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New medicine: integrating complementary, alternative, and conventional medicine for the safest and most effective treatment.
Conventional Western medicine used to mean taking the body apart and analyzing it down into ever smaller components. But examining a piston can’t tell you how an engine works. We cannot explain the mind by dissecting the brain, nor understand a person by doing chemical tests. And living organisms are quite different from mechanisms: they self-assemble,and the whole has a huge effect on its parts. The healthy body is an infinitely intricate three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle that is continually breaking itself apart, even down at the molecular level, and then reconstructing itself.
A new medicine is emerging that realizes that you cannot predict how a complex system functions just by studying its parts. So it aims to work with the body as a whole, to trigger the awesome capacity for self-healing. This means tapping into a spectrum of complementary and conventional treatments and mind–body medicine to maintain health and well-being. Medical science is rediscovering the power of self-healing processes, an area where traditional systems, such as acupuncture, massage, or herbal medicine, may have a lot to offer.
We should consider health as having three “realms”: structural, biochemical, and psychological (see p.14). Conventional medicine tends to focus on one or other of the three dimensions. For example, drugs target biochemical aspects, surgery focuses on the body’s structure, and counseling on the mind. But since many health problems are complex, conventional medicine can offer no single “magic bullet,” and its existing treatments have limited success or cause side effects. In painful, stress-related illnesses such as migraine, or in recurring disorders like arthritis, psoriasis, and eczema, single-level approaches fall short. In chronic fatigue or persistent pain syndromes where standard tests detect no changes in body tissues, drug treatment alone often proves unsatisfactory. New medicine comes into its own where there is no single well-defined cause, and various fact — biochemical, structural and pyschosocial — are involved. Avoiding single solutions, new medicine adopts a holistic approach, looking at temperament, bodily tension, breathing, coping style, lifestyle, and diet, and exploring complementary therapies’ potential to trigger vitality.
New medicine is increasingly driven by patients’ needs. Doctors, though, realize that self-care and patient choice are crucially important. Increasing collaboration between conventional and complementary practitioners and the rise of mind–body therapies are supported by promising research results. We present some of them in this book. While doctors are catching up with new medicine, individuals need to make a special effort to stay well and understand the spectrum of treatments available. This book has been written to support all those who share these aims