In the wake of today's media blitz on the Unicef sponsored campaign called "Spread the Net" -an initiative to reduce the incidence of malaria in Africa -I wanted to pass this great opportunity to make a difference in world on to everyone I know.
So often donating to various causes feels intangible. You know your money is making a difference but you are not really sure how. What I love about this effort is the very practical and tangible nature of it. Its simple. One net can protect a child - and possibly a whole family in Africa from contracting malaria.
Malaria is the leading cause of death among children under the age of 5 and it claims 3000 African children a day! Hard to imagine isn't it?
If you want a first hand account of the impact this campaign can have, I encourage you to read Rick Mercer's blog entry of today at http://rickmercer.blogspot.com/2006/11/spread-net.html Not just a funny guy armed with sharp wit and intelligence, Mercer shares his thoughts about this initiative that he was inspired to support after a trip to Rwanda and Ethiopia.
If you want to make a difference in the world, here is a very simple way to do it. Go to http://www.spreadthenet.org/ and for $10 you can reduce pain, suffering and save lives.
Every 30 seconds an African child dies of malaria .... how long will you wait to make a difference?
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Energy and Information: The Stuff of Our Reality
em>As I sit down to write this morning, I am struck by the gap that exists between what I have to communicate and the language that I have available to me. I feel as though I am creating a whole new language as I go, imbuing familiar words with new intent and subtle shifts in meaning in order to communicate effectively. Each time I have returned to this blog and simply stared at the screen I felt the familiar pangs of a dream where I have something urgent to tell someone but can't seem to speak it or be heard. So here goes nothing! I can't even hope to come close to the mark unless I dive right in!!
Energy and information. It is absolutely everywhere. Sitting here at my computer, I am bombarded by waves and signals. Some are for my wireless network, television and radio signals are flowing through my space and light fills the room with chameleon photons - are they waves or particles? Still other waves of information are the sound waves carrying the jazz music encoded on my CD and flowing out of the speakers on my stereo and to my ears. Miraculously, even though the sounds that reach my ears are simply vibrations, I can differentiate between the sound of pleasant jazz and the less melodic snores of my dog, who is comfortably ensconced under my desk. Waves, carrying both energy and information, picked up by the receiver that is my ear and interpreted into separate and yet co-mingled experiences by a flurry of neuronal discharges in the cortex of my brain.
Sight works in much the same fashion. Our eyes and optic nerves are the receivers for waves filled with energy and information. Once received, that information sets off a cascade of neuronal impulses whose energy seems to be electrical and chemical and my visual reality is created. Seems hard to fathom, doesn't it? And yet, these are widely accepted facts about how these sensory systems work. What is less often discussed is the troubling notion that there is in fact no way to prove the existence of an outside world since our entire interpretation of the world "out there" is based on this flurry of cortical activity once information is passed from receiver to brain. In the words of Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets, "You are not in the world, the world is in you."
The five senses seem to have a common thread in that they move through a set of receivers to become a series of impulses within the brain that can then be used to create experience. We have come to accept that we operate within a framework of these 5 senses. It is yet another lens of our familiar worldview and has imbued a familiar assumption with the status of "truth". What if, in fact, we are multi-sensory beyond these 5? What are the implications to how we live, how we define ourselves?
Esoteric and metaphysical traditions having been offering these possibilities up to us for some time now. And like much of what is available in our current worldview, these concepts are often laden with notions of energy and information that is judged as good or bad, that is the domain of special experts such as mystics, intutitives or healers who seek to create a balance that speaks of some form of normal. Far too often, they rely on their interpretation of what they perceive to be their client's energy and information to be - ignoring the client's personal experience.
Although I have had many interesting experiences in this realm because of my curiosity, I am not at all satisfied with esoteric and metaphysical explanations. I have never found what I was seeking, which was something that held more potential and possibility than I could find within a traditional medical framework. I found plenty that evoked even more questions and that amazed me and yet there seemed to be lots of rules, notions of expertise and initiation along with a hearty doses of good energy vs. bad energy. Blinded by a familiar worldview, the current interpretation of much of this fascinating information is limited by the very same handicap that I believe limits the possibility for medicine. These fields may seem to be very attractive alternatives and even quite far off the traditional path for some, but they continue to operate within same restrictions, making them less of a leap than many would think.
If we begin to consider this information through the lens of autopoiesis, there is much more scope available for consideration. Rather than consider energy and information, whether it appears on an MRI or as an alteration in aura or restriction in chi, as good vs. bad and attempt to fit it into a scale of normal, we can open up other possibilities. One possibility is that it is intelligent and is being constructed or co-created by observer and observed. Now that may need a moment to let your intellect process, but think about it for a minute. The person having an experience is creating it from the information flowing through receivers/senses to the brain which in turn is creating an experience based on the composite of this information. The observer, is, in turn, having their own experience constructed in a similar manner. My experience isn't the clients and vice versa and yet we are sharing something simultaneously.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention my fascination with the concept of the observer at this point. We know from quantum physics that the observer phenomenon is very potent. It is the element that seems to evoke a specific outcome from a range of possibilities. For example, the classic experiment to determine whether light was in fact a particle or a wave was highly influenced by the expectation of the hypothesis and observer. If it was expected to be a wave and measured as such, then the photons, or packets of energy and information that make up light, would behave as though they were waves. If they were expected to be particles, they behaved like particles. Without going into tremendous detail, as there are numerous places to read about this phenomenon, the photons existed as packages of energy and information that held a wide range of possibilities and participated with the observer and their intention to create a result. You are in not the world, the world is in you. We have incredible influence in the creation of our experiences and by extension, our world.
I am absolutely fascinated by how our expectations as clients and practitioners shape our reality, translating to our perceived results. There has been much written about the concept of intention in the past 5 years. Wayne Dyer opened the subject wide with his best seller, The Power of Intention. The popularity of The Secret is another indicator that society is ready for another way to consider what we attract and create in our life. How might that apply to medicine?
/>Radical thought? Maybe yes, maybe no. We know that energy and information exists everywhere, including in the very atoms that vibrate in a frequency that we can recognize as a table or an ultrasound wave...and yes, as our physical body too. We are not exempt. Tissue, fluid, neurotransmitters, hormones, DNA could all be broken down to their composite atomic components too. As we work with the macro aspect of our bodies, the ligament, the bone, the hormone etc, what else is occurring at the micro level? How does our interaction, expectations and intention begin to influence the very molecules that make us up? Worth some consideration, don't you think?
What about other receivers? Bruce Lipton has gathered some very compelling evidence that cells have receptors on the exterior of their membrane. His research concluded that they are clearly attuned to some signal in their external environment. A signal that is unique, a signal that is "Self". Read his book, The Biology of Belief, for more information.
What other systems do we have to process energy and information through? Our brain may be quite attuned to the 5 senses but we have other systems that process information very effectively within the body itself. Candice Pert shares her discovery of the many neurotransmitter pathways that exist in the body which store and process energy and information in her book, Molecules of Emotion. There is a very strong link in my mind between her discoveries and the concept of chi and meridians in acupuncture.
