Healing medicine

Whole Earth, Winter, 1997 by Andrew Weil

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.

For a variety of cultural reasons, Chinese medicine developed along functional rather than structural lines. For one, it was unthinkable in traditional Chinese society to cut into a dead human body. So Chinese thinkers had to develop their system in the absence of detailed knowledge of internal structures of the human body. They focused instead on developing a science of functional relationships, spheres of function and their inter-relationships. One sphere identified very early was a defensive sphere concerned with self-protection against various kinds of environmental or internal threats. That concept led physicians to explore Nature to find ways to protect and enhance this function. An impressive array of remedies in the Chinese traditional pharmacopoeia are highly valued because they are believed to increase body defensiveness. This includes a number of species of mushrooms and some higher plants, which are very much prized as tonics to extend longevity, increase resistance of all kinds, make people generally healthier.

Note how recently, in western medicine, we identified and recognized the functions of some organs. We identified these as structures, but didn't know what they did. When I was at Harvard Medical School in the late 1960s, I was still taught that many of these organs were functionless. it requires an amazing degree of hubris to say that because you don't know the function of something, therefore it has no function, then to take it even one step further, and give surgeons license to take it out because it's just taking up space. When I was growing up, no one made it to adolescence with their tonsils and adenoids intact. Similarly, I know many patients, right up through the 1980s, who went into leading hospitals for abdominal surgery, a hysterectomy, or gall bladder removal, and did not find out until they got their hospital bills that their appendix had also been taken out, as a useless structure that could give trouble at some point. Physicians systematically destroyed young children's thymus glands throughout the 1950s in the belief that they were useless structures that got too big in childhood and adolescence and should be bombarded with X-rays to shrink them to normal size.

Meanwhile in the East, without any knowledge of thymuses and appendices, tonsils and adenoids, Chinese doctors recognized a defensive function of the body and gained very practical information about how to strengthen it. The mushrooms and plants that the Chinese doctors have been using for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, now turn out actually to increase immune function. They are non-toxic, they increase phagocytosis, movement of macro phages, and various aspects of immune function. They are now a very hot item of research because they may be potentially useful for the treatment of AIDS and other chronic viral conditions that we can't manage in western medicine because we don't have technologic weapons. This is not to deny the importance of structural thinking, but more emphasis on function would make apparent the body's principle of self-organization, the ability to diagnose problems, repair damaged structure, and regenerate structure.