There are aspects of life that appear to be objectively determined. So objective, in fact, that they are almost never questioned. Their evidence seems natural, unquestionable, beyond doubt. And yet, very often, this supposed objectivity is nothing more than a cultural assumption made unbreakable by an aura of scientific authority: a form of power that, precisely because it presents itself as neutral, manages to place itself beyond criticism.

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It is within this horizon that we must place medicine. Or rather: one medicine among many.

Our medicine, modern Western medicine, is called biomedicine. At first glance, the word sounds reassuring. It evokes life, the body, care, scientific competence. It seems to contain a positive promise: to understand life in order to protect it, to measure it in order to save it, to intervene on the body in order to heal it.

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And indeed, almost no one would think of challenging it. Not because biomedicine has no limits, but because we have been taught to see it not as a cultural, historical and political system, but as medicine itself. As if it were not one particular way of interpreting the body, illness and healing, but the only legitimate language through which the body can be understood.

The problem begins precisely here: when a form of knowledge stops seeing itself as a perspective and starts presenting itself as absolute reality.

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One of the deepest effects of biomedicine is depersonalization. Paradoxically, this happens at the very moment when, in many parts of the world, we celebrate the rise of so-called personalized medicine. But personalizing does not necessarily mean recognizing the person. One thing is to adapt a protocol to a genetic, metabolic or statistical profile; another thing is to listen to a biography, a suffering, a story, an environment, a singular way of inhabiting the world.

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Depersonalization is born from the claim of objectivity. The body is translated into parameters, indexes, thresholds, numerical values. Health and disease are placed within statistically defined ranges of normality. At a certain point, a number decides whether you are healthy or ill, normal or deviant, in need of treatment or not.

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This does not mean denying the usefulness of data. That would be naïve, even dangerous. The point is another: when data become the only language of care, everything that cannot be measured risks becoming irrelevant.

The pain that does not appear in medical tests. The fatigue that finds no altered value. The sadness that does not fit into a diagnosis. The fear that is dismissed as anxiety. The body that speaks, but no one listens.

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Even the drug, the ultimate symbol of biomedical power, contains this ambiguity. That very long, boring and almost unreadable leaflet that comes with medicine is, in truth, a small epistemological confession. It tells us, between the lines, that a drug is never an objective cure in any absolute sense. It tells us that effects may vary, that the body may react in unexpected ways, that what heals one person may harm another, that human specificity always exceeds calculation.

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A drug never acts on an abstract body. It acts on that body. On that biological history. On that immune memory. On that microbiome. On that biography. On that nervous system. On that context of life. On that loneliness. On that fear. On that broken relationship with the world.

And yet, in the dominant narrative, the pill continues to be presented as an almost miraculous solution. We swallow it and imagine its power spreading neatly through every cell of our body. We wait for it to take effect, as if healing were an automatic, linear, mechanical event. A substance enters the body, corrects the error, restores balance.

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But what really happens? Are we truly healed, or have we simply witnessed something else?

 

Biomedicine itself tells us, almost unintentionally, the terms of its own effectiveness. We might put it this way: a biomedical drug is a substance that, once swallowed, injected, inhaled or applied, achieves the goal of making the symptom disappear. The very symptom that led us to the doctor in the first place, or placed us in the hands of the pharmacist and his monthly budget.

Beautiful, isn’t it? A true miracle! The same miracle that biomedicine makes even more seductive by progressively reducing so-called “healing times.” And here, on the horizon, a new word appears: healing, associated with the variable of time.

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The question of time, as we know, is a serious problem for us Westerners. Being ill means stopping. And stopping means interrupting the flow of productivity, missing a meeting, giving up a tennis lesson, losing an aperitif with friends, stepping out for a few days from the well-ordered machinery of commitments. It is no coincidence that almost every pharmaceutical advertisement insists on the same promise: to get us back on our feet quickly, in time to return to our schedule, our appointments, our daily performance.

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Healing is thus transformed into speed of recovery.

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What matters is not so much understanding what the body is saying. What matters is making it silent as quickly as possible. And then there is the question of healing. Yes, healing.

The dictionary defines it as “the process of becoming healthy again.” But this apparently simple definition opens up a much larger question: what does it really mean to regain health?

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If symptoms tell us that there is a problem, what problem are they actually referring to?

It is at this point that the imposing biomedical structure reveals its fragility. Because when faced with the most radical question — why am I unwell? — it often does not produce a real answer, but only refers back to the very parameters on which its language is built.

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If you have anemia, clinical tests will say that some blood values are altered. If you have cystitis, they will say that inflammation is present. If you have high blood pressure, they will say that the value exceeds a threshold. If you have chronic pain, they will look for a lesion, damage, dysfunction. And so on.

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All of this is certainly true. But it is also partial. Because knowing what is happening in the body does not necessarily mean knowing why that body began to speak in that particular way, at that particular moment, within that particular life.

