, blindness, bear maulings, and dying of appendicitis or childbirth are all 100% natural. Nature is indifferent to the suffering it inflicts; consumption and chaotic damage are the rule of life. This was knowledge that our ancestors had a keen, painful understanding of as they buried their offspring and companions. It drove them to learn and innovate to improve their own lives and those of their descendants.

But our predecessors somehow accomplished the unthinkable: they wove a privileged cocoon of health and comfort around humanity that was so thick and resilient that many of their descendants began to falsely presume that times were better when lifespans were shorter, and waists were smaller from famine and disease, instead of a juice cleans or a round of Ozempic. Collective, romanticized ignorance is poised to be the undoing of civilization.

Arguments in favor of nature are objectively idiotic, and yet they gain traction in popular culture almost every year.

Shoes. Eyeglasses. Surgery. Antibiotics. Bridges. Cars. Farming. Soap. Clean water. Toilets that refill with clean water after you shit in them. We are tightly encased by unnatural augmentations made possible only by reason, logic and the human desire to improve -and yet we are drowning in messaging to the contrary. Messaging that screams natural is always better -which ignores the fact that we wear clothes, don’t live in the caves, and miraculously live past the age of 30. These are claims that have no basis in reality, that people blindly accept to the extent that they will argue with actual experts about it.

Is the US truly “the sickest country in the world” because many of us are fat into our 80’s, or are we just salty that our miraculous advancements for keeping even sedentary folks alive for a normal length of time have fallen short of immortality and godhood? While our secretary of health believes that natural is best, forgoing pasteurization and vaccination isn’t going to help anyone live longer. RFK Jr. was a marginalized, scientifically uneducated, delusional idiot when he began his quest to make natural selection commonplace in America 20 years ago, and now -without new education or scientific insight, he finds himself in a position to make magical thinking kill on a national level, thanks to the will of the people. Elections have the gravest of consequences when the electorate surrenders its belief in objectivity and rationality.

The vast majority of Mom’s for Liberty enthusiastically embrace makeup, and even injections of collagen fillers and botox (an actual toxin) -who paradoxically draw a hard line at injecting much safer vaccines into their children to protect them from horrific diseases like tetanus. At least those mom’s will look their puffy, expressionless best for their kid’s extended stay in the ICU for rigid paralysis and renal failure. Incidentally, mechanical ventilation and dialysis are often required to survive a natural course of tetanus -but neither intervention is a natural remedy. You can easily argue that injecting parts of a natural virus or toxoid in the form of a vaccine is substantially more natural than treating the infection it prevents.

Assertions that claim nature’s superiority are ironically composed on unnatural devices and distributed on unnatural networks, to be read on other unnatural devices that are protected in the colorful plastic of plants that died millions of years ago -which are tucked into an unnatural pocket that is never made of a natural redundancy of our own flesh. Please stop pretending that natural is better, when you carry your tools of civilization in denim pockets instead of a natural meat sock… and why are you using tools at all? That’s not natural!

Why should we reject the gifts of reason and knowledge when they so obviously benefit everyone? Natural is not better: nature wants you dead after you reproduce. Nature is indifferent to the tragedy of high infant mortality so long as a few survive, and that is the limit to its concern for us if we fail to consider the fact that nature has no problem with mass extinctions. Nature doesn’t care if you die, so why do you imagine that it cares about you?

Is it fascinating that deer was able to make so many natural adjustments to survive?

Absolutely! Is it heroic? Was the deer healthier for it? Absolutely not. A car accident is also fascinating, but that doesn’t make it enviable, nor does survival make one more resistant to future high-speed impacts.

If you strive to live a more natural existence, shed your clothes and smartphone -and don’t you dare show up in my operating room asking for pain medicine and surgical attention after you are shot in the chest. Don’t refer to articles about the natural benefits of penetrating thoracic trauma or excerpts from wellness blogs about natural healing secrets -articles and blogs are not natural.

Its not that I don’t want to take care of you (I do actually, because I indulge heavily in the sin of empathy) -it’s just that I am trying to contextualize your heartfelt perspective on nature, and help you understand how you to live life in a way that is consistent with your strongly held beliefs. That last phrase was illustrative sarcasm -please don’t take it as advice.

Beware of grifters hocking natural products, because they will fool you twice with deceptive simplicity: nature is unlinked to matters of individual health, and those natural products aren’t natural either (unless you think turning 10 pounds of hemp buds into one ounce of CBD oil is natural).

And never forget that grifters can be appointed to positions of power and influence. Status is not credibility.