[MD] Science: Medicine?

[gav]

it surprises me that people who understand that organic farming is better than conventional farming don't get the same point in relation to their own health. chemicals are bad for the environment and they are bad for us...industrial medicine, like industrial agriculture is an anachronism. the concept of biodiversity and its integral relation to ecosystem health is a metaphor that can be applied to our own health - biologically, socially and intellectually.

biologically in the recognition that we are an ecology of cells and microrganisms. health is a function of the dynamic balance of microrganisms within our guts which optimise nutrition and elimination. drugs, legal and illegal, damage the integrity of this fundamental level. 

socially we are a product of the matrix of social relations that mediate our lives. if there is an imbalance - if for instance a significant number of these interrelations are inauthentic/oppressive, we see disharmony develop in the individual at an emotional level which if unchecked manifests eventually as physical illness

intellectually we are an ecology of ideas; if these ideas are coherent, if they interrelate logically, a map of reality results that allows us to understand ourselves and the world well, and consequently we feel in control of our lives. if these ideas are incoherent, if they lack a connecting underlying framework or principle (ie a metaphysics), then these ideas jostle for supremacy and we feel a lack or separation from reality prime - cos our map is incomplete, incoherent: it confuses rather than clarifies....we feel lost, disconnected....schizo-affective.

holism. the organism is more than the linear sum of its parts. it is a web of interconnections in which the *interconnections* - the dynamic element - are primary. separation and isolation, of elements of our body (eg the germ theory of disease), in the context of an atomised society, and in the context of disparate and discrete paradigms of thought, all reduce the number and vitality of these interconnections. the chi don't flow...we are all dammed rivers.

bye



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