Knowing the History of Medicine has helped me understand Campbell's book, "Whole"

During college, I took a course: "The History of Medicine: A Study of Causal Concepts of Disease." It was part of my philosophy courses and as I continue learning, this class comes into my mind almost more than any other. Why? Because it shaped my thinking about our paradigms, how we view the world.

I had never considered doctors fulfilling any other role than what I knew of them. They diagnose why you're sick, tell you why you got sick (e.g. you have bronchitis), and then proscribe some way for you to get better (e.g. an antibiotic). But when you go back far enough, we find there was a time when we didn't know about such things as germs. Not only that, but doctors didn't fulfil the role they now did.

Doctors were much more like a pastor--a moral compass. When you came in with diabetes, they asked what you had done in the past week etc. and pinned it on sleeping out in the street on a cold night (yes, really), and even more often found things society considered to be morally wrong that "caused" your disease. Things named are often gluttony, being promiscuous etc. The idea was you did something to bring about this disease. We rarely hear that now, and if we do it's usually something you ate or a lifestyle problem, not violation of a moral code.

Next we learned about bloodletting and why the people would have thought bloodletting or leeching was a good idea. At this time, they believed in four humors, described as follows.

"The Human body contains blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. These are the things that make up its constitution and cause its pains and health. Health is primarily that state in which these constituent substances are in the correct proportion to each other, both in strength and quantity, and are well mixed. Pain occurs when one of the substances presents either a deficiency or an excess, or is separated in the body and not mixed with others" (Attributed to Hippocrates, On the Nature of Man).

Others such as Theophrastus explained, "Those with too much blood were sanguine. Those with too much phlegm were phlegmatic. Those with too much yellow bile were choleric, and those with too much black bile were melancholic." (Wikipedia, Humorism).

Thus, if you had one of these problems you could work adjust the humors to fix your problem.

Later we learned about Ignaz Semmelweis, who discovered what was later labeled as germ theory of disease. The disease puerperal fever (known as "childbed fever"), was causing high mortality rates (10-35%). While working in Vienna's hospitals, Semmelveis found that the doctors' wards had three times the mortality of midwives' wards (because doctors would come from the cadaver lab into the birthing rooms without washing their hands). Semmelweis proposed the practice of washing hands with a chlorinated lime solution. Though he could not scientifically explain why this practice worked, the mortality rates dropped from 10-35% to 1%.

Unfortunately, his ideas were in conflict with the established medical and scientific community and doctors would not adopt his suggestion. Semmelweis, facing so much opposition to his ideas, eventually was sent to an asylum and died without knowing he would make such a huge impact on scientific thought. Later, Joseph Lister relied on Semmelweis's findings to implement hygenic methods and found great success, and Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory of disease, which explains that some diseases are caused by pathogens (microorganisms) that invade and reproduce within a person and cause us to become ill.

These are just three examples of theories of disease to illustrate that the functions of doctors have changed over time and the way by which they diagnosed and tried to cure disease has also changed drastically. Knowing the history of causal concepts of disease has made me much more open to thinking outside our current medical system. Before that class and since, my husband and I have each had illnesses that doctors and specialists looked at us and said "you are a puzzle. I have no idea what to tell you." Basically, though our medical system is advanced, we still have no way to describe the combination of symptoms I was experiencing. This again helped me be open minded to other solutions. By changing my diet and lifestyle I've learned I can get rid of those chronic ailments the doctors were confused by. It's not by taking a drug, it's more by sleeping, healthy eating, avoiding pollution etc. When I read books over time especially Farmacology, and Whole, I realized as I've approached our bodies as a whole system that's how we've overcome the symptoms doctors couldn't pin down. In her book Farmacology, Daphne Miller MD looked at her patients and found that identifying the most urgent or uncomfortable symptom and then having a 15-30 minute chat and giving her patients a prescription for the ailment wasn't really working. Her patients were often going to several doctors for several problems and were taking a lot of separate prescriptions and then would be given another prescription to get rid of the side effects of the original prescriptions. In our current medical system, Dr. Miller feels like we are often overlooking the person as a whole. As she looks at her patients as a whole, she often describes them as "depleted." While they do have specific aches and pains, overall they look just unhealthy. She suggests that we should view the body as a whole. She likens the body to soil and says that our bodies are like depleted soils. She wanted to learn how farmers create "good tilth" (good soil). Miller found that it's an intricate balance to create good tilth and while some farmers choose to have hundreds and even thousands of pounds of Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium (the three main elements needed for plants to grow), other farmers create truly good soil by byodynamic farming techniques (e.g. using compost and manure to create soil that is more healthy). I feel like Miller and Campbell's theories of health are closely related and both spot-on. Looking at the body as a whole system of intricately related parts will result in healthier people.

