As for movement and energy, a continual differential calculus operates between available energy and its many reservoirs. The optimal ratio in the presence of a forward impulse, restrained or unfettered depending upon the needs of the moment, constitutes poise. It is a position, not a commodity, a posture with as much variability as our bodies have for movement. If the overweening pride of the Conscious Memorious Mind can be restrained and become subservient to the proprioceptive mind, Poise can easily be maintained, and even retained.
The binary tropisms of mindedness extend into and permeate each ecosystem as the trophic fields (however complex the networks may become) originate from the primary zones of prey and predation. Tropism can hardly be separated from trophic function so that heliotropism in the aerial parts of plants and their geotropism in the soil is one of the primary tropes of mindedness on earth. The energetic necessities of poise will be discussed in Section 18.
The tripos of human life
Sociality, like all creation, is a reproductive act (a hormonal product therefore of the Reproductive Axis in conjunction with the somatic axis, that of construction). The psyche emerges from our bios and so cannot be separated or disentangled from all the invisible threads of mindedness, the enzymatic matrix and the familial constellation. In common with all organisms on the planet, both our structure and our functions are punctuated and phased by circadian, tidal, lunar, seasonal, circannual time and develop our individual lives along even longer spans.
People become ill all the time. Health as poise is not an account of people who never get ill or are in some way blessed. Rather it describes those who manage their well periods well and recover well from illness. It is not an inherent state but one that can be managed by good nurture and using plants to advantage.
State of the system
The inexorable circadian punctuation, with its sequentiality of days, in tune with the musical enumeration of walking, all conspire with our love of narrative and enumeration. We divide and subdivide day into its parts and moments, not fixed in symmetry but phasic and proportionate.
Health relates the current and conscious state of the system and cannot be less provisional than life itself. Health as category has all the character of an aspiration but is more of a current post–rationalisation, constantly and anxiously revisited. Newborns are not teleological in this respect: it is a fiction we learn and for which we come to yearn. Sleep is the region of life where health is ensured and refreshed and paradoxically suspends the consciousness that annotates our health.
Fixity in life, as in politics, provides the most temporary of benefits and is maladaptive in the long run. To paraphrase Heraclitus, we need variance to obtain some fixture.
Intermission
By way of recapitulation, this book is about the avoidance of subjective illness (about which little has been written) and says very little about the ever–present threat of disease (about which a great deal has been said). It hopes to show possible paths to health by way of a relativistic physiological model of adaptation. The model focuses on the integration of chronobiology with the notion of the neuroendocrine terrain. According to this model, the avoidance of illness correlates with the achievement of poise.
It may have helped officials at the World Health Organiszation to have defined health so optimistically after the World War had finished as:
physical, mental, and social well–being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity
but that bold statement alone will not do any good to our patients. If we are to help them to health, we must have a workable model on which to build a therapeutic strategy. The elaboration of the model cannot be simplistic yet we must be able to put it simply, so I shall try to focus on the practical aims of therapy in this recapitulation.
Disease may be silent at first but will inevitably cause the subjective state of illness. Disease itself will be attended by objective markers so, while it may be mysterious, its presence is unambiguous and the feeling of illness unsurprising. However, people frequently experience illness yet (sometimes after exhaustive investigation) have no signs of disease to show for their suffering.
Between illness caused by disease and illness with no apparent cause, lies an intermediate state of conditions (for example, migraine) that possess some elements of disease and many of unexplained illness.
These three arbitrary points on the spectrum of the experience of illness are all open to modification by the physiological diagnostic model presented here: the book is emphatically not about the management of psychosomatic medicine, as the body of all illness and of all disease has both somatopsychic and psychosomatic limbs. No illness is “all in the mind” and every illness is in All the Minds.
The movement between the burdens and joys of consciousness is bound to disturb. Illness, as distinct from disease, manifests a response of consciousness to disordered physiology. The sense of disorder may be caused by incipient disease or impending infection but is as likely to be precipitated by contingent events or physical and mental dysfunction. Yet what is physical and mental dysfunction but a loss of capacitance—the failure of a response to events (and there may be no “adequate” response, to the loss of a child, for instance) and perceived needs. Every response is coupled with the storage and liberation of the required energy. “Perceived need” will incorporate a lifetime of patterning and the editing by the terrain of those stored by past generations in light of current circumstances.
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94 Ascribed to Empedocles (c. 500–430 BCE). The four elements were associated with the four humours by Polybus (fl. c. 390 BCE).
PART TWO
PEOPLE: WITHIN AND WITHOUT THE CLINIC
Preface to Part Two
The herbal medicine that I espouse is not so much a cure for maladies as an essential aid to living well. Rather than concentrating on what is wrong, by enhancing the strongest qualities of our patients and modifying and diminishing their less helpful traits, maladies are actually less likely to put in an appearance, or if they do, their vitiating effects may be lessened and the term of convalescence shortened, with a speedier return to strength.
I would also want to make a case for herbal medicine being the repository of that aspect of Hippocratic medicine that concerns itself with what in old parlance were called the “six non–naturals”. This term may sound odd to our ears but means no more than those aspects of human life that belong to nurture rather than nature. Perhaps we should rename them the “six nurtures”. They point to areas of life where our behaviour may contribute to better health and are traditionally listed as follows:
| 1. Air | (fresh) the need for |
| 2. Sleep | enough
|