Words are medicine. Expressing your emotions, vital.

Sometimes the words of others are medicine.

Not every day, not every moment. Sometimes they reach you, sometimes they drift past. I have emails of poems I subscribe to, and a handful of poets I follow on Instagram. Some mornings I open them and stop after the first line; other times I read the whole thing, twice. I don’t force it. I let the words come when they’re meant to. I trust that if I need their medicine, they’ll find me, the way you trust a cup of tea to warm your hands when you’re cold.

We don’t go to the pharmacy every day. We go when something aches, when a wound or fever insists on attention. Language, too, works this way. It waits until the ache of the soul, the confusion of the heart, the fog of the mind makes us reach for it. Sometimes that reaching is deliberate: calling a friend, booking therapy, reading a poem aloud, or opening a novel. Other times it’s less conscious: we hear a song in a café that suddenly loosens grief, or a stray line of poetry lands in our chest like balm.

This healing power of words is not a recent discovery. It’s a timeless truth that transcends cultures and generations. Words have always been our collective medicine, a universal balm for the soul.

The ancients knew it first. In Mesopotamia, sickness was driven out with spells spoken by priests who believed their incantations carried force enough to untangle demons from flesh. In Egypt, healers copied charms into papyrus rolls, pairing herbs with prayers, because a poultice was only half a cure if the gods were not invoked. In India, the sages recognised sound itself as medicine—the syllable Om humming through the body like a tuning fork for the soul. And in China, a healer might write a talisman, burn it, mix the ash into water, and have the patient drink—swallowing characters as though words themselves were a prescription.

The Greeks gave this a name: pharmakon. A word that meant both “drug” and “spell.” Plato said the soul could be healed by words, that speech itself was medicine. The Romans inherited this, whispering charms alongside practical remedies. And in every market, in every household, mothers and grandmothers spoke protective verses over children, not unlike how today we might murmur “you’ll be okay” over a child with a fever, not knowing those words are already part of the healing.

The Abrahamic faiths carried the torch of this medicine. In Hebrew psalms, in the name of Jesus spoken over illness, in the Qur’anic verses recited over the sick, words became bridges between the human body and divine care. Avicenna, the great Persian physician, wrote about how imagination and belief could affect the body, acknowledging that healing sometimes travelled not only through herbs and surgeries but through stories and speech.

And far from the cities and holy books, in oral traditions across the earth, words sang people back to health. Among Native American nations, medicine songs restored balance to a person and their community. In Africa, healers used chants and praise poetry, rhythmic and communal, to ease pain and invite vitality. Across the Pacific, Polynesian karakia prayers were spoken to steady a patient’s spirit, while in Australia, Aboriginal songlines kept both land and people alive—the very earth itself dependent on words to remain whole.

Even when Western Europe entered its long medieval twilight, where science slowly edged out magic, words did not disappear from medicine. Charms were tied around necks, prayers whispered at bedsides, mantras chanted in Tibetan monasteries. To this day, Tibetan Buddhists call mantra sngags—literally “spells”—not metaphor but medicine.

And then, in the modern age, we circled back. Doctors began to notice that the way they spoke to patients mattered as much as the pills they prescribed. Hypnosis, suggestion, “the talking cure”, all revealed that the body listens to words. Today we call it the placebo effect, but really it is nothing new; it is only science catching up to what every grandmother, every priest, every poet, and every shaman has always known.

And if that sounds lofty, remember it is also ordinary.

Sometimes our own words are the medicine.

Sometimes healing is the story we tell ourselves while lying in bed sick: This fever will pass, my body knows what to do. Sometimes it is the journal entry scribbled in anger that lifts the weight from the chest. Sometimes it is the song hummed through tears. Sometimes it is saying aloud to a trusted friend: I’m not okay. These are the stories we tell ourselves, the narratives we weave, that have the power to heal.

Emotions need to move.

Left unspoken, they lodge in the body, weakening us. Not causing illness, but leaving us more vulnerable to it. That is why creativity heals, because it lets the unsaid become said. Poetry, painting, song, prayer: all these are ancestral forms of medicine. They cost nothing, but they are powerful enough to make grief move, to bring laughter where there was silence, to remind us we are alive.

You don’t need to journal every day, sing every morning, or read every poem that crosses your inbox. But there will be times (after loss, in uncertainty, during grief) when a story or a verse or a ritual will arrive precisely when you need it, and you will recognise it as medicine.

Trust that the words will find you when you need them. But also, make it easy for them to reach you. Leave the book by your bed. Keep the songs close. Let poetry arrive in your inbox. Listen when someone speaks love over you. Speak love over yourself.

For as long as we have been human, language has been part of the healing. Create a space for these healing words in your life, and they will find their way to you.