Wilberg on Wednesday - The Illness Is The Cure pt 2/46

Guiding Thoughts

“Disease occurs … not in the body but in life.”

J. Good Byron,

“The idea of one basis for Science and another for Life is from the very outset a lie.” Karl Marx

"It is far more important that one’s life should be perceived than it be transformed; for no sooner has it been perceived than it transforms itself of its own accord."

Maurice Maeterlinck

“An advanced industrial society is sick-making because it disables people from coping with their environment and, when they break down, it substitutes a ‘clinical’ prosthesis for the broken relationships.”

“People would rebel against such an environment if medicine did not explain their biological disorientation as a defect in their health, rather than as a defect in the way of life which is imposed on them or which they impose on themselves.”

“A number of authors have … tried to debunk the status of mental deviance as a ‘disease’. Paradoxically, they have rendered it more and not less difficult to raise the same kind of question about disease in general.”

Ivan Illich

“Patients turn their problems into illnesses, and … the physician’s job is to turn them back into problems.”

Michael Balint

“…the body’s symptoms are not necessarily pathological, that is, they are not just sicknesses which must be healed, repressed or cured. Symptoms are potentially meaningful and purposeful conditions… as well as a royal road into the development of the personality.”

Arnold Mindell

“A psychological medicine … obviously comes into conflict with the technological development of medicine, which has already become an Über-technology. This development is itself closely connected with modern economic structures, with industry, with the income sources of physicians, with the gigantic need for patients – and others – to be deceived.”

“That illnesses have meaning, can lead those affected to the meaning of their lives – this is the insight that natural-scientific medicine has fundamentally impeded.”

“One sees, now, that psychology in medicine brings forth an unexpected result. It does not only bring knowledge of the soul, but illuminates the body in such a way as to let it appear in a new light. The body is no longer what it seemed before, and what anatomy and physiology teach.”

“Illness can be experienced as this – that through a bodily occurrence a development in awareness is created.”

“The greatest goal would be to understand how in every case, in what way an illness is just a muted final thought, a still insufficiently [fulfilled] creative act.”

Viktor von Weizsäcker

“… health is not an objective condition which can be understood by the methods of natural science alone. It is rather a condition related to the mental attitude by which the individual has to value what is essential for his life. ‘Health’ … consists in the individual’s capacity to actualise his nature to the degree that, for him at least, is essential.” Kurt Goldstein

“… scientific determinism is the root and prevalent philosophy in our present Western technological culture, where the bulk of our endeavours incline to engineering, that is, the direct alteration and control of physical structures. Medical practice, deriving from this outlook, is based on the assumption that distress can only be alleviated by changing behavioural or physical manifestations of that distress. Antacids for dyspepsia, tranquillizers for anxiety, and behaviour therapy for sexual dysfunction are clinical examples of this engineering philosophy. The experience of distress, it is held, will yield to control of its physical determinants; there is no need to explore or amplify the experience itself, as the experience is only a reflection of disturbed underlying mechanism.”

David Zigmond

“… science is, to a quite unimaginable degree, through and through dogmatic; dealing with un-thought-through conceptions and preconceptions. It is of the highest importance that there be thinking physicians, who are not of a mind to leave the field for the scientific technologists.”

“… the genetic approach is clear to everyone. It seems self-evident. But it suffers from a deficit, which is all too easily and therefore all too often overlooked. To be in a position to explain an illness genetically, we need first of all to explain what the illness in itself is.”

“Those who wish to stick rigidly to genetic explanation, without first of all clarifying the essence of that which they wish to explain, can be compared to people who wish to reach a goal, without first of all bringing this goal in view.”

“All explanation reaches only so far as the explication of that which is to be explained.”

“It can be that a true understanding of the essence of an illness…prohibits all causal-genetic explanation….”

Martin Heidegger

“If people become ill, it is quite fashionable to say that the immunity system has temporarily failed – yet the body itself knows that certain ‘dis-eases’ are healthy reactions. The body does not recognise diseases as diseases in usually understood terms.”

“You are not healthy … no matter how robust your physical condition, if your relationships are unhealthy, unsatisfying, frustrating or hard to achieve.”

“…a person in poor health should be seen by the physician in relationship to the family and also in relationship to the environment. Old-time family doctors understood the patient’s sensitivity to family members and to the environment, of course, and they often felt a lively sympathy and understanding that the practitioners of modern medicine often seem to have forgotten.”

“…try to understand that the particular dilemma of illness is not an event forced upon you … Rather realise that to some extent or another your dilemma or your illness has been chosen by you…

“There is no need to feel guilty since you meant very well as you made each choice…”

“… no person dies ahead of his or her time. The individual chooses the time of death.”

“…no individual dies of cancer or AIDS, or any other condition, until they themselves have set the time.”

from The Way Toward Health – a Seth book by Jane Roberts

“Through the long succession of millennia, man has not known himself physiologically; he does not know himself even today.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

“The ‘I’ is first and foremost a bodily ‘I’.”

Sigmund Freud

The Basic Questions

• What if ‘explaining’ an illness is one thing, but understanding it is quite another?
• What if illnesses have life meanings and not just biological ‘explanations’ and ‘causes’?
• What if the biology of the human body cannot be separated from the biography of the human being?
• What if the life of the human body cannot in any way be separated from the life of the human being in all its existential dimensions – personal, social and economic?
• What if body symptoms are like dream symbols – there to be understood and to tell us something?
• What if ‘the illness is the cure’ – offering patients an opportunity to gain important insights into themselves to bring about healing transformations in their lives and not just their bodies?
• What if conventional biomedical tests and treatments aimed at finding ways to fight and ‘cure’ a person’s illness can prevent them from learning vital lessons from their illness?
• What if official medical statistics show that conventional forms of biomedical treatment are themselves a leading cause of death ?
• What if many prescription drugs worsen or prolong the very symptoms they are prescribed for?
• What if so-called ‘scientific’ medicine is really money-driven medicine – relying on illness as a cash cow for the corporate health industry?
• What if every bodily state is at the same time a state of consciousness – and vice versa – thus making nonsense of the separation between ‘body’ and ‘mind’, medical treatments on the one hand and psychological therapies on the other?

Then we would need a new understanding of illness and a new model of medicine – one that not only questions but goes beyond the biomedical model.

• This in turn could spare both individuals and private and public health services the huge costs of pharmaceutical drugs and hi-tech biomedical equipment.
• It would also mean that psychological counsellors and therapists could no longer leave ‘medical’ problems and symptoms to the medical profession.
• Indeed it would allow a new foundation for medical training to be created – not biological medicine but ‘Life Medicine’.
• Out of this could come very different ways of treating patients – not through conventional doctoring but through ‘Life Doctoring’. For the aim of Life Medicine and the Life Doctor is to help patients discover in what ways their illness is the cure – there to help them heal their lives.
• In this way the individual patient would no longer be reduced to ‘a case’ of some generic ‘disease’. Instead every such ‘case’ and every such ‘disease’ would be understood in terms of the individual life circumstances behind it.