Energy and information. It is absolutely everywhere. Sitting here at my computer, I am bombarded by waves and signals. Some are for my wireless network, television and radio signals are flowing through my space and light fills the room with chameleon photons - are they waves or particles? Still other waves of information are the sound waves carrying the jazz music encoded on my CD and flowing out of the speakers on my stereo and to my ears. Miraculously, even though the sounds that reach my ears are simply vibrations, I can differentiate between the sound of pleasant jazz and the less melodic snores of my dog, who is comfortably ensconced under my desk. Waves, carrying both energy and information, picked up by the receiver that is my ear and interpreted into separate and yet co-mingled experiences by a flurry of neuronal discharges in the cortex of my brain.
Sight works in much the same fashion. Our eyes and optic nerves are the receivers for waves filled with energy and information. Once received, that information sets off a cascade of neuronal impulses whose energy seems to be electrical and chemical and my visual reality is created. Seems hard to fathom, doesn't it? And yet, these are widely accepted facts about how these sensory systems work. What is less often discussed is the troubling notion that there is in fact no way to prove the existence of an outside world since our entire interpretation of the world "out there" is based on this flurry of cortical activity once information is passed from receiver to brain. In the words of Deepak Chopra, The Book of Secrets, "You are not in the world, the world is in you."
The five senses seem to have a common thread in that they move through a set of receivers to become a series of impulses within the brain that can then be used to create experience. We have come to accept that we operate within a framework of these 5 senses. It is yet another lens of our familiar worldview and has imbued a familiar assumption with the status of "truth". What if, in fact, we are multi-sensory beyond these 5? What are the implications to how we live, how we define ourselves?
Esoteric and metaphysical traditions having been offering these possibilities up to us for some time now. And like much of what is available in our current worldview, these concepts are often laden with notions of energy and information that is judged as good or bad, that is the domain of special experts such as mystics, intutitives or healers who seek to create a balance that speaks of some form of normal. Far too often, they rely on their interpretation of what they perceive to be their client's energy and information to be - ignoring the client's personal experience.
Although I have had many interesting experiences in this realm because of my curiosity, I am not at all satisfied with esoteric and metaphysical explanations. I have never found what I was seeking, which was something that held more potential and possibility than I could find within a traditional medical framework. I found plenty that evoked even more questions and that amazed me and yet there seemed to be lots of rules, notions of expertise and initiation along with a hearty doses of good energy vs. bad energy. Blinded by a familiar worldview, the current interpretation of much of this fascinating information is limited by the very same handicap that I believe limits the possibility for medicine. These fields may seem to be very attractive alternatives and even quite far off the traditional path for some, but they continue to operate within same restrictions, making them less of a leap than many would think.
If we begin to consider this information through the lens of autopoiesis, there is much more scope available for consideration. Rather than consider energy and information, whether it appears on an MRI or as an alteration in aura or restriction in chi, as good vs. bad and attempt to fit it into a scale of normal, we can open up other possibilities. One possibility is that it is intelligent and is being constructed or co-created by observer and observed. Now that may need a moment to let your intellect process, but think about it for a minute. The person having an experience is creating it from the information flowing through receivers/senses to the brain which in turn is creating an experience based on the composite of this information. The observer, is, in turn, having their own experience constructed in a similar manner. My experience isn't the clients and vice versa and yet we are sharing something simultaneously.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention my fascination with the concept of the observer at this point. We know from quantum physics that the observer phenomenon is very potent. It is the element that seems to evoke a specific outcome from a range of possibilities. For example, the classic experiment to determine whether light was in fact a particle or a wave was highly influenced by the expectation of the hypothesis and observer. If it was expected to be a wave and measured as such, then the photons, or packets of energy and information that make up light, would behave as though they were waves. If they were expected to be particles, they behaved like particles. Without going into tremendous detail, as there are numerous places to read about this phenomenon, the photons existed as packages of energy and information that held a wide range of possibilities and participated with the observer and their intention to create a result. You are in not the world, the world is in you. We have incredible influence in the creation of our experiences and by extension, our world.
I am absolutely fascinated by how our expectations as clients and practitioners shape our reality, translating to our perceived results. There has been much written about the concept of intention in the past 5 years. Wayne Dyer opened the subject wide with his best seller, The Power of Intention. The popularity of The Secret is another indicator that society is ready for another way to consider what we attract and create in our life. How might that apply to medicine?
/>Radical thought? Maybe yes, maybe no. We know that energy and information exists everywhere, including in the very atoms that vibrate in a frequency that we can recognize as a table or an ultrasound wave...and yes, as our physical body too. We are not exempt. Tissue, fluid, neurotransmitters, hormones, DNA could all be broken down to their composite atomic components too. As we work with the macro aspect of our bodies, the ligament, the bone, the hormone etc, what else is occurring at the micro level? How does our interaction, expectations and intention begin to influence the very molecules that make us up? Worth some consideration, don't you think?
What about other receivers? Bruce Lipton has gathered some very compelling evidence that cells have receptors on the exterior of their membrane. His research concluded that they are clearly attuned to some signal in their external environment. A signal that is unique, a signal that is "Self". Read his book, The Biology of Belief, for more information.
What other systems do we have to process energy and information through? Our brain may be quite attuned to the 5 senses but we have other systems that process information very effectively within the body itself. Candice Pert shares her discovery of the many neurotransmitter pathways that exist in the body which store and process energy and information in her book, Molecules of Emotion. There is a very strong link in my mind between her discoveries and the concept of chi and meridians in acupuncture.
What about our facial system? Fascia, the 3 dimensional web-like milky coating that flows over and through our muscles, organs, blood vessels, nerves and in fact, into every single cell has been postulated to be a vast network of micro-tubules that flow throughout our entire body. Within the tubules, energy and information is carried in various forms including thermal, mechanical and electromagnetic (John Barnes, Healing Ancient Wounds). Anyone who has experienced work or training with respect to the fascial system will likely have had an experience where energy and information begins to move rapidly in the body, giving rise to sensations and, quite often, old memories.
The body is but one interface for this type of energy and information to be released into flow. Another is Quantum TLC(TM) (see Louise LeBrun, Phoenix Rising as well as Gwen McCauley, The Alchemy of Energy). The point is less about how energy and information is stored and accessed, but about the fact that it exists. This is an element blatantly absent from our current models but one I suspect any clinician, and certainly every human, has experienced but may not have had the language to describe. Limiting our explorations of energy medicine by placing them within the context of our familiar worldview also dimishes their potency and potential.
I've been in the rehabilitation medical field for 15 years and I can feel the palpable restlessness among many of my colleagues who quietly seek out ways to explore, evolve and then often struggle when it comes to integrating what has become meaningful for them personally into their existing models when working with others. Some end up leaving and embracing more alternative approaches because they have been unable to bridge the gap. Many times they discover that they have jumped from the frying pan into the fire as the "box" looks different but it still has some limitations. Others keep their thoughts and opinions pretty close to their chests in the hope that they will continue to fit into the collective. Clients are seeking, too. They recognize that something is missing and growing numbers of them are looking for alternatives. I believe the collective is shifting and its time we began to explore the range of potential and possibility that so many scientific pioneers have opened up for us. This is not new science by the way. Much of it has been around for 70+ years. Don't we all deserve an open exploration. In the past, curiosity has been a punishable offence, I don't believe that is the case any longer if we are to grow and evolve.
