The more power any group wields by consensus the less it has need of ideology: statutory medicine has the advantage of historical and demographic assent and so has no need to claim it. It will be helpful for minority groups like practitioners of herbal medicine (however impressive the number of people who consult us) to eschew ideology because such postures are invariably associated with an increased likelihood of hypocrisy and the generation of excessive zeal, both obstacles to truth or, to put it a little less piously, of no ultimate benefit to patients.
Personalities restored
If we are to make reflections on the concept of health, we might consider that the first requirement should be integration: that we should be careful not to exclude approaches to human experience. We should therefore include what might be thought to pertain to medicine but to question, nonetheless, whether the practice of medicine is in the best position to understand the dynamic potential for health, when health is considered as more than the absence of disease or infirmity.
Treating whole systems as greater than the sum of their parts requires, axiomatically, a bias towards integration. Systems theory would seem to be an appropriate starting point for modelling health yet, for all its popularity and the interest shown in it by progressive healthcare professionals, it is not so easy to interpolate into the practice of phytotherapy: an appeal to systems theory can sound like an appeal to a commonsensical deity. I would ask for the restoration of the integrity of purpose as a perquisite rather than an ideology and suggest that the practitioner lower her or his border controls against seemingly disparate investigations and expressions of the human condition. It is a call, therefore, for lifelong eclectic study and, counter to the settling into professional routines, a ceaseless quest for the broadest approach without losing sight of the individual patient. In most traditions, however different their cultural forms may appear, the practitioner is someone who assesses, leads or induces, mediates and attempts to modify the outcomes for the client.
Axioms
Perhaps the term—as a self–evident truth—is almost obsolete given that modern mathematics has rendered Euclid's axioms, to mention the most famous, open to doubt and invalidation. Let us rather use it to indicate succinctly the assumptions from which we intend to proceed.
As for the main theme of human health, apart from the biological and circadian components that I wish to develop in the following segment, it might be helpful if I state here my particular integrative bias: I consider it as axiomatic that to understand the health of the individual, she or he needs to be considered as:
A psychosocial and psychosexual being who tends to seek a life that seems sufficiently purposeful to that individual.
Of course, the detailed study of each of these components (and there can hardly be fewer than four) might need to be conducted separately, but if the unity of the object of study thereby becomes fractured, the search for reintegration becomes a further level of study in itself. What needless proliferation! The latter part of my axiom emphasises our inherent tendency to pursue meanings, even nihilistic ones. Even the denial of meaning concerns itself with what it might mean to be purposive. Our linguistic nature makes the delivery of meaning and the interrogation of words for their hidden intentions unavoidable. I am not speculating here on the correlations between health and belief or the resolution of doubt. The necessary spadework is the province of a research institution, not an individual. While it is interesting to note that some sociological research has found positive correlations between belief and an overall improvement in certain measures of well–being, that is not a line I am pursuing. Nor do I wish to make any association between health and idealism and the resolution of difficulty, though such quite plausibly might be made, because I do not have any essentialist notions, psychological or philosophical to formulate.
By axiom I mean nothing more than the scope of my intention: a pragmatic realisation that I have to declare the range of my inquiry. I wish to elaborate a physicalist description of those assemblages which constitute physiological life on the one hand and to match it with a naturalistic view of those elements of human life that converge on the notion of potential health (that I have called Poise) on the other. The two other elements in the “axiom” imply a third, sequentiality: perhaps most intricately and exquisitely illuminated by the obligatory sequential rules found in human embryology. As herbal practitioners of biological medicine, we could be content to stop at the biology of the person from embryo to adult, but the axiom that I proposed a couple of paragraphs ago cannot dispense with those other elemental structures of human development.
Human development
The study of human development after birth is not without controversy and by no means settled but no one I think denies that development is sequential even though some (like Bandura) doubt that it is determined by stages. He could be said to sit between the Behaviourists (whose notions of operant conditioning he thought inadequate) and Chomsky who deplored Skinner's Behaviourism on more fundamental grounds and demonstrated that imitation cannot explain language acquisition. Behaviourism has fortunately died its own death but critics of Chomsky (like George Lakoff) have effectively complained that he has thrown out the baby of mimesis with the bathwater of crude reductionism.
Freud decided (there is no other word for it) that our impulses towards life are fundamentally sexual, Erikson that they are social, with Adler altering the nature but not the intensity of Freud's declarations and Jung extensifying the scope. An element of territoriality seems to characterise these divisions. Viktor Frankl brought the consideration of meaning to human impulse. Is it too simplistic to suggest that they were all partially right, that one impulse does not exclude the others?15 Even so, these partial explanations must (in my view) be compatible with biology, which is not at all to say they are so reduced. There are many strands to the discussion that need to be integrated into a primary formulation, even before we consider how to apply such a formulation in practice.
Mind, thoughts, conceptions
Given that in the history of philosophy, each defined position has elicited a number of opposing viewpoints, one simple naive conclusion might be that pluralism (in the face of insistent theories of monism) must be the defining characteristic of any attempt at an explanatory device of human experience. Philosophy of Mind has historically tended to define a direction from the natural world to sense–perception or the other way around. The notion that they must operate in both directions is not just a way of avoiding an impossible choice by refusing to settle on one or the other, but rather a naturalistic assumption about the continuity of life with matter and the emergent properties of mental processes. I tend to think that an eclectic approach requires differing schools of philosophy to be seen as complementary and necessarily so, rather than incompatible, just as I see no conflict between introspective analysis and objective measurement. In spite of the numerous postulates that I make in this book, I have genuinely tried to record reflections rather than deliver a “treatise”, and hope that I have sufficiently accepted and adopted the provisional nature of all inquiry.
Since the advent