The Limits of Our Understanding

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We rely on direct demonstration of the curative value of a treatment to believe in the efficacy of a particular therapy. This relies on the availability of a viable method by which we can test the claim. In some cases, however, this simply does not exist.

For example, the Ancient Romans knew that disease within the arteries caused angina. Yet verification of this knowledge was only really available in the 1930s, when Werner Forsmann put a catheter into his own heart finally to prove the truth of this assertion.

It is quite possible that a relevant test of what precisely happens during the healing process is not yet available to us, and as yet it is simply inappropriate to dismiss it as a form of therapy. It may be premature to perform experiments on healing without first knowing the essence of the processes that take place. Not knowing the very nature of these processes may bias what is found.

It is conceivable that there might be an aptitude in humankind to cure, which is reliant on some dimly understood emanation that is now an enigma to humanity. It may be that, in terms of getting near to a fuller understanding of precisely what is happening when a healer cures, we are like a caveman trying to comprehend chaos theory.

An element of suggestion is assuredly a factor in these healings, but this falls woefully short of explaining the cures. Whatever the interaction that occurs between healer and patient-presupposing that there is one-no one has as yet offered any definitive explanation of what it might be composed.

We should remind ourselves that what is today regarded as pseudo-science may in the future become part of medical practice, and one can never be entirely certain that one is right to dismiss new claims. It is quite possible that there might be an ability in humans to heal, which is not the doing of a deity or a devil but accountable to some mysterious force, as yet unexplained or unex-plainable with the current vocabulary of medical science. An article in New Scientist magazine in 1995 bewailed the fact that we are not prepared to discuss the extent of what we simply do not know. Instead we swagger and preen and talk complacently of what we do understand.

It is important to consider the idea that the beneficial aspects of having visited a healer do not easily lend themselves to being quantified in a scientific way. After you have seen a healer or a healing doctor, you may behave slightly differently, and people may perceive you differently, leading to a chain of positive effects that bolsters your sense of wellbeing, reducing your symptoms and increasing your pain threshold.

These are all very subtle changes, and changes that we ourselves may not even be consciously aware of. This means examining the psychological, cultural and social aspects of illness and health, and the importance of understanding not only the means by which a patient's physical system comes to work properly but also the way in which the patient comes to feel well again and is re-integrated into his or her society as a full participant.

There is a detectable shift in some medical quarters at least from placing the emphasis on relieving symptoms and curing disease to the broader question of how healing itself occurs. What we need is a synthesis between the wisdom of faith healing and conventional medicine.

Just as the nature-nurture debate can be resolved only by the bringing together of sociology and socio-biology. so too can medicine proceed only when it comes to some meaningful rapprochement with healing and the rest of complementary medicine. We should denigrate neither conventional medicine nor healing but begin the peace process between the two in the spirit of human enterprise.