I've been in the rehabilitation medical field for 15 years and I can feel the palpable restlessness among many of my colleagues who quietly seek out ways to explore, evolve and then often struggle when it comes to integrating what has become meaningful for them personally into their existing models when working with others. Some end up leaving and embracing more alternative approaches because they have been unable to bridge the gap. Many times they discover that they have jumped from the frying pan into the fire as the "box" looks different but it still has some limitations. Others keep their thoughts and opinions pretty close to their chests in the hope that they will continue to fit into the collective. Clients are seeking, too. They recognize that something is missing and growing numbers of them are looking for alternatives. I believe the collective is shifting and its time we began to explore the range of potential and possibility that so many scientific pioneers have opened up for us. This is not new science by the way. Much of it has been around for 70+ years. Don't we all deserve an open exploration. In the past, curiosity has been a punishable offence, I don't believe that is the case any longer if we are to grow and evolve.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
A Different Lens
em>I've been absent these past few days, not because I don't have anything to say, but rather because there is so much I want to say that I wasn't really sure where to begin! I'm going to just dive in and hope that you will ask questions and check out the references if I am unclear. This will certainly be ground I will cover repeatedly and in different ways as this blog unfolds. So here we go!
I decided to begin exploring the concept of worldview in this missive. Largely because it begins to create a different platform from which to think about our medical models. Right now, we are conditioned to looking at our health and, in fact our world, through a particular set of lens. Its like wearing your sunglasses all day at the beach. It can become quite easy to forget that you are seeing through a lens. When you remove your sunglasses, you see the same things quite differently. Its not as though either way of seeing was incorrect, they were simply different.
Different perspectives are available depending on what lens you are looking through. Staying with the sunglasses analogy, my husband had a strange experience when he put his sunglasses on in the car last summer and realized that he could no longer see the display on the radio of his new vehicle. Thoroughly annoyed thinking that the display was malfunctioning, he was nearly ready to turn around and head back to the dealership, when I pointed out that I could see the display just fine and I wasn't wearing sunglasses. Different set of lens, different "realities".
The lens of our current worldview is so pervasive that it becomes difficult to imagine that any other possible way of "seeing" exists. I believe this is further compounded if we are participating in any kind of scientific, medical or paramedical field as these aspects of our culture have been in many ways untouchable. When we begin to poke at the underpinnings of these parts of our worldview, we are in jeopardy of bringing down the whole house of cards that constitutes our sense of reality. And yet, reluctance to change does mean that change isn't already occurring. We can only put our heads in the sand for so long before we either suffocate or come up for air and come face to face with another way of seeing.
Having said that, it doesn't mean that one version of reality, one version of a worldview is inherently right. Just like my husband's experience when wearing sunglasses, there may be aspects of our reality that are not visible when seeing through the lens of our current worldview. It doesn't mean the alternative possibility isn't there, its simply beyond our perception until someone points it out to us.
For ease of reference, I will call the current worldview our "familiar worldview". The alternative I am presenting, I will call an "autopoietic worldview". Let me say right up front that there are few references available to explore this so I will direct you to the links section where you will see WEL-Systems Institute listed. This information comes directly from experiences and education I acquired through the programs I have taken with WEL-Systems. My quest for an alternative to our familiar worldview had taken me far and wide when I discovered the elegant simplicity available through a WEL-Systems perspective. It simply made sense to me and so I am sharing it with you here.
I have made one minor change in that I am referring to a "familiar worldview" as I have found that the moniker of "therapy model worldview" used in the WEL-Systems body of knowledge invariably confuses therapists and those in the medical community and diverts attention from the more important point, that being the potential for looking beyond the lens of the familiar and recognizing that there is actually a continuum of perspectives on "reality" available - with our familiar worldview at one end and an autopoietic worldview at the other end. In between, the possibilities are endless.
Confused yet? Lets start with what has been familiar to us and through simply familiarity has gained our unquestioning allegiance. Our notions of reality are firmly based on Newtonian Science and the early medical concepts put forth by Des Cartes. We have been taught to believe that what really matters is matter. Its not real if you can't see it or touch it. We treat and refer to our bodies as mechanical devices from the cellular membrane to the heart as a "pump". These analogies of how body systems work steadily reinforces our mechanistic point of view. We rarely engage the concepts of energy and information in traditional medicine, with the exception of diagnostic tests.
Our familiar worldview tells us that we ARE our bodies. That all individual responses are judged against an external measure called "normal" - the state we strive for whether it is our blood chemistry or the opinion of our colleagues. Existing outside the range of "normal" signals that we are in dangerous territory. Normal is reinforced with rigor in the cultural realm where there is tremendous pressure to meet the expectations of society, family systems, governments and peer groups.
It even extends to how we are manipulated by the pharmaceutical industry. Recently reading , Selling Sickness, I was shocked to discover that the pharmaceutical industry has manipulated the "normal" values of cholesterol blood tests to ensure high volume of sales of its key medications. The range of "acceptable normal" for cholesterol has been altered at least once in the last decade without any significant research findings other than a panel review of "experts" who receive financial endorsements from the very companies who stand to profit from their recommendations.
This brings me to yet another key tenant of our familiar worldview and that is that an "expert" is someone other than you. The expert can look at your experience as though he/she is reading a guide or a map and tell you exactly what you are experiencing and what must be done. It is as if by reading a Michelin tourist guide about Italy, an expert can tell an Italian citizen what life in Italy is like with more conviction and have that interpretation become the "truth" regardless of what the Italian citizen might know from their personal experience. Sound familiar? I think the very fact that opinion based on case study becomes irrefutable truth is a big contributor to the problems in our medical system. There is no room for conversation or personal experience. That, accompanied by a strict adherence to "normal", forms the sides of an impenetrable box leaving little room for discovery and lots of latitude for error.
This is particularly troubling if you are considered one of the "experts" because of your field of practice. There are times when we wear this cloak with ease but far more often in my own experience, the mantle of expert doesn't rest easily when a case doesn't conform to expectations. When a patient doesn't get better in spite of your best efforts any number of things scoot through our minds. We question our skills, we blame the patient for somehow not conforming to our recommendations and we begin to seek solutions shot gun style from more tests to pharmaceuticals, all in an effort to resolve the situation. How often do we actually listen? Why do we assume something is wrong - what if this is a very intelligent response? What tools do we have to guide our patients into their own unique experience - not as an expert but as someone accompanying them on a journey of discovery. Curiosity is a valuable trait when accompanying someone into discovery and not one always associated with the an expert expected to already know all the answers.
I will share a very simple example of a young man I treated a few years back. He was a stellar baseball pitcher and well on his way to a scholarship and possible professional career in the sport. He had been groomed from age 3 to excel in the sport that his parent's felt he had an aptitude for. The entire family's social life was built around his sport. Then one spring, he developed terrible shoulder pain forcing him to sit out several games. He was seen by several top orthopaedic surgeons, received MRIs and CT scans, steroid injections and oral anti-inflammatory medication regularly throughout this course of treatment before he landed in my caseload for Physiotherapy treatment.
