"What can I offer in return? Money, or what?"

I come from a cultural context that frowns pretty heavily on someone charging money for medicine, and by that, meaning not only medical assistance, but also mystic, spiritual, religious, and other forms of internal support... and I share that mindset. 

It's not one unique to my peoples, either; I've heard stories that if Slavic herbwomen caught one of their own charge cash for care, that they'd shun her for doing so. 

Such allowances in behavior could snowball in an ever shifting Overton window, until large organizations may even monopolize the region's capacity for care, and force the poor to die of curable conditions simply for lacking the sum extorted from them to be allowed to live. 

Wouldn't that be heinously inconceivable. Impossible travesties, of course. *sarcasm*

That said, people working to serve their human and nonhuman communities in these ways were not economically neglected by their peers and relations, on a material cultural, nutritional, or service level. 

Gifts were neither expected nor demanded for such care, but they were given by all but the ignorant or uncouth. 

The craftsperson and the cunningfolk, the mender of wounds and the magus, the weaver and the wixen lacked neither horse nor lodge, soup nor shirt, and curing of their own when the time came... but reportedly, no one did. 

I've personally heard several elders from many tribal or otherwise-ancestral community structures - especially among those who have maintained continuity with their Ways - speak with pride how their people measured a share of their humanity in how they wove a floor that prevented any from falling from calamity, debility, or fatigue into actual destitution. 

If one were to shotgun scatter across a smattering of the globe's many ancestral linguistic-memories of societal concepts and foundational values, one would bump into Swahili's ukarimu, the multi-Bantuubuntu, Malagasy's fandraisam-bahiny, Islamic perspectives on karam, the Sikh seva of the langar,  Pashtunwali's melmastyā́, Sanskrit's atithidevo bhava, Jewish hachnasat orchim, Latinate hospitium, Grecian xenia, the Irish laws of fáilteachas, the cumlīþnesse of Old English, the Norse tongue's gestaréttur, the Albanian onto-fatal devotion to mikpritja, the Andean and Amazonian Quechua's various takes on sumaq, the Aboriginal Warlpiri concept of the jirrmilypa-purlturr-purlturrpa, the importance of the Samoan talimalo fa'aaloalo, the Fijian peoples' veikauwaitaki, the Classical Chinese 好客的, and the Japanese omotenashi. 

This lengthy-but-incomplete sampling - leaving out Persian, Slavic, Turkic, and "North American" languages entirely - points to an overwhelming symphony of hominid-familial consensus of our baseline expectations of ourselves and each other that the conditions of contemporary industrial modernity fails to rise to. 

I imagine that if our respective octuple-great grandmothers could but see us now, they'd... bring us some herbal tea, sit us down, and give us a gentle, firm talking-to. Or give us a smack somethin' fierce lol.

What is to be done?

As people who live in an urban fabric where lacking contemporary housing can and may get you shot by law-enforcement, where much of the forageable land is flanked and bulwarked by poisoned hedges and swales - even if accessing them weren't subject to accusation of vandalism, trespass, or loitering - and where transportation is monopolized by expensive and collision-happy machines, what are we to do? 

As the chaos gives us disquiet, the industrial by-products render us tumorous, and the wear-and-tear of empty calories and extractive labor expectations adds a creaking to our joints, a clenching to our guts, and a cramping to our backs, how do we navigate?

As best we can, I suppose. Eyqeshiwa.