HUMPTY DUMPTY I have made reference before to my preference for alternative, or holistic, medicine over the Western variety. I'd like to take a moment to go over the primary rationale for my choice. Modern medicine differs from natural medicine in one essential factor: its basic approach to disease. Please keep in mind that I am referring to the use of medicine to manage a disease and not a crisis, like a broken bone, or a ruptured appendix. My biggest criticism of Western medicine (for the treatment of disease) consists in its fundamental perspective on life, a perspective that seems somehow to belie an attitude about life that is completely out of harmony with a view expressed long ago in a famous nursery rhyme:
... all the kings horses and the kings men couldn't put Humpty together again.
Western physicians posture as if they believe that we can put Humpty together again. And they believe it because of something else they believe, something very basic to their practice of medicine. In a word, Western doctors believe that a living being is a machine, with parts that can be taken apart and put together again. On a certain level, this seems to be true, like when they set a broken bone, or perform an organ transplant, or replace a knee or a hip. On a deeper level, however, it could not be further from the truth. The basic difference between a living thing and a machine is extremely easy to grasp, and need not be expressed in terms that are in any way esoteric:
A living thing is not truly made of parts, and grows from the inside out, in contrast to a machine, which is made of parts and may be assembled, taken apart and re-assembled again and again.
I cannot overstress the importance of this statement. Its truth lies at the very heart of holistic medicine, which always approaches a disease as just that, i.e., a state of being dis-eased, or out of balance. Because it believes that a human being is essentially a machine, Western medicine is aggressively analytical in its approach to managing disease. Hence, the notorious poking and prodding (not to mention the unnecessary surgery) we are always hearing about. Holistic medicine, by contrast, is synthetical, treating the body as a single complete organism, whose separation into parts is viewed as nothing more than a matter of perception on the part of Western thinking, not much different than the way we divide the single planet into different time zones. It is true, there may indeed be such a thing as a heart and a stomach, and so on, but they are always parts of a dynamic whole, simply doing, if you will, their parts to sustain that whole. They should never be viewed, much less treated, in isolation from the entire organism. It is for this reason that a natural healer, if treating a patient for a stomach problem, for example, will not just focus on the region of unrest, but make an effort to stand back and get a view of the complete organism, believing that the stomach issue is merely a reflection of an imbalance in the greater dynamic, an imbalance that has somehow made its way, or trickled down, to the affected area.
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