I took his history with his anxious parents present. All subjective and objective test findings indicated a rotator cuff impingement that was at risk of tearing if he returned to pitching without resolution. He began a typical course of physiotherapy with a colleague and got no better. A few weeks later I noticed he was in my schedule again. I re-tested him with the same results as a few weeks earlier.
This time his parents decided to stay in the waiting room and I decided that perhaps it was time to shift focus. I asked him, a 15 year old boy, why he thought he may not be getting better. Watching closely, I saw his breathing begin to change. He shrugged and told me he didn't know why. Not content to let this opportunity slip away when something was clearly happening below the surface, I playfully asked him, to imagine that he might know the answer, and what did his imagination have to say. He immediately began to have a body response. His breathing changed again, his arm began to subtly twitch and he suddenly felt like a furnace radiating heat. I gently encouraged him to just relax and breathe deeply, acknowledging that something was going on in his body and that was perfectly fine.
After a few short minutes, he looked quite comfortable, peaceful and somewhat surprised. He began to tell me that until that moment, he hadn't realized just how much he didn't enjoy baseball anymore. He wanted his summer off to spend with friends and to try out a summer job. Until that moment, he said, he didn't realize just how trapped he felt and how frightened he was to let his parents down. In the next breath, he let me know that he knew what he had to do and that it was going to be fine. I encouraged him to trust what he had just experienced and we carried on with his regular physio session. The whole interaction took less than 10 minutes.
He showed the first improvement after months of treatments at the end of that session and within 2 or 3 weeks was discharged with a pain free and fully functional shoulder and the prospect of a very different summer ahead of him.
As I write it down, it doesn't seem all the remarkable. The intuitive side of me recognizes exactly what went on here. However, what I do find remarkable is that after all the "experts", the tests, the medications a simple question about this young man's personal experience and a willingness to entertain the possibility that it was an intelligent response to have shoulder pain and to experience the subtle shifts in his body when asked about his experience - was the key to restoring his wellness on several levels. It was simple, easy and effective. All I had to do was step beyond my familiar lens and into another where I was no longer the expert, but he was.
There are many more points that define this familiar worldview we share and I will offer a few more that I think are particularly relevant in this conversation. Some of which are the need to figure out "why" as though once the mystery is solved intellectually or diagnosed, everything will get better or we will know exactly how to proceed. So far, in my own experience of working with clients, asking them about their experience and staying with them while encouraging them to relax into their bodies, I have discovered that there is often no clear answer to the mystery, or at least one that can be explained with language. The sensory information that moves through the body seems to carry its own answer for the individual. They experience an insight which often is difficult to express but they "know". That is sufficient.
We also tend to believe that the more intense the experience is in the body, the more serious it is. Furthermore, those intense sensory cues are not to be trusted because they signal danger. As a woman about to give birth to my second child, I can't begin to tell you how hard wired that message can be. Even in the throes of childbirth, a very healthy and natural body function, some women experience intense fear because of the deep unconscious messages we carry about not trusting our body, particularly when the sensory experience is intense. Intense experiences, whether they result in a newborn or not, are an indication of the amount of information moving through the body. If I tighten up my body as contractions occur, I will experience more physical discomfort than if I breathe, relax and let my body take the lead, trusting that it knows what comes next. And that dear reader, is based on more than my childbirth experience! It holds true for many life experiences - physical, emotional and spiritual.
There are many more tacit truths about our familiar worldview than I have engaged here so I will refer you to Phoenix Rising: The Freeing of Human Potential by Louise LeBrun (available through http://www.wel-systems.com/) for a complete and highly thought provoking overview.
You may have noticed the counterpoints of an autopoietic worldview shared above but let me make them abundantly clear here. I know that while they make sense, they are often not our default way of interacting with the world. I encourage you to ponder them, try them on for size and keep them in your awareness if only to see what doors they may open in your perception.
A partial overview of an Autopoietic worldview consists of the following:
I decided to begin exploring the concept of worldview in this missive. Largely because it begins to create a different platform from which to think about our medical models. Right now, we are conditioned to looking at our health and, in fact our world, through a particular set of lens. Its like wearing your sunglasses all day at the beach. It can become quite easy to forget that you are seeing through a lens. When you remove your sunglasses, you see the same things quite differently. Its not as though either way of seeing was incorrect, they were simply different.
Different perspectives are available depending on what lens you are looking through. Staying with the sunglasses analogy, my husband had a strange experience when he put his sunglasses on in the car last summer and realized that he could no longer see the display on the radio of his new vehicle. Thoroughly annoyed thinking that the display was malfunctioning, he was nearly ready to turn around and head back to the dealership, when I pointed out that I could see the display just fine and I wasn't wearing sunglasses. Different set of lens, different "realities".
The lens of our current worldview is so pervasive that it becomes difficult to imagine that any other possible way of "seeing" exists. I believe this is further compounded if we are participating in any kind of scientific, medical or paramedical field as these aspects of our culture have been in many ways untouchable. When we begin to poke at the underpinnings of these parts of our worldview, we are in jeopardy of bringing down the whole house of cards that constitutes our sense of reality. And yet, reluctance to change does mean that change isn't already occurring. We can only put our heads in the sand for so long before we either suffocate or come up for air and come face to face with another way of seeing.
Having said that, it doesn't mean that one version of reality, one version of a worldview is inherently right. Just like my husband's experience when wearing sunglasses, there may be aspects of our reality that are not visible when seeing through the lens of our current worldview. It doesn't mean the alternative possibility isn't there, its simply beyond our perception until someone points it out to us.
For ease of reference, I will call the current worldview our "familiar worldview". The alternative I am presenting, I will call an "autopoietic worldview". Let me say right up front that there are few references available to explore this so I will direct you to the links section where you will see WEL-Systems Institute listed. This information comes directly from experiences and education I acquired through the programs I have taken with WEL-Systems. My quest for an alternative to our familiar worldview had taken me far and wide when I discovered the elegant simplicity available through a WEL-Systems perspective. It simply made sense to me and so I am sharing it with you here.
I have made one minor change in that I am referring to a "familiar worldview" as I have found that the moniker of "therapy model worldview" used in the WEL-Systems body of knowledge invariably confuses therapists and those in the medical community and diverts attention from the more important point, that being the potential for looking beyond the lens of the familiar and recognizing that there is actually a continuum of perspectives on "reality" available - with our familiar worldview at one end and an autopoietic worldview at the other end. In between, the possibilities are endless.
Confused yet? Lets start with what has been familiar to us and through simply familiarity has gained our unquestioning allegiance. Our notions of reality are firmly based on Newtonian Science and the early medical concepts put forth by Des Cartes. We have been taught to believe that what really matters is matter. Its not real if you can't see it or touch it. We treat and refer to our bodies as mechanical devices from the cellular membrane to the heart as a "pump". These analogies of how body systems work steadily reinforces our mechanistic point of view. We rarely engage the concepts of energy and information in traditional medicine, with the exception of diagnostic tests.