T. Colin Campbell, PhD in his book Whole gives an analogy to help us better understand how our health system views the body.

"An old story: six blind men are asked to describe an elephant. Each feels a different body part: leg, tusk, trunk, tail, ear, and belly. Predictably, each offers a vastly different assessment: pillar, pipe, tree, branch, rope, fan, and wall. They argue vigorously, each sure that their experience alone is the correct one.

I can't think of a better metaphore to highlight the big problem with scientific research today. Except that instead of six blind men, modern science tasks 60,000 researchers to examine the elephant, each through a different lens.

Now, there's nothing wrong with that, in and of itself. You could argue that the six men, each focused on an individual part, together produce a richer and more detailed description of an elephant than could be generated by one person just walking around looking at the creature in its entirety. Similarly, think fo the level of detailed understanding that 60,000 scientists can glean when they are empowered to focus on such granular component parts.

The problem arises only when, as in the parable, the individual points of view are mistakenly seen as describing the whole truth. When a laser-like focus is misunderstood as a global overview. When the six men or 60,000 researchers don't talk to one another or acknowledge that the overall goal of the exploration is to perceive and appreciate the whole elephant. When they assume that any view that questions their own is simply wrong.

...the triumph of reductionism over wholism over the past several hundred years -- rather than reductionism being used as a tool int he service of wholistic understanding -- has seriously impaired our ability to make sense of the world" (Whole, T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., pp. 45-6).

Campbell explains reductionism is the belief that anything can be understood if you have an understanding of all its component parts while wholism is the belief that the sum is greater than the sum of its parts. Thus, wholism encompasses reductionism.

Kurt Goedel developed the incompleteness theorem stating that no complex system could be known in its entirety, and any system that could be known in its entirety was merely a subset of a larger one. Basically, science can never fully describe the universe.

So when science breaks the body down into its parts and believes we could solve the problem better if only we understood one small system better, we are practicing reductionism.

*(FAMILY SYSTEMS THEORY -- this could also be applied to family systems. "The family systems theory is a theory introduced by Dr. Murray Bowen that suggests that individuals cannot be understood in isolation from one another, but rather as a part of their family, as the family is an emotional unit." So, when so and so refuses to eat dinner it's not only to be blamed on the child, but it's the family overall system that needs tweaking).

"If the world was, indeed, an accumulation of parts, each defined by discernable edges, then perhaps at some future point the technologists could understand the human body through a reductionist lens powered by supercomputers, complex computational models, and other technologies. But the world is far more complex than this. The enzyme is not, in fact, a discrete unit that stands along; it is an integral element of a larger system. It exists in service to the system, as does every other element of that system. If an element ever ceases to act in service to its system, as with uncontrolled cancer growth, the system breaks down, and may even fail entirely. Because each part is an integral element of the same system, all the parts are connected to one another; no one part stands alone. And this means each part affects and is affected by the other parts. Removing or modifying a part changes the whole, just as changing the whole, as we will see in later discussions, impacts the parts---that is, when one part is altered, all other parts are forced to adapt to try and keep the system running.

"In this scenario, the discrete boundaries we assign to individual parts melt away. Put simply, there are no fixed 'edges' within the human body that separate any one part from all the other parts. In their place are infinite connection and unending change, and it is this continual cascade of causes and effects that renders reductionist prediction models useless.

"This lack of boundaries is important because it means that each 'part' of the body involves more that what can be seen when the part is viewed, as it is in reductionism, in isolation from the larger system it serves...

Better, more powerful technology doesn't alter that fundamental reality. No matter how many blind men you employ to ovserve parts of the elephant, and no matter how much technology is available to support them, you can never generate the understanding required to see the full elephant...in studying parts out of context, we blind ourselves the wholistic interpretations as well as real-life-solutations to human health those interpretations would provide... (Ibid. pp. 55-6).