understand and control knowledge, to find an absolute truth.
Postmodernism, including deconstruction, questions the idea
of certainty, the idea that an ultimate truth can be told, that
there is an ultimate truth. This philosophical movement can be
associated with the significant insights made in physics such
as Einstein's 'Theory of Relativity' and Heisenberg's Quantum
Physics. These 'discoveries' destroyed Newtonian physics and
brought us into an age of uncertainty.
When one deconstructs a discipline one embraces a
lack of control, but there remains a need to co-operate with
others to find possible solutions through co-operation and
communication. This is integrative medicine. In an editorial
in the British Medical Journal titled 'Medicine, postmodernism,
and the end of certainty' (Dec 1996), Paul Hodgkin said: 'I
came across a curious word the other day – Credicide; the
death of belief. Not this or that one, but all and every. Strictly
speaking, of course, it means the active killing of belief rather
than just its simple demise. What is dying of course is not
just Progress, Education, Science, Justice, or God – though all
these do look anaemic shadows of their former selves. What is
dying is the House of Belief itself.'
The Future of Medicine
The future of medicine is in the synthesis of all proceeding
stages in medicine, gleanings of the best qualities from
each epoch. Primitive medicine was communal medicine,
everyone was engaged, and medicine and public health
had a common root. Primitive medicine had a high spiritual
component, essential to engaging the whole person. The
empirical medicine of the second stage brought forward a
more complex cosmology, integrating self, society and culture.
This medicine made sense to people; it was linked to their
everyday existence. Scientific medicine is at its core concerned
with evidence and that needs preserving in the medicine of
the future, but the concept of evidence needs re-visioning,
re-conceptualising.
All of this will make us all feel insecure but isn't that what
happens when we embrace a major paradigm shift? The future
of medicine lies in not knowing, of being innocent, of being
naked. The future lies not in finding ultimate truth but in
working creatively as if every patient were a new opportunity
to rediscover the origins of medicine, the sacred, the emotional,
the social and cultural aspects of the individual. To bring
together the power of reductionism with the compassion of
Holism means we see the patient, not the disease.
Integrating the past into the future requires one to take
the best knowledge of our medical ancestors and creating a
dialogue among all types of practitioners as well as patients. O
See ad, right, for more on Wing's Herbal.
ODYSSEY 48
•
DIGIMAG
'If the 15th century
(medieval) was
the age of Belief,
the 16th century
(Renaissance) the
age of Adventure,
the 17th century
the age of
Reason, the 18th
century the age of
Enlightenment, the
19th century the
age of Ideology
and the 20th
century the age
of Analysis, then
naturally the 21st
century should
be the age of
synthesis'.
George Christakos.
Jen-Feng Wang and
Jiaping Wu in 'Stochastic
Medical Reasoning and
Environmental Health
Exposure. Imperial
College Press 2014