Our familiar worldview tells us that we ARE our bodies. That all individual responses are judged against an external measure called "normal" - the state we strive for whether it is our blood chemistry or the opinion of our colleagues. Existing outside the range of "normal" signals that we are in dangerous territory. Normal is reinforced with rigor in the cultural realm where there is tremendous pressure to meet the expectations of society, family systems, governments and peer groups.
It even extends to how we are manipulated by the pharmaceutical industry. Recently reading , Selling Sickness, I was shocked to discover that the pharmaceutical industry has manipulated the "normal" values of cholesterol blood tests to ensure high volume of sales of its key medications. The range of "acceptable normal" for cholesterol has been altered at least once in the last decade without any significant research findings other than a panel review of "experts" who receive financial endorsements from the very companies who stand to profit from their recommendations.
This brings me to yet another key tenant of our familiar worldview and that is that an "expert" is someone other than you. The expert can look at your experience as though he/she is reading a guide or a map and tell you exactly what you are experiencing and what must be done. It is as if by reading a Michelin tourist guide about Italy, an expert can tell an Italian citizen what life in Italy is like with more conviction and have that interpretation become the "truth" regardless of what the Italian citizen might know from their personal experience. Sound familiar? I think the very fact that opinion based on case study becomes irrefutable truth is a big contributor to the problems in our medical system. There is no room for conversation or personal experience. That, accompanied by a strict adherence to "normal", forms the sides of an impenetrable box leaving little room for discovery and lots of latitude for error.
This is particularly troubling if you are considered one of the "experts" because of your field of practice. There are times when we wear this cloak with ease but far more often in my own experience, the mantle of expert doesn't rest easily when a case doesn't conform to expectations. When a patient doesn't get better in spite of your best efforts any number of things scoot through our minds. We question our skills, we blame the patient for somehow not conforming to our recommendations and we begin to seek solutions shot gun style from more tests to pharmaceuticals, all in an effort to resolve the situation. How often do we actually listen? Why do we assume something is wrong - what if this is a very intelligent response? What tools do we have to guide our patients into their own unique experience - not as an expert but as someone accompanying them on a journey of discovery. Curiosity is a valuable trait when accompanying someone into discovery and not one always associated with the an expert expected to already know all the answers.
I will share a very simple example of a young man I treated a few years back. He was a stellar baseball pitcher and well on his way to a scholarship and possible professional career in the sport. He had been groomed from age 3 to excel in the sport that his parent's felt he had an aptitude for. The entire family's social life was built around his sport. Then one spring, he developed terrible shoulder pain forcing him to sit out several games. He was seen by several top orthopaedic surgeons, received MRIs and CT scans, steroid injections and oral anti-inflammatory medication regularly throughout this course of treatment before he landed in my caseload for Physiotherapy treatment.
I took his history with his anxious parents present. All subjective and objective test findings indicated a rotator cuff impingement that was at risk of tearing if he returned to pitching without resolution. He began a typical course of physiotherapy with a colleague and got no better. A few weeks later I noticed he was in my schedule again. I re-tested him with the same results as a few weeks earlier.
This time his parents decided to stay in the waiting room and I decided that perhaps it was time to shift focus. I asked him, a 15 year old boy, why he thought he may not be getting better. Watching closely, I saw his breathing begin to change. He shrugged and told me he didn't know why. Not content to let this opportunity slip away when something was clearly happening below the surface, I playfully asked him, to imagine that he might know the answer, and what did his imagination have to say. He immediately began to have a body response. His breathing changed again, his arm began to subtly twitch and he suddenly felt like a furnace radiating heat. I gently encouraged him to just relax and breathe deeply, acknowledging that something was going on in his body and that was perfectly fine.
After a few short minutes, he looked quite comfortable, peaceful and somewhat surprised. He began to tell me that until that moment, he hadn't realized just how much he didn't enjoy baseball anymore. He wanted his summer off to spend with friends and to try out a summer job. Until that moment, he said, he didn't realize just how trapped he felt and how frightened he was to let his parents down. In the next breath, he let me know that he knew what he had to do and that it was going to be fine. I encouraged him to trust what he had just experienced and we carried on with his regular physio session. The whole interaction took less than 10 minutes.
He showed the first improvement after months of treatments at the end of that session and within 2 or 3 weeks was discharged with a pain free and fully functional shoulder and the prospect of a very different summer ahead of him.
As I write it down, it doesn't seem all the remarkable. The intuitive side of me recognizes exactly what went on here. However, what I do find remarkable is that after all the "experts", the tests, the medications a simple question about this young man's personal experience and a willingness to entertain the possibility that it was an intelligent response to have shoulder pain and to experience the subtle shifts in his body when asked about his experience - was the key to restoring his wellness on several levels. It was simple, easy and effective. All I had to do was step beyond my familiar lens and into another where I was no longer the expert, but he was.
There are many more points that define this familiar worldview we share and I will offer a few more that I think are particularly relevant in this conversation. Some of which are the need to figure out "why" as though once the mystery is solved intellectually or diagnosed, everything will get better or we will know exactly how to proceed. So far, in my own experience of working with clients, asking them about their experience and staying with them while encouraging them to relax into their bodies, I have discovered that there is often no clear answer to the mystery, or at least one that can be explained with language. The sensory information that moves through the body seems to carry its own answer for the individual. They experience an insight which often is difficult to express but they "know". That is sufficient.
We also tend to believe that the more intense the experience is in the body, the more serious it is. Furthermore, those intense sensory cues are not to be trusted because they signal danger. As a woman about to give birth to my second child, I can't begin to tell you how hard wired that message can be. Even in the throes of childbirth, a very healthy and natural body function, some women experience intense fear because of the deep unconscious messages we carry about not trusting our body, particularly when the sensory experience is intense. Intense experiences, whether they result in a newborn or not, are an indication of the amount of information moving through the body. If I tighten up my body as contractions occur, I will experience more physical discomfort than if I breathe, relax and let my body take the lead, trusting that it knows what comes next. And that dear reader, is based on more than my childbirth experience! It holds true for many life experiences - physical, emotional and spiritual.
There are many more tacit truths about our familiar worldview than I have engaged here so I will refer you to Phoenix Rising: The Freeing of Human Potential by Louise LeBrun (available through http://www.wel-systems.com/) for a complete and highly thought provoking overview.
You may have noticed the counterpoints of an autopoietic worldview shared above but let me make them abundantly clear here. I know that while they make sense, they are often not our default way of interacting with the world. I encourage you to ponder them, try them on for size and keep them in your awareness if only to see what doors they may open in your perception.
A partial overview of an Autopoietic worldview consists of the following:
- there is more than a Newtonian or Cartesian way of looking at the world and that is through the discoveries of Quantum Science where the unseen (energy, information) is just a real as matter
- we are MORE than our bodies. Call it what you will, but I am clear that the essence of me is much more than my physical package. I agree with the notion that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. What holds true for you?
