At this same period, the development of the achromatic lens revealed to physiologists an ecology within the microcosm that had previously been limited by the resolving power of the lens of the human eye. As the scales of time and the cosmos deepened and that of the human cell shortened, medicine was forced from synthetic systems to the cataloguing of this new rich world of detail. The subsequent rise of biological medicine in the two centuries that followed tended to separate the material agents (especially the infectious ones) from all other human experiences, giving rise to orphan, caretaker roles like psychiatry and the budding of psychology and sociology away from medicine and, most curious of all, tended to separate medicine itself from biology and drove in deeper the wedge between art and science.
Human life is known to its particular resident by the continuity of consciousness. If life is a state series, coupling events out there with experiences in here, the physics and biology out–there must interact continuously with the physics and biology in–here. To report a state of illness, it must be reflected, even if dimly, in a conscious state. To discover a disordered physiology incidentally before it manifests as an illness (as biological medicine is able to do) is to practise a modern form of augury. That capability of medicine does not detract from the existential nature of illness nor does it explain the subjective nature of wellness which surely is a positive feeling rather akin to that promoted by the World Health Organization. Perhaps I should just call “Poise” “wellness” and have done with it, but this latter idea, though so immediately appealing and understandable, may sound like little more than a successful pacification of the gods. I wish rather to integrate it with the biology on which it depends and upon relations within all the other human spheres.
Some definitions of health
In the first paragraph to this book, I described Health as a euphemism in the literal sense but perhaps it is better to call it an aspiration. To what, and how to restore it? These are the questions I am trying to address. The definition made by the World Health Organization (A state of complete physical, mental, and social well–being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity) was certainly aspirational but did not take the trouble to suggest how that goal might be achieved. The who implied that political and social stability was necessary to personal well–being; however, the social health of each individual emerges at a much smaller scale and might be as easily constrained as enabled by the prevailing culture: the struggle against parental wishes and trends is not just the prerogative of the artist.
Health is, of course, the aspiration that unites nearly all people. We wish people happiness to go with it: I am sure there must be a clue there.
Whatever our circumstances, what can we really claim as our own? Our consciousness, our bodies, a sense of comfort. If these are disturbed we have lost our greatest possession and so cannot claim to have health even if we are fortunate in our material circumstances and our relationships. We may have more than we had and hope to have even more but more alone will not restore well–being. The key to restoration (when we lose it) involves our access to stored energy, the fundamental basis of biological life.
Metabolic systems work effectively only when there is inbuilt redundancy. This derives from Shannon's theory of Information which in turn follows from the laws of Thermodynamics. In another field, it will be obvious to those using computers that the size of a file has to be larger than its data because extra capacity is needed to store it and to interact with the storage device and external media.
The ability to store and to retrieve energy is fundamental to health and can be improved and enhanced at the neuroendocrine and at the organ and system levels by the use of medicinal plants in the context of a trusting therapeutic relationship.
The model I have developed in this first part seems complicated only if we think we are not. Experience has shown me that without a model, a theory of cure, medical practice and the outcome for patients will tend to be haphazard. Retaining confidence in your model as you subject it to daily scrutiny, without losing either faith or the habit of scepticism, provides a good ground for clinical excellence to develop. The model must also mature towards simplicity without losing sight of all the complexities.
The calculus of poise
The informatic output of a system is obliged to be larger than the system itself. Shannon's theory of Information tells us that the inbuilt redundancy of a system cannot exceed certain limits, which is another way of saying that if we interconverted information and energy, reserve beyond a certain level is a hindrance, and below it the system ceases to operate effectively, if at all. The ratio between the system and its reserve is not a fixed amount but will return after excursions to a characteristic ratio and so can vary within the expression of its means. To take a well–known example that occurs widely in plant forms, the output of the fractions expressed by numbers in the Fibonacci series starts widely enough, at 0.5 but never larger, and converges rapidly to the Golden Mean. Actually, random numbers will also converge, but less rapidly.
Increase in the complexity of a biological system (like us) leads to a robustness in the face of environmental chaos. Redundancy has the capability of optimising plenty and accommodating to scarcity.
Development (the opposite of envelopment) and evolution (rolling out) are roughly synonymous (though French doctors, I notice, are more likely to speak of the evolution rather than development of a condition). I think it is helpful to bear both nuances in mind when discussing health. Development of the individual mimics evolution in that the person cannot choose the environment exactly, but the uterine environment, where the initiation takes place, has already been chosen by evolution, both of the species and the germ-line. The conceptus has to choose a response and the quality of that response will modify its development. Unlike evolution, there already exists a plane—a landscape already grooved by choice—a finitude of possible forms defined by mother and the child's unique novel genome. The metabolic repertory of prokaryotes, by contrast—an almost infinitude of possible forms—allows them to generate new beings every 20 minutes or so but not long enough to create a more complex body. Our metabolism—less inventive and therefore more vulnerable to random variation—cannot be completely stochastic: it has to have some unidirectional patterning. That is the point of life: reacting to a random world, but not blindly nor unaided.
As I shall try to elaborate in later sections, patterning—both inherited and adopted—frees us up to respond to chance. Although this is a narrow binary choice (odds equally for and against a benefit) a rapid succession of choices creates a pattern of our own making and offers us the opportunity, slim as it may be, to avert our own imprisonment and to make the best of what comes our way and what we have. That may not always be much but it is what we have and constitutes our capacity for health. We can augment this by the six or more nurtures. Furthermore, medicinal plants allow us to improve our capacitance and so increase poise.
Mindedness, which I described at the start of Section 3 as both product and producer of the circularity and recursiveness of Life, is a turning towards and away from the fundamental binary in life. This tropism is seen most easily in a unicellular organism as it turns towards areas of higher nutrient and away from inhibitory, toxic zones. It has a mind to do so, hence the invention of the name. As any system gets larger and its informatic output increases, the ratio between available information/energy is conserved but the size grows accordingly as does the buffer.
A buffer functions to smooth out delays in processing capacity (or capacitance, the fourth of the five interlocking ideas in Section 3). As the organism gets more complex,