Bodies are more like ecosystems than cars
Pick a time, place, or level of education, and you find a different understanding of what bodies are. Is the body merely a temporary vehicle for an eternal soul or an organic machine carrying around our intelligent brain? Are we semi-permeable bags of self-organising molecular chemistry programmed by replicator genes or is our more fundamental nature a cacophony of information-encoded electro-magnetic fields?
As a species we don’t agree. Even philosophers and scientists—especially philosophers and scientists—don’t agree.
We might assume that scientific method has brought us the definitive answer of what the body is. Modern medicine must surely be using the correct model of the body?
Well, yes and no. Extensive areas of indeterminacy stump scientists who are not yet able to describe the full workings of even one individual cell amidst the trillions which make up our body; nor has it worked out what consciousness is or how it interacts with matter, or how living organisms can be self-organised. There is an inherent level of ignorance of what we are and how we work. This means that anyone working as a health professional is relying on a conceptual model of the human body—an idea of how body and mind work.
Wider society has an even less robust idea of what we are.
Since industrialisation and the invention of the combustion engine, the pervasive conceptual model of the body has been body-as-machine running on fuel and water; built of replaceable parts which wear out with use; and run by a central head-quarters—the brain.
This idea of body-as-machine has been encouraged to persuade men to engage with their health as much as women. Popular health and fitness books have been published in the format of Haynes Workshop Manuals for mechanics; modern man, it is assumed, readily identifies his bodily functions with the workings of a combustion engine.
The problem with the machine idea is that we tend to hand over responsibility for upkeep and repair to a mechanic who can remove parts, replace them with new improved parts, or adjust levels of essential fluids. We need do very little.
“All models of medicine are based on worldviews that reflect the underlying beliefs and assumptions about life inherent in their host culture.”
The biomedical model of modern medicine emerged in the age of Newtonian physics when all things obeyed the rules of mechanics. But scientific understanding has progressed a long way since then and our ideas about ourselves need to be kept up to date.
Studies show that mind, body, and environment interact such that our physical health can be influenced by our lifestyle, surroundings, emotions, behavioural habits, and many other factors besides. Although proven, this idea has not yet permeated the deep soil of medical practice. Physicians complain that patients expect the doctor to mend their body like a machine and are rarely willing to engage with their own healing.
What is a physician to do when presented with a patient suffering with chronic anxiety? It might be caused by epigenetic influences going back several generations (research shows that if your grandfather was traumatised, you are more likely to suffer anxiety), environmental and developmental influences in your childhood or even in the womb can influence your reactivity to get stuck in chronic anxiety, and even certain bacterial species in your gut can trigger anxiety. Unpicking the complex causes of an individual’s chronic anxiety could take years of doctor-patient cooperation; time doctors don’t have, and time patients may not be willing to wait.
As a result, patients with chronic anxiety are still likely to be given medication prescribed after only a short chat. The medicated patient may feel less anxious, but they are now sedated. One problem has been masked by another. A more enlightened physician might offer a combination of talking therapy and anti-anxiety medication while encouraging the patient to adopt some form of self-management such as meditation or yoga.
The body is not a machine. Machines have discrete replaceable parts with specific functions connected to each other in straightforward ways. Bodies have parts with multiple functions and blurry boundaries connected to each other in ways too complex for us to fathom. We function as dynamically self-adjusting systems rather than machines designed by an inventor; we are more ecosystem than car.
Dr Daniel Nicholson of Exeter university, has made a study of mechanistic thinking in biology concluding that: “the machine conception of the organism today is impeding rather than enabling further progress in our comprehension of living systems.”
There is now emerging, even in post-industrial societies, a holistic world view in which we are an integrated whole rather than a dissociated collection of parts. This is an ecological view which recognises the interdependence of all phenomena and the fact that we are embedded in our environment.
This is the new systems view of life.