- our bodies are not mechanical devices but function as an organic processor that process energy and information (more on this in upcoming entries)
- our body never lies, we can trust the truth of our own experiences
- each of us is an expert in our own right because we are the ones having the experience (remember the Italian having his experience of being Italian interpreted by an expert with no personal experience)
- the more intensely we feel or experience, the more energy and information that is moving through our body, an organic processor
- there is intelligence behind what goes on in our bodies that we can access by simply breathing , relaxing and allowing ourselves to claim what is true for us about our experience
I am not endeavoring to present these worldviews as either/or. Neither one is right or wrong. They are simply two different possibilities, two different perspectives. I will claim, however, that I have found that the range of possibility and potential that exists in an autopoietic framework to have made a tremendous difference in how I practice Physiotherapy and Personal Coaching as well as how I live.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Body Talk - Discovering the Wisdom Within
There are days when I catch myself having variations of the same conversation many times over and I find that hard to ignore. The theme du jour had much to do with how we have learned not to trust ourselves.
I had the opportunity to speak with a delightful woman today who reminded me once again of the futility of trying to shut down the intelligence of our body. In many cases it simply will not be silenced with prescription meds, putting mind over matter or trying to dull it with alcohol. It simply waits for another opportunity to knock on our consciousness. I believe we need to start paying attention to those messages before they go underground only to resurface as physical dis-ease.
Somewhere along the line we have come to believe that our bodies are the enemy. That we are held hostage to the whims of flesh and bone. That we are victims of our physiology, genetics, or -fill in the blank. We also have come to prize our intellect as represented by our "brain", ignoring the incredibly vast and dense network of connection that is our body. The brain in essence is a clearing house and filtration device. It is our body that is equipped with elaborate sensory capacity. It is designed to support our survival and evolution. It is not the enemy but rather our vehicle for living. Without a body we cease to exist on this plane. It makes sense that it would be created to maximize our survival!
There has recently been a bit of media buzz around the discovery of the additional function of the intestinal tract as a sensory device that also affects our immune system. Turns out that the phrase "gut feeling" is more fact than colloquialism. Consider the number of people diagnosed with everything from irritable bowel syndrome to Chrohn's Disease. Is it possible that their gut had some intelligence that was left ignored because we learned not to trust those gut feelings? A courageous young woman, Karina Evangelista, shares her personal journey of full recovery from Chrohn's Disease in chapter one of Sekhmet Rising: The Restlessness of Women's Genius. Because current medicine doesn't hold a belief that Chrohn's is a curable condition, she is simply considered a non-compliant Chrohn's case. Karina is clear about the moment she choose to trust the messages her body was sending and what choices she needed to make to move from dis-ease into ease.
Trusting that what goes on in our body as both intelligent and is a gateway to our evolution is a radical shift away from the silencing that requires progressive pharmaceutical intervention, addictions and the many other possible distractions we create to avoid the message because we fear the messenger. I have heard it said that in a struggle between the body and the intellect - the body always wins. I am inclined to agree.
As a final caveat, I wrestle with whether to dilute my message here but find myself wanting to explain that I don't see any of this as either/or situation. Rather I see the potential and possibility represented by a continuum. Before medicating, whatever our "drug" of choice might be, I urge you to consider what the intelligence is that is seeking expression through the body.
Learning to trust the body's innate wisdom is the essence of what I consider body talk and how I came to name this blog. Thanks for taking this journey with me!
I had the opportunity to speak with a delightful woman today who reminded me once again of the futility of trying to shut down the intelligence of our body. In many cases it simply will not be silenced with prescription meds, putting mind over matter or trying to dull it with alcohol. It simply waits for another opportunity to knock on our consciousness. I believe we need to start paying attention to those messages before they go underground only to resurface as physical dis-ease.
Somewhere along the line we have come to believe that our bodies are the enemy. That we are held hostage to the whims of flesh and bone. That we are victims of our physiology, genetics, or -fill in the blank. We also have come to prize our intellect as represented by our "brain", ignoring the incredibly vast and dense network of connection that is our body. The brain in essence is a clearing house and filtration device. It is our body that is equipped with elaborate sensory capacity. It is designed to support our survival and evolution. It is not the enemy but rather our vehicle for living. Without a body we cease to exist on this plane. It makes sense that it would be created to maximize our survival!
There has recently been a bit of media buzz around the discovery of the additional function of the intestinal tract as a sensory device that also affects our immune system. Turns out that the phrase "gut feeling" is more fact than colloquialism. Consider the number of people diagnosed with everything from irritable bowel syndrome to Chrohn's Disease. Is it possible that their gut had some intelligence that was left ignored because we learned not to trust those gut feelings? A courageous young woman, Karina Evangelista, shares her personal journey of full recovery from Chrohn's Disease in chapter one of Sekhmet Rising: The Restlessness of Women's Genius. Because current medicine doesn't hold a belief that Chrohn's is a curable condition, she is simply considered a non-compliant Chrohn's case. Karina is clear about the moment she choose to trust the messages her body was sending and what choices she needed to make to move from dis-ease into ease.
Trusting that what goes on in our body as both intelligent and is a gateway to our evolution is a radical shift away from the silencing that requires progressive pharmaceutical intervention, addictions and the many other possible distractions we create to avoid the message because we fear the messenger. I have heard it said that in a struggle between the body and the intellect - the body always wins. I am inclined to agree.
As a final caveat, I wrestle with whether to dilute my message here but find myself wanting to explain that I don't see any of this as either/or situation. Rather I see the potential and possibility represented by a continuum. Before medicating, whatever our "drug" of choice might be, I urge you to consider what the intelligence is that is seeking expression through the body.
Learning to trust the body's innate wisdom is the essence of what I consider body talk and how I came to name this blog. Thanks for taking this journey with me!
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Closing the Gap
After writing yesterday's entry, I picked up a book that has been lying on my shelf for a few months now and found it so exactly in line with my thoughts that I couldn't help but notice the synchronicity. The book is called "Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science" and was written by Atul Gawande during the final year of his surgical residency.
Although I am only part of the way through it, I found it to be one of the most breath takingly honest books I have ever read. He displays immense courage and compassion as he explores the humanity of medicine. The dance between the human challenges faced by physician and patient alike is written beautifully and I can't help but wonder at the potential impact that this book could have on how we view medicine.
Physician's and surgeons are not born, they are made after years of practice. It just so happens that their practice is on people. How comfortable and accommodating can the general public be in the face of what we know is true and often don't speak of? How willing are any of us to step into the shoes of a "expert" who must use imperfect science and fill in the gaps with intuition and experience to make the leap into diagnosis and treatment.
How much of that gap has been created by modern medicine's stubborn clutching at old scientific principles? Consider Bruce Lipton, a former medical school professor and researcher, who shares in his seminars and in his book, "The Biology of Belief", that one of the things that drove him out of teaching at one of America's leading medical schools was the insurmountable gap between what he was expected to teach in the classroom and the incredible discoveries that he and his colleagues were seeing in the lab. He knew that the information he was teaching medical students was hopelessly out of date and often not accurate in the face of mounting scientific evidence. His conscience won and he left teaching.
New fields in science, one of which is quantum biology, are conspicuously absent in current medicine. We demand infallible experts and then blindfold them by embracing a worldview that ignores one of the fastest growing areas of science - quantum sciences. While embracing this arm of science in some areas of our lives, application of quantum science in understanding our humanity continues to be off limits for many.
