In this chapter, the author describes how medical care in the United States is based on a split perception of the nature of being human, which has led to institutionalized practices that inadvertently contribute to suffering. American biomedicine is also business-driven and turns both patients and their suffering into commodities. The origin of this approach to care can be seen as an outgrowth of a particular Western cultural perception based on ancient Greek philosophy, that of the so-called psyche-soma split, subsequently reified in Europe by Cartesianism. The author proposes that based on developments in modern physics, which reveal the natural order as based on electromagnetic states, in conjunction with holistic approaches to the human condition, an alternative basis for biomedicine could consist of the adoption of an already culturally amenable resource, that of the Old Testament as revealed in its linguistics. The implications for medical care would include recognizing the significance of relationship itself to healing for both patient and practitioner.
TopAn Hebraic Alternative To Mind-Body Dualism In Care
The practice of biomedicine in the United States has been governed by a split perception of human being that is characterized in terms of two domains: body and mind. Culturally, this formulation derives from ancient Greek philosophy which described human beings as consisting of soma and psyche, a dualist perspective that persists to this day in the West. It is this view that led to the separation of aspects of care and remediation of suffering into separate institutions: physical or biomedical care and psychological or psychiatric care. As these institutions have grown in influence, both practical considerations and cultural perceptions have firmly entrenched the view that the body and mind are indeed separate, to the extent that, under the auspices of the pervasive empiricism and reductionism of biology which governs the study of medicine, the body has come to be viewed as a machine and the mind as a ghost in the machine, as the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle first expressed it (1949), appearing to justify dualism.
Although there is a growing awareness of the lack of efficacy in the standard approaches to the treatment of disease, particularly to the chronic conditions which make up the bulk of treatment and include anxiety and depression (Attia, 2023), I perceive a deeper problem related to the cultural perception in the United States of what a human being is. American biomedicine is relentlessly business driven; that is, medical care, under which mental and psychological services have been subsumed, is based on the commodification of both the patient and their suffering (Attia, 2023, pp. 33-34; Olney, 2015). This means that disease states of all kinds as well as literal body parts of the human organism are viewed as profitable. The trajectory of this perception is “cyborgian”: a human being is a programmable mechanism comprised of functional parts that can be replicated, interchanged, and enhanced (Adee, 2023; Standefer, 2020). Although practitioners in healthcare are also trained and encouraged to develop a good “bedside manner,” patients are basically regarded as biological systems and mechanisms that develop operational glitches. Interventions following on this perception are devised according to diagnostic schemas that rest on statistically based conceptions of the “normal.” Despite the inherent problems of defining normal, which must include both philosophical and cultural considerations, and the use of baseline definitions arising from an arguably not-well population to begin with (Attia, 2023), interventions arise out of a medical thought-system that has forgotten that it is itself a model, not necessarily an extension of reality (Olney, 2015).
I propose that advances in the scientific understanding of the nature of reality, specifically in the physics of energy, could help to bring biomedicine up to date philosophically, and that several of the most ancient intuitions and observations about human nature, wellness and healing confirm them. Furthermore, they would have the capacity to integrate disparate healing practices and philosophical and cultural views that have reached an impasse.
The problem is that the undeniable power of modern biomedicine to do repair work, especially in acute and life-threatening situations, has left the human touch in the form of compassion and the treatment of the whole person far behind (Michael Doss in McLean, 2015, p. xvi). In other words, technological advances have contributed to an increasingly narrow perspective on treatment and although physicians will acknowledge that healing is in fact not actually in their power, neither the conditions of practice nor modern attitudes support the oldest-known fundamental condition for recovery from disease: gentle, loving care and encouragement that recognizes healing forces inherent to living organisms (McGarey, 2023, pp. 23, 25, 103-4; McLean, 2015, pp. xvii-xix).