Can you recommend an e-book or something that would teach me this?

I would recommend practice. Take your text and cut in it half. Make decisions about what to keep, what to discard, what to compress -- don't worry too much whether these decisions are "correct". Evaluate the results, but if you feel you must put something back, figure out what you'll discard to make space for it.

Repeat this process frequently and you'll get better at editing (and writing, too).

1. people suffer 2. there are basically NO ideas kicking around why.

I don't think this is true. There are LOTS of ideas why -- you might follow the academic guidelines and consider doing a literature review (if only for your own knowledge) first.

Any beginning is better than none.

That's not necessarily true. Making Jesus your personal friend and Savior is also a beginning, to give an obvious example.

I see my role here as a non-scientific shaman healer trying to treat diseases by random herbs.

Let me reiterate that you are not the first person in the world to have discovered this problem. Start by reading a bit, maybe consider doing something a bit more scientific than "random herbs"? :-)