The biomedical model we have used for the past century has reached its limit of effectiveness. The word “healing” is not used in medicine today, with one exception. The first-year histology course includes some talk about wound healing, But outside of that, the word healing is not used in medicine. One of the points that I made in Spontaneous suggest that the human body has a healing system. Not a very radical idea. All you have to do is watch cut finger heal to see very clearly that the body has a capacity for awareness of troubles and the mechanisms for repairing tissue. Yet it is discouraging to find that it’s much easier to talk with children about the body’s healing capacities than with most of my colleagues. If a kid gets an “owie” you say watch what happens. If you try to talk to most physicians about the body’s system, it’s easy for them to dismiss this as more New Age fluff. It is not New Age fluff, it is physiological reality. Any level of biological organization that we examine, from DNA up to the most complex body systems, shows the capacity for self-diagnosis, for removal of damaged structure, for regeneration of new structure.
Why are medical students never taught that the body has healing functions or healing systems? First, consider the great lopsided emphasis on disease processes rather than on health in the pre-clinical years of medical school. Second, when medical students get to their clinical years, they are seeing very sick people, hospitalized people, a population in which healing responses occur less frequently than in the general population. If your whole world of illness is hospitalized patients, that tends to make you more pessimistic about possibilities of healing.
But there is a deeper problem here with the nature of western science and medicine in general. We are very locked into looking at the body as a set of structures and structural systems rather than functional systems. The healing system is not a structural system. I can’t show you a slide of it, the way that I could show you a slide of the circulatory or digestive systems. In some cases, as with circulation and digestion, structure and function are relatively synonymous. But other cases, notably healing, demonstrate no neat correlation of a function with a set of body structures. The healing system makes use of all of the structural systems — the normal operations of the circulatory, nervous, immune, and endocrine systems, and more, for its operations.
Why are medical students never taught that the body has healing functions or healing systems? First, consider the great lopsided emphasis on disease processes rather than on health in the pre-clinical years of medical school. Second, when medical students get to their clinical years, they are seeing very sick people, hospitalized people, a population in which healing responses occur less frequently than in the general population. If your whole world of illness is hospitalized patients, that tends to make you more pessimistic about possibilities of healing.
But there is a deeper problem here with the nature of western science and medicine in general. We are very locked into looking at the body as a set of structures and structural systems rather than functional systems. The healing system is not a structural system. I can’t show you a slide of it, the way that I could show you a slide of the circulatory or digestive systems. In some cases, as with circulation and digestion, structure and function are relatively synonymous. But other cases, notably healing, demonstrate no neat correlation of a function with a set of body structures. The healing system makes use of all of the structural systems — the normal operations of the circulatory, nervous, immune, and endocrine systems, and more, for its operations.
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