The Politics of Healing and Science

On the Scientific Model and its Application in Healing

The only pure applied science best manifests itself in its various applications in pure engineering where a mathematical model is used to produce precise, predictable and repeatable results. The validation of engineering is in its use of mathematics and the fact that numbers do not lie. Yet, even in these applications there is often an aftermath if an ethical component is ignored; destruction of environment being just one consequence.

Opinion, preference and speculation, like ethics, are not scientific. They are part of what the scientific model sometimes calls "value judgment" and for the sake of coming to unbiased conclusions must be put aside. Yet, many other applications of science; archeology, evolution, etc, for instance, are often just someone's best guess based on found fragments of information. These essentially non-mathematical sciences are sometimes just as capable of creating myth comparable to some of the wild suppositions of the old world superstitions because the evidence that presents itself is fragmented and calls for conclusions based on postulation or speculation. For instance: The oldest human fossils happen to have been found in Africa but, there is no real proof that human life, as we know it, actually came from Africa or that present day homo sapiens evolved from it. Should another humanoid fossil be found in Japan, for instance, the previous theory would change. This is credentialed speculation. It is just someone's best guess. Similarly, in Law, evidence can be manipulated to produce and entirely different hypothesis for what may or may not had happened.

Healing As Art

Healing has historically been considered an art because the variables i.e. the human being and the remedy, are more often than not never the same for any two people. Traditionally, the Healing art was the process of applying cold blooded logic towards removing an ailment. The process was scientific only that science included physical and non-physical considerations the nomenclature of which used very fine and abstract concepts. According to their science esoteric terms like, Fire, Air, Water, Earth, Salt, Sulfur, Mercury and others which have nothing to do with their physical counterparts were integral. Astrological terms were also used. These concepts were part of the jargon because there was a very keen awareness that the physical world existed because of an astral and spiritual dimension. Example: The force that knits flesh together has no scientific validation and no one can claim that they are responsible for it. It happens when the circumstances are conducive to it but, not because of any physician's ability.

Today, because science cannot quantify these it often chooses to ignore them or selectively accept a very small spectrum of their manifestation. Psychology, which literally translates as "the study of the soul," is perhaps the only modern practice that approaches a study of the unseen. It does model behaviour however but seldom can explains exactly why it happens. It is not a science.

Having said this: Traditional healing methods were neither misguided, ineffective or naive in the hands of the sincere and competent. But, they were reduced to superstition in the hands of the sometimes well educated "wanna be's."

Ironically, although science helped remove superstition; in the same way that religion subjugated scientific fact with dogma to consolidate its power; corporate profit now often subjugates science to further its own interests through a similarly contrived truth. A "myth"based on selective facts, "political influence" and interpretations based on legalese rather than cold blooded analysis giving a whole new meaning to what sometimes passes for "scientific proof."

This is so obvious in so many areas in today's world that anyone who does not consider this is naive.

Healing remains an art but, today, it is an art under siege.