new/old practices

(The next couple of posts, with some editing, appeared in part in a paper I wrote in 1995 for a university course in Oncology Nursing.  The paper was entitled "Alternative Medicine Integrated Into a New Health Care Model for the Oncology Patient".)

Whether we acknowledge it or not, people have always consulted people other than orthodox or allopathic expert health-professionals to verify their subjective experience of symptoms, and to verify their impressions regarding whether to self-treat or to seek professional treatment.

What this means, simply, is that we will usually talk about our fears, our feelings, our pains or sorrows, first  with someone we trust and with whom we can identify, not a certified expert.

Maybe, in the midst of whatever we are experiencing, we already know.  Our intuition, a gut feeling, is already telling us something.  But often, we don't feel we have the knowledge or the authority to say what we know about our own state of health.

Orthodox or allopathic Western medicine is the only form of medicine taken seriously by most people today.  Staunchly refusing to admit to its embarrassing past, when questionable practices like cupping, blood letting, or intestinal purging were accepted treatments among the university-educated medical men, it is backed today by huge sums of money, political and intellectual prestige.  Supported by the best scientific minds, with access to the latest technological advances, it exerts such a tremendous influence on our lives and thinking as to be nearly a religion. It is certainly the only system of thought that enjoys such legitimacy.

It is so dominant that many are surprised that other systems of thought regarding health and treatment of illness exist, not only in rural areas, non-industrialized Third World nations, or ancient, indigenous cultures, but in the more developed and prosperous parts of the world as well.

Orthodox medicine enthusiastically embraced the scientific-objective view suggested by Isaac Newton, that certain immutable laws of nature existed and operated with or without our knowledge or consciousness.  This new scientific method was adopted whole-heartedly as a logical alternative to religion and magic.

Technology and scientific discoveries of the late 1800 's and early 1900's did seem at first to be the answer to all humanity's problems.  Spectacular scientific medical triumphs over infectious diseases occurred.  Vaccines, vitamins, hormones, wonder drugs of all kinds, and refined diagnostic and surgical instruments and techniques were developed.  Laboratory tests, new anasthetics and surgical procedures, marvelous technological machinery, seemed capable of almost anything!

Coincidentally, some of my acquaintances from Africa equate the leap of humanity's progress with the coming of Christian missionaries and wanted nothing more than to receive a Western education.

However, new horrors and stresses on society and our earth are directly or indirectly tied to the advance of science:  contamination of the planet's vital resources, many-fold harmful effects on animal and plant life from chemical and radiation pollution, extinction of uncounted species, massive deforestation, soil erosion, the breakdown of the ozone layer, global warming, all an indictment of science gone amok!

"Pure science", objective truths, a measurable universal reality, turned out to be easily subverted, sold-out, to specific political and economical agendas.  We now seem to be unable to control at all the ways in which our scientific knowledge and skills are used, consuming endless resources and intelligence for purposes of social and ecological subjugation.  Science, Richard Tarnas suggests, is "in thrall to man's own self-destructive irrationality."

Suddenly, we find ourselves in a crises that mirrors man's world view, a man-made environment, mechanized, soul-less, self-destructive, disconnected from anything resembling the natural world from which we arose and of which we sense, in some distant echo, we are an inseparable part.  The psychological and biological crisis has never been more disturbing.

Orthodox medicine is still appealing, because it confers a high ability to describe, predict and control the observable world, but it must move forward.  In my next post, I will discuss how and why in some ways, it is a backward-looking model.  We long for a holistic model of health which will unify and address the hidden, the mystical though unoccult, dynamics of life.