Monday, October 24, 2005

Two Schools of Thought in Healthcare

It is my observation that there are two schools of thought in healthcare. You could call one "Western medicine" and the other "holistic healthcare" but it's more than that.

Here they are:

  1. Your body is a complex machine. Interlocking parts of this machine break down for no known reason, and when they do, they must be serviced by someone else.

  2. Your body is alive. It is an organism that has intelligence in every cell, and it gives you all the signs and signals you need to allow your body to heal itself. Everything in your body, including disease, happens for a reason.


I believe that each of us has the perspective at either extreme, or somewhere in the middle. For me, I'm on the extreme of number 2 - the holistic healthcare perspective. All the evidence I see points to our bodies being alive, being organisms. There is just nothing machine-like about my body. One has to examine specific body parts or even cells in total isolation to get the thought that the body is a machine. As soon as you factor in the mind-body connection, or the self-healing capability, the machine paradigm completely dissolves.

What do you think?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

To me, calling my body a "machine" implies that it is a "thing" to be worked, mastered, managed, forced, used up. Like buying, driving, and maintaining a car. This is my house, my home, the vessle that carries my thoughts and hopes and passions. I am blessed enough to be ambulatory, to carry my thoughts, hopes and passions, my brain and sensory receptors to other places, to make contact others, to help and to love.

Anonymous said...

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