December 01, 2014
Catching A Tiger By Its Tail
In our conventional way of looking at illness, we see a symptom, like a sore throat or a tumor, and find various ways to treat it so it will go away. This is analogous to hacking off the tip of an iceberg and expecting that it will disappeared because the tip is no longer visible. All we have really done is treat the physical manifestation of something that is much more complicated brewing beneath the surface.
Treating a symptom and having it disappear is considered a cure, it is the cornerstone of allopathic medicine. We have found numerous cures for many horrible diseases in the last 100 years. A drug, for example, can make part of the brain work more efficiently or kill off cells that divide and grow too quickly. A knife can remove a part of the body that is sickened and diseased. Cures work at the physical, on the physical, molecule to molecule. While cures are beneficial on one level, the problem is that they introduce physical change into complex systems with a cascade of related moving parts. To alter one part of the whole often changes others down stream. Removing a sick organ, for example, can create space in the body that destabilizes the location of others, or changing levels of serotonin to decrease depression can cause erratic sleep patterns and sexual disfunction.