I wonder, how would we change our view in medicine if we were to change our view about what it is to be human? How much would we discover about our potential if we were to simply begin to notice what the quantum sciences have to offer in our understanding of who we are? What other doors might fly open for us if we were willing to entertain the thought that our notions about what it is to be human might be incomplete? I wonder - don't you?
Although I am only part of the way through it, I found it to be one of the most breath takingly honest books I have ever read. He displays immense courage and compassion as he explores the humanity of medicine. The dance between the human challenges faced by physician and patient alike is written beautifully and I can't help but wonder at the potential impact that this book could have on how we view medicine.
Physician's and surgeons are not born, they are made after years of practice. It just so happens that their practice is on people. How comfortable and accommodating can the general public be in the face of what we know is true and often don't speak of? How willing are any of us to step into the shoes of a "expert" who must use imperfect science and fill in the gaps with intuition and experience to make the leap into diagnosis and treatment.
How much of that gap has been created by modern medicine's stubborn clutching at old scientific principles? Consider Bruce Lipton, a former medical school professor and researcher, who shares in his seminars and in his book, "The Biology of Belief", that one of the things that drove him out of teaching at one of America's leading medical schools was the insurmountable gap between what he was expected to teach in the classroom and the incredible discoveries that he and his colleagues were seeing in the lab. He knew that the information he was teaching medical students was hopelessly out of date and often not accurate in the face of mounting scientific evidence. His conscience won and he left teaching.
New fields in science, one of which is quantum biology, are conspicuously absent in current medicine. We demand infallible experts and then blindfold them by embracing a worldview that ignores one of the fastest growing areas of science - quantum sciences. While embracing this arm of science in some areas of our lives, application of quantum science in understanding our humanity continues to be off limits for many.
I wonder, how would we change our view in medicine if we were to change our view about what it is to be human? How much would we discover about our potential if we were to simply begin to notice what the quantum sciences have to offer in our understanding of who we are? What other doors might fly open for us if we were willing to entertain the thought that our notions about what it is to be human might be incomplete? I wonder - don't you?
Monday, March 19, 2007
New Identities
The front page of today's Toronto Star featured a headline that read: "Medical Secrets: When Honesty is the Policy". It then went on to explore how often this policy is not in effect and its tragic results. Approximately 23,750 people die each year in Canada as a result of adverse events in hospital. In the US the number is even higher, estimated at 98,000. Something is seriously wrong with our medical system!
Far too often I believe we are quick to hold the doctors and surgeons accountable for these startling statistics. In truth, they are only statistics until they touch our lives directly and then they become our nightmare. As with many of the social challenges we face, this one is a complex and multi-headed beast and I don't presume to have the answers, only some swirling thoughts.
One aspect of this issue that seems to be over looked is the physician's themselves. It is tempting to point our collective finger at them as they seem so untouchable. When society isn't hailing them as gods, we are quick to vilify them instead. The fall is indeed a steep one. And what we seem to miss is their very real humanity.
Admittedly, I have been on the sidelines as I am not a physician, but I have worked with enough clerks through fellows as well as established GPs and surgeons to appreciate that their training is both exacting and brutal at times. It is rife with humiliation at the hands of their peers and superiors. It embeds a message they must be experts and that they must at all costs be correct or bear the serious consequences of their errors.
Given the degree of en-culturation they endure, it takes a very mature and self-realized physician to have the courage to admit an error in their judgement and wear their own humanity openly. Undoubtedly the stakes are high when dealing in human lives but do we ever stop to question what the stakes are in their personal lives?
We, as consumers of health care have been far to complacent. We are content to rely on perceived expertise of a third party. We fail to take responsibility at all times for our own well-being. We have been content to elevate our physician's to god-like status for as long as it suits us. We aren't likely to perceive our dentist or our accountant in quite the same light. It is one thing to respect a professional's field of expertise and quite another to engage in groundless reverence. We are contributing to the problem with our expectations and unquestioning engagement with social identities. Can we see the person behind the mask? How do we expect to be seen in return?
Perhaps we need to turn our attention to the notion of identity. There is personal identity - the aspect that represents the essence of who we truly are at our very core as a unique individual. There is also the far more familiar social identity that is cultivated through our upbringing, education and belief systems. Our social identity is rarely one of our own making but rather represents a composite of the many rules and expectations we have acquired on our journey through life. It is this social identity that invites careful examination if we are ever going to close the gap between the humanity of patient and physician. As long as a gap exists, we will continue to hold physicians to impossible standards and physicians will struggle to free themselves from the tight little boxes that leave little room for compassion, authenticity and honesty. Without authenticity there is precious little room for the safety that honesty requires.
By design, our health care system in Canada bombards physician's with unbelievable workloads. Reeling at the sheer volume of patients passing through their hands makes the convenience of pharmaceuticals seem like an easy answer to the congestion of busy family practices. In those frenzied 10 minutes, how much human interaction can take place?
Canada is a democracy and we, as health consumers have the right to demand more from our government when it comes to health care. We also must be willing to consider that more comes with a price tag. Another multi-headed beast is a multi-tier system but its beyond the scope of today's musings.
Let me turn instead to an even deeper conversation that lies below all of this and that is the worldview that embraces the fundamental concepts that we are not experts when it comes to our own bodies, that our bodies are something to to normalized at best and feared at worst, that there is no underlying intelligence in our body responses and that Descartes has had the final say when over 200 hundred years ago, in his opinion, the body was a mechanistic device.
Dehumanization of patient and physician isn't such a big leap from there, is it?
There is another way to look at the world that is autopoiesis. And that my friends will be another entry so stay tuned!
Far too often I believe we are quick to hold the doctors and surgeons accountable for these startling statistics. In truth, they are only statistics until they touch our lives directly and then they become our nightmare. As with many of the social challenges we face, this one is a complex and multi-headed beast and I don't presume to have the answers, only some swirling thoughts.
One aspect of this issue that seems to be over looked is the physician's themselves. It is tempting to point our collective finger at them as they seem so untouchable. When society isn't hailing them as gods, we are quick to vilify them instead. The fall is indeed a steep one. And what we seem to miss is their very real humanity.
Admittedly, I have been on the sidelines as I am not a physician, but I have worked with enough clerks through fellows as well as established GPs and surgeons to appreciate that their training is both exacting and brutal at times. It is rife with humiliation at the hands of their peers and superiors. It embeds a message they must be experts and that they must at all costs be correct or bear the serious consequences of their errors.
Given the degree of en-culturation they endure, it takes a very mature and self-realized physician to have the courage to admit an error in their judgement and wear their own humanity openly. Undoubtedly the stakes are high when dealing in human lives but do we ever stop to question what the stakes are in their personal lives?
We, as consumers of health care have been far to complacent. We are content to rely on perceived expertise of a third party. We fail to take responsibility at all times for our own well-being. We have been content to elevate our physician's to god-like status for as long as it suits us. We aren't likely to perceive our dentist or our accountant in quite the same light. It is one thing to respect a professional's field of expertise and quite another to engage in groundless reverence. We are contributing to the problem with our expectations and unquestioning engagement with social identities. Can we see the person behind the mask? How do we expect to be seen in return?
