Doctors and scholars give Hippocrates credit as the founder of modern medicine. He developed a simple medical philosophy that modern doctors continue to use today: “Everything in excess is opposed to nature.”

Even though Hippocrates referred to medicine, there is another body to which we could apply his words: the body politic.

For a moment, entertain the notion of a political body. As the citizens, we are the blood in the body and the organs are the governing bodies. We carry messages and give support to the political organs. News and information fills us with the oxygen we need in order to keep the governing bodies running. We move and collect the protein that keeps the body rebuilding, and we communicate the signals between the different parts of the body.

The organs are the governing bodies: The House, the Senate, the Presidency and the Supreme Court all play separate but critical roles. They cannot work without the others or without the blood to supply them. Together we the people and our government compose the body and the society in which we live.

When we become infected with radicalism, partisanship or factionalism, we get sick. Such infections can come from exterior sources such polluted air like Fox News or the Cato Institute. However, it can also develop internally by party polarization and defective cells.

What’s important is that an infection in any part of the political body easily spreads to the rest, and as it spreads, it damages everyone. As blood, the people spread the infection. We supply the organs with the support, information and trust that they need. However, an excess of ideology will block our reception or bind us with the wrong message.

Information is the key nutrient that allows the blood to support the organs. To the extent that false inferences and opinions pass as news the blood begins to bring pollution into the organs, causing everything to breakdown.

Without information or with an excess of homogeneity, we the people become sickle cells, no longer capable of supporting the organs. As a result the organs can’t function correctly. False information, indifference and cynicism can all have a devastating effect.

The entire body breaks when the blood is corrupted. However, organs can damage the body too. When political organs are infected, it develops more like a cancer. A few bad cells like Karl Rove or Charles Koch malfunction and break their biological rules of reproduction. They begin to reproduce without control, and as they multiply they pull the blood vessels in their direction.

As they attract more blood to themselves, the healthy cells in the organs are forced to convert or whither. The cancer begins to dominate particular organs such as Congress and infected organs fill the blood stream with infected blood.

The cancer uses the contaminated blood to spread itself from organ to organ. Starting in the congress, it pollutes the blood and prevents the function of the presidency. Hazardous nutrients are leaked into the blood and get carried into the presidential organ. From one body, it uses blood to spread to another.

The people become more radical, and functioning organs starve. The result is a continuing growth of radicalism within the body. For healthy governing cells to survive, they must radicalize to continue their blood flow. As organs become more radical, the hormones and proteins the organs supply into the blood grows increasingly tainted.

As time continues, the entire body is overrun by malignant growth. Originally, the blood and the organs were designed to purify one another. Before mass media and Rupert Murdoch, individuals took a greater part in their government and supported it.

As the blood, it is our job to carry dead and defective cells out of the body. For the body to function well, we need to remove the toxins from the body and support the governing organs. The organs of the body need to take measures to purify and enrich the blood. We need the governing organs, and they need us. Despite what individuals such as Ron Paul say, we need this body.