Wilberg on Wednesday - The Illness Is The Cure pt 30/46

Distinctions Central to Life Medicine

Basic Distinctions

Life Medicine is rooted in a number of new and fundamental distinctions.

1. Between feeling ill and ‘getting ill’.
2. Between feeling ill-at-ease with one’s life and being ‘ill’.
3. Between the particular life meaning of an illness for the individual and its biological ‘causes’.
4. Between our subjectively ‘felt body‘ or ‘lived body‘ and the ‘clinical body’ or ‘physical’ body.
5. Between the body as an embodiment of the human being and the body as a biological machine.
6. Between our subjectively felt sense of bodily ‘dis-ease’ and an ‘objective’ bio-medically diagnosed ‘disease’.
7. Between seeing the patient’s life problem as their illness and seeing the patient’s illness as the symptom of a life problem.
8. Between talking to a doctor because one is ill and getting ill in order to talk to a doctor.
9. Between seeing illness itself as a symptom and seeing symptoms only as possible signs of an illness.
10. Between knowing that one may die by means of an illness and believing that one dies simply ‘from’ an illness.
11. Between meditating an illness to heal one’s life and medicating an illness to heal one’s body.
12. Between seeing a patent’s illness as something to be cured and understanding that the illness is there to cure the patient – to help them to heal and transform their lives.

Table of Differences:
Biological Medicine versus Life Medicine

Assumptions of Biological Medicine The purpose of medicine is to cure the illness. The illness is the enemy. Health is ‘good’. Illness is ‘bad’. Health and illness are opposites. The human body can be separated from the life of the individual human being. The patient’s life problem is their illness and its symptoms. Illnesses are things that we ‘get’ or ‘have’. Illnesses have ‘causes’ but no life meaning – aside from interfering with our lives and thus requiring treatment. A somatic symptom is a diagnostic ‘sign’ of a bodily disease. Diagnosis identifies independent disease entities in the body and thus guides treatment. Illness can be life-threatening and thus a cause of death. People die from illness if they are untreated or incurable. The aim of medicine is to ‘cure’ or rid ourselves of an illness. Illness is an attack by ‘foreign bodies’ or ‘non-self’ organisms such as viruses or mutated cells. Medicine is war against disease – helping our bodies to ‘fight’ disease. Healing means bringing about changes in our bodies. Mind and body ‘affect’ one another though physiological processes. Illness is the result of an objective biological process occurring in the physical body Feeling ill results from ‘getting ill’ with some objective physical ‘disease’. The way we feel our bodies – our inwardly felt body – is a subjective expression of the physical body. The aim of the physician is to help the patient to recover or ‘feel themselves’ again – to feel the same way they did before getting ill. The purpose of the physician-patient relationship is to heal the patient by diagnosing and treating their symptoms. The health of the individual is an entirely private matter and a function of their bodies. Symptoms are caused by a physical disease or disorder in the human body or brain. Symptoms have bodily causes. The human body is a functioning biological machine. We ‘have’ a body – a body which we can feel in different ways. Health is our capacity to maintain a fully functioning body and mind, no matter how sick the society in which we live. Every patient’s illness is just an individual ‘case’ of a generic disease. Medical science is based on ‘proven facts’, such as the way the immune system functions. Most medical research is ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’. Most medications are scientifically trialled and tested to show their effectiveness and safety. Modern biomedical treatments of illness save countless lives and are therefore indispensable. Inner well-being is an expression of the health of the body.