Perhaps we need to turn our attention to the notion of identity. There is personal identity - the aspect that represents the essence of who we truly are at our very core as a unique individual. There is also the far more familiar social identity that is cultivated through our upbringing, education and belief systems. Our social identity is rarely one of our own making but rather represents a composite of the many rules and expectations we have acquired on our journey through life. It is this social identity that invites careful examination if we are ever going to close the gap between the humanity of patient and physician. As long as a gap exists, we will continue to hold physicians to impossible standards and physicians will struggle to free themselves from the tight little boxes that leave little room for compassion, authenticity and honesty. Without authenticity there is precious little room for the safety that honesty requires.
By design, our health care system in Canada bombards physician's with unbelievable workloads. Reeling at the sheer volume of patients passing through their hands makes the convenience of pharmaceuticals seem like an easy answer to the congestion of busy family practices. In those frenzied 10 minutes, how much human interaction can take place?
Canada is a democracy and we, as health consumers have the right to demand more from our government when it comes to health care. We also must be willing to consider that more comes with a price tag. Another multi-headed beast is a multi-tier system but its beyond the scope of today's musings.
Let me turn instead to an even deeper conversation that lies below all of this and that is the worldview that embraces the fundamental concepts that we are not experts when it comes to our own bodies, that our bodies are something to to normalized at best and feared at worst, that there is no underlying intelligence in our body responses and that Descartes has had the final say when over 200 hundred years ago, in his opinion, the body was a mechanistic device.
Dehumanization of patient and physician isn't such a big leap from there, is it?
There is another way to look at the world that is autopoiesis. And that my friends will be another entry so stay tuned!
Sunday, March 18, 2007
A New Perspective In Medicine
This article was written and appeared in several e-zines in 2005/06 and it seems fitting to share it here as a starting point in this mutual journey of disovery. Enjoy!
A metaphor that has been used to represent the uniqueness of each of us is that of a Bonsai tree. There is incredible intelligence behind the way our bodies express themselves. What we have considered as dysfunction is a magnificent and artful expression of not simply survival, but growth. As the poet, Maya Angelou stated so eloquently, “to survive is necessary; to thrive is elegant”. Part of my personal evolution has been to begin to recognize and reclaim all the wonderful twists and turns in my own life that have left me not with gnarled branches, but with grace and elegance. This metaphor represents my own ability to not only grow, but to thrive. In reclaiming all those experiences I discovered the space that allows me to engage clients with a sense of reverence and respect for the incredible intelligence in the body.
As a University student, I had the experience of human dissection. It was the intimate knowing of the machine without life present. The knowing was of only the most basic nature, visible only to the naked eye. Although encouraged to treat cadavers with the utmost respect as they lay as empty shells, there was such an obvious separation of essence and matter that it was difficult to identify with the person that once lived, breathed, laughed and cried. Without animating force, tissue lay as inert as the gurney that supported it. Stripped of all vitality, the mechanism that once housed an animated being was available for rudimentary exploration, an opportunity to understand the vehicle. When would we begin to understand the vital force that once inhabited tissue?
When Descartes struck his deal with the church so many years ago in order to obtain bodies for dissection, he left behind a legacy of separating mind from body. Descartes had never believed this separation to be a true representation of how humans functioned. The separation of body from mind/spirit was one of convenience at the time that Descartes was negotiating with the Church to have access to human cadavers to dissect and study. The Church wanted to maintain undisputed authority over all spiritual matters and the artificial distinction of vital essence and body was created as a boundary.
Fast forward to the 21st century where this arrangement of convenience has now acquired status as “fact” simply because it has remained undisputed for so long. This view along with the prevailing view of Newtonian science has left little room for exploration in medicine outside of the limitation of these perspectives. Yet science marches on in other forums as our evolution demands. It is growing impossible to continue to hold this separation of mind from body as true in the face of mounting evidence from the scientific community.
For example, Candace Pert has demonstrated the presence of the same neuropeptides, once thought to belong solely in the realm of the brain, to be present throughout the body. In essence, the body “thinks”. As someone who uses acupuncture as a modality to assist in restoring balance in the body, I find this particularly compelling. Is it possible that acupuncture meridians are the neuropeptide channels? It is quite possible that soft tissue techniques such as Rolfing, Myofacial Release and Craniosacral work are all possible means to engage in the physical manipulation, release and metabolization of neuropeptides. These physical modalities have been given a very esoteric and marginalized place in medicine and yet I believe there are undeniable reasons for the effectiveness of these techniques that requires us to embrace more than a simply mechanistic perspective in future research.
Sixteen years ago, Valerie Hunt measured the electromagnetic fields that emanate from the human body and has noted the changes in frequency as fields interact. Her contribution to science was possible once sufficiently sensitive technology was created to measure the subtle fields. The fields existed all along. What was new was the science that allowed such subtle signals to be measured. There was a shift in perspective that created a context for this information to be measured and considered useful.
Consider nuclear medicine. We use our as yet limited understanding of energy and fields as a non-invasive means to examine the health of tissue or distribution of blood flow through the body with CT scans, MRI (magnetic resonance images), Bone Scans, PET Scans (Positive Electron Transmission) among others. The images created are representations of the energy signals transmitted or absorbed by tissue. They reflect field interactions.
All this evidence and there are still those who believe that the human body does not carry an energetic field. We are much more than a mechanism made of bone and tissue. Bone itself is a living and dynamic structure that is constantly remodeling itself. Cells are in constant renewal. Neuropeptides flow through the nervous system and tissue, communicating information. The scientific discoveries of Bruce Lipton demonstrate the cell’s ability to adapt and express is based largely on environmental cues and much less on what we once considered to be pre-determined genetic expression.
How did ancient civilizations come to their complex understanding of the body? What can we learn from their holistic perspectives? What becomes possible in the fields of wellness and medicine when we are willing to embrace a broader perspective, one that invites curiosity about the place of quantum science in a larger context than diagnostic tests; a perspective that considers concepts of self-renewing systems and fractals as evidenced in nature and how they apply to humans as organic beings; an autopoietic perspective. An autopoietic perspective is an invitation to consider that the body is not separate from the mind and that within the expressions of what otherwise might be considered pain, dysfunction or emotions there is a vast amount of information at our disposal. The concepts of normal/abnormal, good/bad or right/wrong do not exist in this perspective. In place of these arbitrary judgments there is an invitation to explore intelligence and information, as the body communicates it. The route to this engagement is not through the intellect but through the body directly.
Our bodies deal with an amazing amount of information on a daily basis as they are engaged in all the processes necessary for life. Although present, our intellect plays no significant role in the processes of digestion, respiration, reproduction and so on. Since we also recognize the presence of information networks in the form of neuropeptides and electromagnetic fields, it stands to reason that these systems are capable of functioning or “thinking” without intellectual direction. By artificially and perceptually disconnecting the body from the mind, we have lost touch with a means of incredible resourcefulness in our lives. Its implications are staggering to our future health, wellness and evolution. The good news is that the disconnection is simply one of perception. A shift in perspective is all that is required to reconnect mind and body.
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