Alternative medicine (theories)

The origins, theories of, and influence of Alternative Medicine

A study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that over one third of people preferred alternative medicine to conventional methods, citing the medical establishment's emphasis on diagnostic testing and drug treatments that did not consider the patient's well-being and health as a whole. And in some countries, notably Chinia and India, what are considered 'alternative' treatments are central to government health strategies. . In fact, there are social and cultural dimensions to health policy as well as scientific and historical ones. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the response and acceptance of so-called 'alternative' health treatments.

Health as bodily harmony

The underlying assumptions of alternative medicine are that health is a state of bodily harmony or balance, and disease is a disharmony or imbalance. (p6). This idea, central to traditional Chinese and Indian herbal treatments, is also present in the Western medical tradition, often taken as starting with Hippocrates. Hippocrates believed that the elements of good health were essentially environmental, such as a calm mental state, a balanced diet and physical exercise. Even that 'commonsense' health mantra of ‘fresh water, sunshine and exercise’ is by no means universal, it has its own social and cultural roots.

Conventional medicine is seen to have split away from the 'bodily harmony' approach in the nineteenth century, particularly following the discovery of disease-carrying microbes - germs, viruses, bacteria and so on. Prior to this, medical practitioners in Europe shared what is sometimes called the 'humoural' model of the human body, but no one school had a monopoly of authority in health matters.

The Theory of the Four Humours  The humoural theory, developed by the Roman doctor Galen, held that the four elements in nature - fire, air, water and earth - corresponded to four fluids in the body: blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm. Herbs were believed to positively affect the humours through four key properties: being hot, dry, cold or moist. Health was a matter of balancing the humours or ‘bodily juices’.

Nonetheless, Europeans at this time were particularly open to new treatments that arrived from abroad as a result of trade in far-off and mysterious lands. These were seen not merely as a response to a more fundamental bodily imbalance, but as the essential 'cause' of the imbalance. Hence they could be treated in isolation, usually through drugs.

Where conventional medical treatment is seen as effective in dealing with certain 'emergencies', such as physical injuries, other long-term illnesses and bodily disfunction's seem to many people to remain poorly understood and conventional treatments ineffective and even harmful. Another objection to conventional medicine is its emphasis on 'treatment' rather than 'prevention'. Almost all health spending in Western countries is on the former - some 85% in the case of the United States - as opposed to the latter.

As Roberta Bivins puts it, in Alternative Medicine - A History, "medical practises are typically culturally specific - that is, they are internally coherent with and respond to practically the cultures in which they initially developed". Bivens puts it thus: "The incorporation of dissection in to medical training and knowledge production was clearly integrated with Enlightenment ideas of rationalism and empiricism." And today, recent advocates of 'enlightenment thinking' invariably cite examples of treatment by Alternative Health practitioners as dire evidence of the spread of 'irrationality" . However, anatomical dissection is opposed to the social values of Confucian China and Buddhist India, contributing to the continued acceptance of 'alternative medicine' in these cultures and conversely the added resistance to it in the West. Equally, approaches such as acupuncture and moxabustion were in harmony with the philosophical beliefs of the East, but opposed to those of the West. Central to both techniques is "an immense pharmacopoeia, a detailed disease classification system and a set of body-maps" which define relationships between the body's organs and systems, as mediated by a circulatory system "that moves both tangible and intangible substances" around the body. In particular, the strange (to Western eyes) concept of ‘’qi’’.

The importance of lifestyle  A report by the US Centers for Disease Control stated that 54%of heart disease, 37% of cancer and half of cerebrovascular and atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries) was preventable through changes in lifestyle.

At certain points on the body's surface, the various vessels or channels through which these fluids move, and which connect different functional and sensory organs, can be stimulated, thereby altering the flows of qi within them and between the organs. In moxabustion, this is done through the medium of small cones of fibre (extracted from the leaves of Ateresia vulgaris or mugwort) that are burnt on top of the points. In acupuncture, needles, inserted to different depths and sometimes manipulated, are the means of intervention

The mystical lore of plants crosses virtually every cultural boundary. For example, according to Kathleen Karlsen, MA , an advocate of herbal medicine, a 60,000 year old burial site excavated in Iraq included eight different medicinal plants. “This evidence of the spiritual significance of plants is echoed around the globe”, she adds. In Europe, works such as Pliny’s ‘’Natural History’’, which describes the supposed properties of plants gathered from numerous cultural traditions including the herbal practices of the Celtic Druids, and Dioscorides’ ‘’De Materia Medica’’ , which is a work regarded by some as the cornerstone of modern botany and by herbalists today as a key pharmaceutical guide. But the Romans were not the first.