In the luckiest cases, someone will tell you it is stress. 

In the less lucky ones, you will discover the word “psychosomatic.” This word is extraordinary. Because in everyday practice, it too often means: we do not really know what you have, we cannot find any visible damage, so the problem must be yours — your mind, your emotions, your inability to manage life. Put brutally: there is not much to be done, you will have to live with this illness.

The term “psychosomatic,” which in theory should point to the deep continuity between psychic life and bodily life, is often used as a residual container. A grey area in which all those forms of suffering that biomedicine cannot precisely place within its own schemes are deposited.

You are not ill enough to be taken seriously. But you are unwell enough not to be able to live well.

 

Many people remain suspended in this middle ground.

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To keep the discussion close to everyday life, let us consider anxiety. Almost all of us, in some form and at some point, have fallen into it. Anxiety is one of the great experiences of contemporary life: widespread, transversal, democratic. It passes through work, family, the body, sleep, relationships, the future. It is not only an individual disorder. It is also a cultural symptom.

You go to the doctor. He listens to you, or at least that is what he says. Then, as if he had a crystal ball, he suggests a benzodiazepine. Any benzodiazepine. The first one on the list, the most familiar one, the quickest one, the one that “will calm you down for now.”

End of story. Well, perhaps the story ends for him, since he has fulfilled his biomedical task. He has recognized a symptom, associated it with a drug, produced an answer. But for us, a doubt remains: will that drug truly heal me? Or will it simply silence the symptom? And what if the symptom were the messenger?

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What if anxiety were not merely something to eliminate, but an extreme way in which the body is trying to say that something in my life is no longer sustainable?

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This is not about demonizing medication. That would be a serious mistake. There are moments when a drug can be necessary, even life-saving. It can interrupt a crisis, reduce unbearable suffering, allow a person to sleep, breathe, regain a minimum level of stability. The problem is not the drug itself.

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The problem arises when the drug becomes the answer in place of the question. When it silences the symptom without questioning the life that generated it. When it produces relief without producing understanding. When it normalizes the body without transforming the context.

When it allows the person to return quickly to the very same life that made them ill.

 

This is the silence that does not heal.

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Not silence as stillness, recollection, deep listening. But the silence imposed on the body. The silence of the suppressed symptom. The silence of the unasked question. The silence of the person who is not heard because their suffering has been translated too quickly into diagnosis, prescription, protocol.

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Biomedicine speaks a great deal. It produces reports, prescriptions, guidelines, medical records, classifications, protocols. It is a system saturated with technical language. And yet, within this abundance of language, the person’s voice is often missing.

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What is missing is the simplest and most radical question:

What happened to you?

Not only: what symptoms do you have?

Not only: which values are altered?

Not only: where does it hurt?

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But: what happened in your life for your body to begin speaking in this way?

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This is where biomedicine reveals its anthropological limit. It can describe with great precision the lesion, the parameter, the inflammation, the mutation, the deficit, the biochemical imbalance. But it struggles to understand the lived meaning of illness. It struggles to recognize that suffering is never only a biological event, but also a biographical, social, ecological and symbolic event.

Illness does not interrupt only a bodily function. It interrupts a relationship with the world.

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It interrupts the way a person wakes up in the morning, walks, works, loves, desires, plans, inhabits a house, crosses a city, breathes a landscape. It interrupts the narrative continuity of existence. It forces us to ask who we have become and who we may still be able to become.

But if all this is not listened to, care remains mute.

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Biomedicine can then intervene on the body without truly encountering the person. It can lower a value, contain a symptom, regulate a function, suppress pain. But it does not necessarily heal. Because healing does not simply mean returning within a statistical threshold of normality. Healing means rebuilding a form of coherence between body, life and world.

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This is where medical anthropology can open a breach. Not in order to reject biomedicine, but to provincialize it. To remind it that it is not the final truth about the body, but a powerful cultural form of interpreting biological life. A form that is often effective, often indispensable, but always partial.

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The human body is not only organic matter. It is lived body. Narrative body. Social body. Ecological body. A body exposed to the world and shaped by relationships. A body that cannot be understood only through blood tests, scans, diagnostic algorithms and therapeutic protocols.

This is why silence does not heal. The silence of the doctor who does not listen does not heal.

The silence of the patient who does not dare to speak does not heal. The silence of institutions that turn care into performance does not heal. The silence of a society that reduces health to efficiency, productivity and risk control does not heal. The silence of a medicine that measures the body but forgets life does not heal.

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A truly human form of care should instead begin with a simple and revolutionary gesture: giving the person their voice back. Not as a subjective appendix to diagnosis, but as an integral part of the therapeutic process. Because illness is never only something we have. It is something that happens to us. And what happens to us, in order to be truly cared for, must first be allowed to be told.