Wilberg on Wednesday - The Illness Is The Cure pt 3/46

Medicine, Life and Science

In a way intended to be of help to both patients and health professionals, this book challenges one of the most basic assumptions shared by almost all forms of medicine – conventional or ‘alternative’, ‘scientific’, ‘traditional’ or ‘spiritual’. This is the assumption that illness is something to be cured rather than being the cure.

To challenge this basic assumption, I introduce a fundamentally new ‘existential’ approach to health and illness which I call ‘Life Medicine’ and ‘Life Doctoring’. Life Doctoring and Life Medicine offer patients opportunities to come to an understanding of how and in what ways their illness is itself the cure – offering a source of new healing understandings of themselves and a healing transformation of their lives.

For in contrast to both ‘orthodox’ and ‘alternative’ medicine – each of which in their own ways seek nothing but ‘causes’ and ‘cures’ for illness – Life Medicine and Life Doctoring do not separate science and life, biology from biography, the life of the human body and the life of the human being. Instead the focus is on the larger life context and specific life meanings that particular symptoms and illnesses hold for the individual patient. For as Marx wrote:

“The idea of one basis for science and another for life is from the very outset a lie.”

This ‘lie’ unfortunately has dire consequences of which too few are aware. For research by the medical establishment itself has shown that conventional biomedical diagnosis and treatment through drugs and surgery is itself the leading cause of premature death – ahead of both cancer and heart disease.

By offering an entirely new framework for understanding health and illness, Life Medicine and Life Doctoring can help patients to not only understand the underlying sense of ‘dis-ease’ in their lives that lies behind their illness. Life Medicine and Life Doctoring can also serve a vital preventative role by (a) preventing this ‘dis-ease’ manifesting further as clinical ‘disease’, and (b) educating patients about the possible dangers and potentially sickness-causing or ‘iatrogenic‘ effects of many standard forms of biomedical testing and treatment.

Both biomedical and ‘alternative’ explanations of illness are comparable in many respects to the way in which scientists sought to ‘explain’ dreams before Freud – denying them all meaning. Yet what if the symptoms are comparable to disturbing dream symbols and experiences – both expressions of a felt ‘dis-ease ’? What if illnesses are a type of embodied dream or ‘body dream’? Then deep understanding and not just medical-scientific ‘explanation’, testing and treatment is required.

For again, to ‘explain’ an illness is one thing. Yet to understand it is quite another. For understanding has to do with meaning. Yet so-called ‘biological’ medicine does not even recognise or understand the root meaning of the very term ‘biology’ itself – which does not refer to a set of specialist sciences, but rather to the ‘speech’ (Greek logos) of ‘life’ (Greek bios). Speech carries and communicates meaning. Nothing could be further from the root meaning of ‘biology’ then, than the so-called biological ‘sciences’ – which reduce the life, language and ‘speech’ of the human body itself to a mere molecular ‘expression’ of its genes.

That is why, as Martin Heidegger wrote: “The essential realm in which biology moves can never be grounded in biology as a science.” For the realm in which biology moves is a realm of living and embodied meaning. In contrast, what most fundamentally defines the ‘biomedical model’ of medicine – based as it is on “biology as a science” – is the way it totally denies any personal life meaning to illness – and in particular the exact timing, life situation and larger life context in which an individual’s symptoms first emerge. On the contrary, by merely seeking to fit a person’s symptoms into the frame of wholly impersonal diagnostic or statistical criteria, and then treating their illness with no less impersonal methods of drug or hi-tech treatment, biomedicine can aggravate the very sense of personal meaning loss that lies behind most illnesses – as well as damaging rather than healing patients’ bodies, and even endangering their lives.

The continuing monopoly of biomedicine over our entire understanding of and approach to illness has one reason and one reason only – namely that it is not actually ‘science driven’ but ‘money driven’ – turning illness into a source of vast profits for the drug companies and manufacturers of hi-tech medical equipment. Indeed ‘health’ itself is increasingly defined merely in monetary terms – as the patient’s capacity for ‘employment’ as a wage-slave and to ‘function’ economically as a profit-source for employers.

Many people are concerned about the rising costs of public health care or angered by a global trend towards the privatisation of health services. Yet the roots of this trend lie in the fact that illness itself has long been ‘privatised’ – seen as bearing no relation at all to the social and economic ‘ills’ affecting the patient. To declare that ‘the illness is the cure’ is also to recognise that the ‘cause’ of illness does not lie in the individual alone but also in the world – and that illness itself is in part a healthy response to a fundamentally sick world – and this way also helps to heal that world.