THE FUTURE OF HOLISTIC MEDICINE

Dr. Elkes: Medicine has been preoccupied with the dangers which lurk from without, coming from the environment, from infection, from water, from milk, from all kinds of things. Now these things have been taking care of by the advances of medicine, by advances particularly in public health, by the advances in education. So that part of illness, of suffering, that aspect shall I say, is now pretty well solved. Clean air, clean water. But at least it has been taken care of and the sources have been identified and coped with.

But the paradox of medicine, modern medicine, is that despite these huge advances in medical knowledge, technology, and theory—huge, huge advances—there has stayed with us a segment of illness and ill dis-ease, lack of ease you know, talking about civilization and its discontents, which has become apparent and messy. And what is with us now, are the diseases the dis-eases which come from within, not without—within. And that is a very different kind of illness, and in fact, it is emerging quite clearly that the main pathogen, the main causative agent of illness in society is mode of life itself. Life is the main pathogen. It’s hard to live. And it’s becoming very hard.

Now the puzzle has been, how do stresses and circumstance and other circumstances produce actual damage and scarring of tissues? How does stresses cause coronary heart disease and hypertension and gastric ulcer? How it does it contribute to rheumatoid arthritis and all the conditions? So, I’m trying to answer your question in an indirect way, yet I think it’s leading back to what you are saying and what is happening is that there is an increasing awareness, an increasing awareness of the role in which the mind plays in bodily function—and attitudes of mind affect bodily function. And that is coming in part, from our knowledge of what we know about the brain and its way in which it coordinates function.

The brain is essentially an organ of wholes. It makes things whole. It senses the whole body and feeds back information in an orderly way. It’s the organ which maintains order and balance on the stasis. And the brain by way of the immune system, through the endocrine system, affects the defenses of the body against invasion from without and within. In some way which we don’t yet understand very clearly. Now when you take that, and add a third element to it, that is in fact not the events themselves, but the perception of events. And the nature of the way we perceive things affect function. When you’re coming to the elements of a theory which makes sense of the whole concept and become aware of the way in which the environment—close interpersonal environment—affects bodily function, then you can begin to act on that information and choose deliberately.

Barbara: And learn to listen to your own…

Dr. Elken: It is really, cultivating one’s listening skills, one’s inner listening skills, one’s outer listening skills, and incorporating them into an act which would make awareness, really, the guiding principle and guiding function in living—and I don’t mean living in the abstract in the future, but day-to-day living. I think it’s that really what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the theory and practice of the good day. One good day at a time. One, that’s all one can do, is just one good day at a time.

Barbara: Are you saying that if we can handle our own attitude and correct our attitude towards wholeness, towards love, towards ease, that we can improve our health?

Dr. Elken: I think there’s good evidence for that already, that these attitudes and feelings and affections, particularly love, the positive feelings about oneself and about others can affect one’s own functioning and competence and well-being.

Barbara: So, that gets to a spiritual question.

Dr. Elken: Very much so. The spirit is really the core of it all. And don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t forget that that medicine started in the context of prayer, that the healing places were the healing temples. And it was all conjoined—faith and prayer and love. And I mean self-love in the deepest sense of love thy neighbor as thyself. You must love yourself first in order to be able to love your neighbor and not selfishly, but knowingly, knowingly. It’s always knowing, knowing what it’s about. And. it’s that aspect which is coming more and more into medicine. So really what I see in medicine developing, is of course the physical biological, mental, psychological, and the spiritual element conjoined, and that is what wholeness is about, what really the future of medicines is about.

Barbara: So, we’re really coming to a new level of wellness, because we’re reinstating the more ancient element, which is prayer, adding to it the newer element, which are the medical technologies leading to a level of wellness which probably hasn’t been achieved before.

Dr. Elkes: No, has not been. I don’t think it has. I doubt it’s been achieved in isolated civilizations, by relatively few. It has not been achieved on a wider scale. And the beauty of our age and the timeliness of our age, is that far from discarding science, one can accept modern science, particularly modern—the huge development in in neurobiology and psychobiology the important big development in knowledge. The way we know that, how the body functions as a system is accordingly consistent. All that good sense, good sense to the attitude of looking, belief, affection, love, an element of daily life, which is what all the great religions have always said.

Barbara: Thank you very much, Doctor Elkes. What we’re seeing here again is an evolution in the field of health where we are doing two things at the same time, we are reaching deep into the past of what we used to know and perhaps lost, which is the sense of self-healing, of prayer, of the realization of the power of the Spirit. And we are adding it to the more recent understanding through science of how the technologies, the mechanisms of the body work. Together, Spirit and understanding of the external elements of the body will create a new level of wellness, a new norm which we perhaps barely seen a vision of yet. Thank you.