Basic Principles of Life Medicine The purpose of illness is to cure the patient. The illness is the cure. Illness is part of a healthy life, just as dealing with life-problems is. Illness is a natural part of a healthy life. The human body is a living embodiment of the individual human being. The patient’s illness is the symptom of a life problem. Illnesses are natural life and learning processes. Illnesses have life meanings – symbolising, and thus helping us explore important life questions. A symptom is a somatic symbol of a felt dis-ease There are no such things as disease entities separable from the body and life of the individual as whole. People die through illnesses and not ‘from’ or ‘of’ them – and do so only if they are ready to die. The illness itself is the potential ‘cure’ – helping to heal or ‘make whole’ our self. Illness is a form of pregnancy – the bodily expression of unborn aspects of our self as a whole. Medicine is midwifery – helping us to give birth to a new sense of self. Healing means letting our bodies change us – our bodily sense of self. Every bodily or somatic state is a state of consciousness – and vice versa. Illness is the result of changes occurring in our subjective or felt body – which is also our bodily identity, our ‘body self’. ‘Getting ill’ results from feeling ill – from a subjectively felt dis-ease. The physical body is an outward expression of our subjective body – our inwardly felt body. The aim of the physician is to help the patient to change – to feel a different self to the one they felt before getting ill. It is the relationship itself that is the chief healing factor, helping – or not helping – the patient to heal. Individual health is an expression of the health of human relations in society. Sicknesses are sicknesses of relation. Both symptoms and their causes are the expression of a felt dis-ease of the individual human being. Symptoms are bodily symbols. The human body is a living biological language. We do not ‘have’ a body. We body – embodying the way we feel. Health is our capacity to fully embody and fulfil our values and potentials as individual human beings. Every patient’s illness is a unique expression of their individuality. Modern medicine is based on linguistic metaphors – such as the military metaphor of immune ‘defences’. Most medical research is profit driven and biased by corporate funding. Most medications are little more effective than placebos, whilst often producing severe or even life-threatening side effects. Statistics from recognised medical journals in the U.S.A. show that biomedical treatments are themselves the third principal cause of death after cancer and heart disease – if not the leading cause of death as well as countless iatrogenic (medically induced) illnesses and symptoms. The health of the body is an expression of inner well-being.

Life Medicine and ‘Alternative Medicine’

One of the principal attractions of ‘alternative’ forms of medicine is that its practitioners tend to give a lot more time to their patients than doctors– at least in the initial consultation – and to ask questions about their lives and life situation as a whole of a sort that biomedical doctors have no time for or see no point in. All the more disappointing then, that such initial consultations usually prove to be a mere prelude to a procedure identical in principle to that of any biomedical doctor i.e. internally framing and ‘diagnosing’ the patient’s bodily symptoms in terms of an unquestioned body of knowledge (for example homeopathy or Traditional Chinese Medicine) and then prescribing some form of pre-given remedy or engaging in some form of pre-prescribed alternative ‘treatment’ – all in a way that the practitioner has been taught is appropriate to the patient’s condition according to their training – and which therefore demands of them no further or deeper thought.

The effectiveness of the alternative remedies or treatments is in large part due to the relationship of trust established between practitioner and patient and to their joint belief in the rationale and efficacy of whatever remedy or operational procedure (for example a selected acupunctural procedure) is prescribed. Belief and trust are the real foundation of the so-called ‘placebo effect’ – though this is a no less important factor in the efficacy of much orthodox biomedical practice than it is in the practice of alternative medicine. For even so-called random double-blind drug trials designed to exclude subjective or observational bias on the part of both patient and researcher assume in advance that the patient’s own body is not itself aware of whether it has been given a ‘placebo’ or a complex pharmaceutical drug even though the latter is bound to be registered and reacted to by the body and registered by the patient in one way or another.

The term ‘alternative medicine‘ belongs to a variety of so-called approaches to medicine regarded as ‘holistic’ – that claim to ‘treat’ the person and not just the disease, i.e. the human being as a ‘whole’ and not just their body. Yet the very language of medicine and of holistic healing – in particular the use of the little word ‘and’ in stock phrases such as ‘mind and body’, ‘body and soul’ or ‘body, mind and spirit’ effectively reduces the human being to a mere assemblage of separate parts. In this way holistic medicine is again, no different in essence from biological medicine – with which it also shares the same basic aim of seeking ‘causes’ and ‘cures’ for illness rather than exploring its life meaning for the patient. Indeed the term ‘holistic healing’ does not even make linguistic sense, for it constitutes what is called a pleonasm like ‘black darkness’. That is because the words ‘whole’ and ‘holistic’ actually share many of the same roots as the word ‘healing’ itself – for example the Middle English hole/hoole and hāl from which the words ‘hail’ – meaning ‘be blessed with long life’ – ‘hale’ and ‘healthy’ are derived. In its linguistic roots, therefore, the phrase ‘holistic healing’ means nothing more than ‘healing which makes healthy’.

