More About Orthodox Medicine and Healing

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It has become a commonplace in literature on healing to berate the indifference of orthodox medicine to healing and to turn members of the medical profession into bogeymen. In some cases this attitude is understandable, but the way forward must surely lie in dispensing with this mutual antagonism and bringing these two branches of medicine together.

Bridging this chasm would be no mean feat, as it has been reinforced by centuries of mutual suspicion. It is not doctors we should castigate but the system that allows them to emerge from medical schools with a mechanistic view of human illness.

Medicine sees injury in a mechanistic way, studying the biochemical changes that are triggered in the immune system, and how the body naturally dams the flow of blood that is produced. While these processes are magical and amazing enough in themselves, the important question is the one that addresses the interaction and influence of the mind upon these physical processes.

The system perpetuates itself by means of a subtle (and therefore incredibly powerful) form of indoctrination. Young idealistic doctors are trained with methods stressing efficiency. They learn to treat patients no doubt as they themselves were treated and as their superiors, whom they try to imitate, treat patients.

When dealing with a sick individual, the notion that one should be intuitive should never be lost sight of; otherwise we are simply 'block-booking' and forgetting that we are dealing with an individual. It is all too often the case with conventional medicine that the doctor will attempt to diminish the significance of the personal quirks of the patient to the illness in question. In contrast, the complementary practitioner sees these peculiarities as keys to the illness and the root of the cure for it. Medical students are as yet untrained in counselling skills or even rudimentary social skills.

The resentment of the spokespeople for conventional medicine is aggravated by the fact that they feel they are being undermined by people with no training in medicine. This in turn leads to resentment from the side-lined practitioners of complementary medicine, who are then driven into a more extreme position brought about by their own defensiveness. The schism between orthodox medicine and unorthodox is a corrosive one and one that is ultimately pointless.

The term 'complementary medicine' is favoured over over 'alternative medicine' in this section of the book as orthodox medicine and spiritual healing are not mutually exclusive, although one could be forgiven for thinking they were.

Healers are caught in a Catch-22 situation. People with healing gifts are alienated from the church and thus tend to work in fringe religious groups, which is the precise reason they are regarded with suspicion by many Christians. The cures that were discovered by folk medicine have now been adopted and assimilated into standard everyday medical practice. Yet the wisdom that faith healing has to offer has not made the transition into orthodoxy as yet and, apart from a few pockets of enlightenment, stands in a medicinal no-man's-land. The reasons for this are cultural and religious.

The influence of Rene Descartes (1596-1650), the great philosopher and mathematician who is credited with beginning modern philosophy, led to a firm dichotomizing of mind and body. Descartes believed that all animal behaviour and internal processes could be explained mechanically. On the relationship between mind and body, Descartes was a dualist, believing the two to be separate.

The type of dualism he advocated was interactionism-he believed in a separate but interacting mind and body. After Descartes, some philosophers elaborated the mechanical side of his philosophy by proposing that humans were nothing but machines and the concept of mind was unnecessary.

While the influence of Cartesian ideas led us out of the Dark Ages in the physical sciences, making medicine search out physical causes for illness, these ideas were corrosive in that they denied the mind as a causal influence on the body. They led science to denigrate everything that was not explainable by theory.

As well as the Cartesian outlook, the influence of the Industrial Revolution, contemporary with the prominence of Descartes, led to a growing confidence in humankind as regards the ability to master the environment. This instilled a materialistic outlook on the world, which manifested itself in an increasing emphasis on the purely physical aspects of illness.

It spawned the identification of parasites, bacteria, viruses, vitamins, hormones and genetic anomalies, as well as the benefit of using chemicals to treat disease. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin; digitalis was discovered from an old folk remedy; the physician became confident that the eradication of disease was on the horizon. Lister made innovations with the antiseptic treatment of wounds.

While, of course, this is all laudable, it encouraged the practitioners of medicine to downgrade the importance of the patient's mental attitude to illness in favour of a purely physical account. It was into this gap that sects such as Christian Science leapt, filling the vacuum left when medicine became materialistic.

The very word 'disease' demonstrates an awareness of the root of many illnesses-a state of absence of ease, of psychological tranquillity, yet this was a reasoning that passed by many in the medical profession. The term 'shell-shock' from the First World War was a manifestation of the unwillingness of conventional medicine to accept that war left psychological damage as well as physical.

The disjunction of physical and psychological approaches to healing has prevailed from antiquity. Egyptian papyri delineate two wings of therapy- one involving charms and incantations, the other scientific approaches employing medicine.

Orthodox humanistic medicine traditionally advocated healing through regimen and diet, contrary to the claim of the complementary health fraternity that they were the authors of the holistic approach to therapy. The problem lies in the medical fraternity's apparent unwillingness to act on this knowledge. Doctors have known for years that what goes on in a patient's mind is as important as the biochemical processes within the body.

At the beginning of the 19th century. Johann Heinroth, a German clergyman, invented the word 'psychosomatic', which unites two words meaning 'mind' and 'body' and emphasizes that a sick person can be cured only when his or her psychological make-up is considered as well as the disturbed organs.

There are specific kinds of illness in which the state of the patient's mental attitude to the malady is of primary importance to the success or failure of its management. It is perhaps more than pure coincidence that these are the illnesses in which faith healing has much of its success.

The first and most obvious of these are afflictions that can be of a psychosomatic character, such as headaches, vomiting and rashes. Another branch includes illnesses that are short lasting and which the body's normal mechanisms will combat in due time. These include muscular aches and pains, and even warts. With these illnesses a positive mental attitude is as important as the physical cure.

A further category is terminal illnesses, where there will be great fluctuations in progress as the disease moves towards its inevitable conclusion.

This knowledge, however, was ignored for a great interval of time as the discovery of the germs that caused diseases such as tuberculosis, cholera and syphilis persuaded doctors that every illness was the result of a specific germ. If they could isolate the germ, they could confidently cure the disease with drugs or by other physical means. They ignored the effects of mental experiences on the progress of disease and treated the body as a machine.

The term 'psychosomatic' is still used in a pejorative sense by doctors, with the faintly patronizing and dismissive implication that the patient is being soft and weak-willed. It has been estimated that illnesses involving a psychoso matic factor apply to some 80 per cent of diseases. As regards faith healing, one can either view this fact negatively or positively.

One can say that this proves the validity and appropriateness of faith healing to deal with the kinds of illness that consume and plague the mind. Conversely, one could say that this fact demonstrates that faith healing's success can be placed in the realm of primitive psychiatry and its triumphs can be put down to suggestion rather than a divinity shaping our ends.