View source for Life - Health Care: No single system of health-care can address the infinite variety of life

Life - Health Care: No single system of health-care can address the infinite variety of life

By Norm Hirst

A homeopath from India told me he was shocked that the President of the United States has only one physician representing only one medical system.  In India the Prime Minister is required to have five physicians representing five different medical systems. This made sense to me.  Medical systems are finite systems as they have to be. The mind cannot encompass infinity. No finite system can encompass the infinite variety of reality or in this case, health-care.  I propose this as an important point to be aware of.  No system of thought can encompass the infinite variety of reality!  This becomes especially relevant in the ways we care for the body/mind.

Back in the 70’s I was hired to design a very advanced hospital computer system.  When we were ready for the pharmacy component I asked the hospital pharmacist if we should alert the doctors if they prescribed incompatible drugs. He thought it was a great idea but didn’t know where I would get compatibility information.  There was some such information for a few drugs but in general they did not know.  They prescribed an average of eight to ten drugs to each patient.  I asked how they knew whether a worsening condition was due to the disease or the drugs.  He sort of smiled and said I apparently had not heard of iatrogenic disease meaning, "doctor caused."  I had not.

That experience made me look for alternatives.  I found a psychiatrist who practiced homeopathy.  He raved about how good he felt actually bringing relief to people for the first time. He enthusiastically explained the theory of homeopathy to me.  I went home thinking it was the most nonsensical notions I had ever heard. Then I realized it wasn’t.  Although it seemed to be nonsense, it couldn’t compete with what I heard in a course on quantum physics.  I continued to investigate homeopathy and found much evidence in its favor.  When I met the homeopath from India I made him my doctor and I saw enough to be convinced.  Also, I will never forget asking an orthodox physician if he had heard about homeopathy.  He answered that at home, he treated his family homeopathically.  At work, he wrote prescriptions.  I also met a doctor who treated a dying girl homeopathically and saved her life.  All other doctors had left her to die saying there was no cure for her disease.

But shocks to my thinking were not over. I knew a woman who developed a lump on her side.  She told me there was a psychic surgeon visiting some friends. She was going to see him to have the lump removed.  Of course I knew that psychic surgeons were frauds.  The whole idea was absurd. I went with her to watch and maybe gloat a little.  As I watched, the surgeon placed his fingertips on the lump.  I saw her skin open exposing the lump.  He lifted it out with his right hand leaving a red hole where the lump had been. When he removed his left hand her skin closed.  There was not a sign that anything had been done except the lump was gone.  There was no pain to the woman. To those who want to tell me he created an illusion, I leave it to them to explain how it was that lump was gone and remained gone.

Long before I met her, Skye suffered a serious knee injury.  Her doctors told her they could restore some function by operating but her knee would never be normal.  Instead she went to a psychic surgeon.  As he operated she sensed she was entering a different reality for a brief time. When he finished she walked home.  As she walked her normal sense of reality returned.   Her knee has been normal ever since.

There are those who do demonstrations debunking psychic surgery.  I saw such a demonstration on TV.  It bore no resemblance to what I saw watching a psychic surgeon.  It was what I might have imagined them doing if I did not believe.  Perhaps the debunkers need debunking.

During the nineteen years we have been together, Skye and I have investigated and been treated by acupuncture, homeopathy, herbs including Chinese herbs, kinesiology chiropractors, naturopathy, nutrition and Jin Shin Jyutsu. In her 24 years of practicing Jin Shin Jyutsu, Skye has experienced benefits on many levels from it's miraculous holistic wisdom.  Each of these body/mind approaches has shown more potential than orthodox medicine convincing me that we are more entities of energy than merely physical entities. Current research by biochemists and biophysicists is tending to confirm this.

Now I believe our bodies are not primarily physical entities, they are energy entities.  He who can effect the energy can help the body cure itself.   Being autopoietic, self-making, the body can cure itself and that is all that can cure it.  He who can only work with the physical aspects can not cure. There can be acute conditions where orthodox high-tech treatment is all that will save a life. However in less acute conditions where cure should be the goal, I don’t believe our medical system is designed to cure.  Prescription drugs are "work-arounds."  That means they do not restore the body to health.  They just force it to function differently so the symptoms go away. When you are on a drug for life, you know there is no cure being attempted.

I refer to the alternatives here as being energy medicine.  They also involve different ways of observing and thinking.  For example homeopaths don’t observe or think in terms of disease categories.  They work with remedies and their symptom pictures matching the symptom pictures of the remedies to the symptoms of the patient.  There was a time when the FDA wanted to outlaw homeopathy unless the remedies were subject to standard double blind trials and were proven effective.  This could not be done.  Different people with the same disease will exhibit some similar and some different symptoms.  Thus a homeopath will choose different remedies for different patients even though they have the same disease.

Each of the energy medicine systems has its own unique way of observing and treating disease.  What one system cannot see or treat, another might.  They all should be available.  Unfortunately they are not really.  In many areas of the US most of them are not available.  Even where they do exist, people will go the orthodox route so insurance will pay.  I believe we could save enormous sums of money if insurance paid for alternative care and we would get better health care.

Finally, I think many believe that orthodox medicine is more scientific with all its miraculous technology.  At this time there is no proper basis for scientific medicine.  I believe there soon will be.  For now all we have is empirical philosophies.

My research has informed me that

# Our official medical system is the most expensive in the world
# When compared to other countries for quality of care, our system does not rank well
# Our medical care is the third largest cause of death
# Our system leads the world in error rates.  One third of all patients are misdiagnosed.

Regarding error rates, I believe there are two possible causes.  First, our bodies truly are holistic.  With medicine divided into specialties the way it is, there are holistic effects that physicians won’t see.  Second, technology can only be a finite system, The extensive dependency on technology can only lead to seeing the body/mind in parts.  The living entity as energy organized and constantly creating itself by holistic relationships cannot be studied in parts. What do physicians do when the MRI shows nothing?  Or worse, how can they be sure that what the MRI shows really indicates what they think it does?  In other countries, the technology is relied on less and the doctor spends more time getting know the patient to fully diagnose. The result is less error.

It is time to demand a new kind of health care that supports the way of Life-itself and to defend the freedom of choice that could be taken away if the "Codex laws" are imposed.  It used to be thought that MD’s were the best authorities on treating disease.  Given contemporary research, there are Ph.D.’s in biochemistry and biophysics who know far more.  Unfortunately they are not considered the best authorities so they have difficulty being heard.   We need a health system that embraces all the knowledge and specialties available to give us truly a holistic approach, not just for caring, but for healing our body/minds.

A  quote Alfred North Whitehead, one of the last thoughts he wrote contributed by him to his festschrift volume.

    “The self-confidence of learned people is the comic tragedy of civilization”  '''No single system of thought can encompass the infinite variety of reality!'''