On the other hand, alternative methods of healing such as acupressure, acupuncture and different types of massage can certainly be understood as stimulating a type of healing inter-cellular communication between different organs and parts of the body – not through the flow of any ‘thing’ that might be called ‘energy’ but rather in the form of breath or air-like flows of atomic, molecular and cellular awareness. Understanding such flows in this way can help bring us closer to essence of what is called ‘Alternative Medicine’ and its distinction from both Biological Medicine and Life Medicine – namely that it works neither through the so-called ‘physical body’ nor through any form of ‘energy body’ but rather through that bounded portion of our larger ‘body of feeling’ awareness’ or ‘lived body’ that can be called the ‘physical soul’.

Understood in this way, alternative medicine in all its forms may indeed be effective in ameliorating or working on symptoms in a way that does not rely on conventional forms of biomedical testing and treatment. Yet even though biomedicine recognises neither a psychical ‘body of awareness’ nor a ‘physical soul’ made up of organised and organising patterns of atomic, molecular and cellular awareness, the ‘effectiveness’ of alternative medicine tends to be assessed – even by its own practitioners – in exactly the same terms as biomedicine. That is why this ‘effectiveness’ can and often is disputed or dismissed on the basis of the purely statistical or so-called ‘evidence-based’ criteria of biomedical science and research, which (like alternative medicine) singularly fails to research and assess what is most important of all and yet not something measurable in principle – namely the individual life meaning of a given symptom or illness for a patient as opposed to its supposedly universal ‘causes’ or ‘cures’ and the impersonal, statistical ‘evidence’ on which they are based.

Biomedicine and alternative medicine differ essentially only in the language they use to describe such ‘causes’ and in the ‘cures’ they offer. Thus whereas a biomedical practitioner may seek the causes of a disease in our genes or in organic disorders, a practitioner of alternative medicine may seek them in the form of ‘blockages’ in ‘energy flows’, an imbalance of so-called ‘energy centres’ or ‘chakras’, a lack of specific vitamins or nutrients, or a surfeit of ‘bad’ ones. And whereas a biomedical practitioner may prescribe a pharmaceutical drug with serious side effects or invasive and potentially dangerous operative surgery as a ‘cure’, the alternative practitioner merely offers a different form of ‘cure’ in the form, say, of a natural herb or a safer type of treatment procedure such as massage or acupuncture. The use of both may, like pharmaceutical drugs, either serve as a placebo and/or have very genuine effects on what I call the ‘physical soul’.

And yet, as I repeatedly emphasise, unlike ‘alternative’ or ‘complementary’ medicine, the focus of Life Medicine is neither on the physical soul or ‘body consciousness’ (i.e. the innate consciousness of our cells and tissues) and nor, like mainstream Biological Medicine, is its focus on the ‘physical body’ – which is nothing but the physical soul as perceived from the outside. Yet the physical soul is, again, but one portion of the lived body or soul body as a whole. Hence if only the patient’s body consciousness or physical soul is treated by whatever means – including those of ‘alternative medicine’ – then, despite all talk of treating the ‘whole person’ or of ‘holistic forms’ of medicine uniting ‘body and soul’, the patient’s larger soul and its body, their body of feeling awareness, remains unseen and unsensed.