In ancient times, healing formulas existed for almost every known disease. Specific conditions were treated with a variety of methods such as tinctures, teas and compresses or by inhaling the rejuvenating fragrances of essential oils.

Indeed, as Kathleen Karlsen also notes, “Shamanistic medicine, alive and well in traditional societies today, often incorporates the use of hallucinogenic plants which enable the herbal practitioner to reach unseen realms to obtain higher knowledge and guidance. “

The esoteric wisdom of ancient healers and of plant lore has been central to medicine since ancient times, not only spawning approaches such as herbalism, traditional Chinese medicine, biofeedback, and homeopathy, but also influencing mainstream approaches to illness.These approaches draw upon general theories, such as the 'theory of similars' or the related 'theory of signatures'.

For instance, the onion was favoured by the Egyptians not only as a food, and used as a medicine, but also respected for reflecting their view of the universe's multi-layered structure. Egyptians identifed medicinal properties in plants such as myrrh, aloe, peppermint, garlic and castor oil. Healing plants are also featured extensively in ancient Arabian lore, in the Bible, and in the druidic tradition of the ancient Celts. Herbal tradtionswere central to life in the Mayan, Aztec and Incan civilizations, and north American Indian herbal rituals.

The medical use of plants by the ancient Greeks reflected their idea that each of the twelve primary gods had characteristic plants. Such approaches are clearly methodologically incompatible with conventional medicine, to say the least. The US Food and Drug Administration strictly patrols claims made for herbal medicine, to prevent medical claims being made to promote them. On the other hand, herbs lacking such elevated 'connections', such as parsley, thyme, fennel and clery were allowed correspondingly more everyday roles in health, and are to many today more easily accepted as having 'health-giving' properties.

The transition from mystical and supernatural understandings of illness to 'scientific' ones is still highly controversial.

Different languages for discussing health

One way to approach the debate (and lack of debate) between alternative and conventional approaches to health and biology is by comparing their two languages and trying to find proper translations, as Samuel Kuhn suggested.

Alternative medicine operates under a holist paradigm. It tries to identify shapes, as in the doctrine of signatures, and make them "resonate", as in homeopathy, which lies on the law of similars. It should be reminded that Plato, when he conceived the notion of Ideas, was also referring to the notion of shape (eidolon, from which "idea" comes, also means shape or structure).

Conventional medicine, of course, is concerned with shapes, as exemplified by our modern icons : the double helix (DNA), the key-lock model of chemical messenger-receptor action, and the more elaborate 3D protein simulations that fascinate most of us. However, although molecular biochemistry is entirely based on the shape of proteins, molecules and electron clouds around nuclei, it would be erroneous to assume that molecular biochemistry covers all shapes and forms found in the living universe. It is not its purpose, because it operates under the paradigm of logical reductionism. Under this paradigm, it is believed (but not provable) that, by reducing life to its most fundamental components, by analyzing all its details, it will be possible to account for the observed universe.

The alternative view (which was the conventional view before the Enlightenment), on the contrary, adopts a phenomenological perspective. Observing that one plant, because of its shape, evokes an image, an idea, or an impression, the alternative-mided practicioner will immediately use it as a tool to discover occurences of this Idea in the sick or healthy body or mind. This analogical thinking, which is often called "magical thinking", is prevalent in dreams and normal thought processes, but is not integrated in the Scientific discourse, and is often condemned as fallacious (e.g. animism).

But does science have, in its own terms, a way to account for shapes in nature? Thia is where the most heated debate is taking place today. Rupert Sheldrake, a respected biologist, came to the conclusion that the tools he was given were logically incapable of explaining how life develops the way it does: it provided the building material, but not the blueprints. When he published in a book his analyses and hypotheses, the most respected journal, Nature, called his book "a book for burning" through the voice of John Maddox, the editor-in-chief. Rupert Sheldrake had proposed the notion of morphogenetic fiedls, a notion not unlike Plato's Ideas.

Could the history of philosophy, and in particular the dichotomy between Plato and the Presocratics, in particular the atomists, illuminate the present debate between alternative and conventional approaches to nature and health?