In this sense the life of the human being and human body as a whole – their soul – is still ignored and left out of the picture even in alternative medicine. That is why, just as is the case in biological medicine (and no matter how more empathic, personable’ or ‘person-centred’ the ‘alternative’ or ‘complementary’ practitioner may be) the patient may be left feeling dis-ensouled. For whether in the form of homeopathic prescriptions, herbal remedies, touch therapies or acupuncture, the patient still ends up being given essentially impersonal forms of treatment, often also in a quasi-clinical setting and manner. Many alternative practitioners therefore effectively treat their patient, like biomedicine, merely as ‘some body’ – and not at all as a unique, living, breathing and embodied soul – one with a soul life and a soul body that extends far beyond the boundaries of the flesh and embraces their entire life world. Then again, the patient as a ‘person’ is but one face of their soul. The patient’s larger soul life and life world however – and its relation to their illness – is something that not even the most detailed medical history can offer a practitioner of any sort the slightest clues to – unless, as in the practice of Life Medicine, it is ‘complemented’ by also taking a detailed life history of the patient.

Finally, treating only the physical soul of a patient – whether through standard pharmaceutical drugs or through herbal remedies, touch therapies or ‘alternative medicine’ of any sort – carries its own dangers. For any externally induced alterations to the physical soul can have deep and even traumatic effects on the psyche and lived body of the patient as a whole – effects which practitioners of alternative or ‘holistic’ medicine who are untrained in any form psychotherapy or psychological counselling are ill-equipped to deal with.

Etymological note 1 – on the terms ‘whole’ and ‘heal’

It is a common but false belief that the root meaning of the verb ‘to heal’ is to ‘make whole’. It is true that the word holistic comes from the Greek holos meaning entire or ‘whole’. The word whole itself however, comes from Middle English hole/hoole or hāl – meaning not only ‘healthy’ but also ‘sound’ – as in the German words Hall (‘echoing sound’) and gesund – ‘healthy’ – but also in the sense of a gathering (ge-) of ‘sound’ (-sund) as in a hall – German Halle. A hall is a place of shelter but one that also echoes, reverberates and resounds (German hallen).

All these English and Germanic words connected with what is ‘whole’, ‘hale’ or ‘healthy’ are thus also intimately related to the German words heilig/das Heilige and their English equivalents – holy and the holy – which in turn refer not just to what is divine or sacred, but also and at the same time that which silently sounds and resounds through all that is. Hence the English hale and German heil, to be in ‘sound’ health. Hence also the German greeting Heil! and English hail! – greeting sounds that offer a divine blessing, grant good fortune, salvation and wish the other a long life – and that are echoed today in the everyday greeting words hello (English) and hallo (German).

The German verb heilen and English to heal – originally meaning to ‘protect’, ‘redeem’ or ‘save’, are all rooted in the Germanic hailaz – meaning a sounded magical or sacred blessing, and go back to the Indo-European kail. The opposite of all that is sound and hale is what in German is called das Unheil – usually translated as ‘misfortune’, ‘calamity’, ‘catastrophe’ or ‘disaster’. Yet what sort of ‘calamity’ or ‘catastrophe’ is meant here? One that merely causes or results from some sort of accidental misfortune – as illness or ill-health is thought to do. Surely not, since the word Unheil has related senses of something being not only unhealthy or unholy but also unsound. ‘To heal’ then, is not simply to restore health in the sense of curing or eliminating a disease but rather to restore the essence of health as ‘soundness’ or Ge-sundheit – to restore resonance. For where there is no longer any felt sense of resonance with another human being, how can the human being once again be brought into resonance with the holy – that which shelters and speaks to all beings within the cosmos, understood as a ‘hall’ or ‘house’ of God? That is why holy caves and temples were the first places people went to for ‘healing ’. It is also why the vocations of ‘holy man’, ‘shaman’ or ‘priest’ on the one hand – guardian of a holy cave, hall or temple – and healer on the other, were originally one. The holy man (or woman) was also a human being who effectively worked their capacity (energein) to use holy sounds and speech in the form of syllables, spells, mantras or prayers to heal – these being sounds and speech in resonance with the divine soul of the human being.



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