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February 01, 2005
#3 Redefining the Role of the Family Doctor
Mortimer Shys Address before:
The Committee to Redefine the Role of the Family Doctor (CRRFD)
Gentlemen. Try not to be alarmed by the following modest revolutionary suggestions, on a subject I am sure you are all close to. We are all sick, but most of us not as sick as we imagine. And yet therein lies the problem for family and friends.
In thought alone, an amazing new theory for the understanding of illness, now asserts that illness always occurs with multiple persons involved. Illness occurs in elaborate scenarios that we, passively, have until this point never been able to perceive. Just because of the assumption: that illness is restricted to the individual in which it is most obviously apparent. I say, the observer is alway guilty of what he observes. And the cause of any illness must be sought admist the group who knows, and knows they know, the apparent victim, ah, all the many victims of the widespread afflictions our miserable subjectivity has . . . forced.
In all cases an illness can actually be treated by treating a corollary illness in someone else, if only one can and is willing to find it. SIMPLY PUT, a person suffering the symptoms from a cold can see this cold vanish, upon the treating of someone else who has a headache, and vica versa. Or both can disappear by the identifying and treating of even an injury, to a third party sympathetically related to both of the others.
DRASTICLY PUT, our whole medical establishment is furiously devoted to the philosophy that a person is somehow inwardly responsible for their own fate, and its grotesque manifestations. Isolating them, focusing upon a treatment only dealing with what appears to be wrong with them, the apparent victim, they engage in a system of societal blame, erected for the social purpose of protecting those who are really to blame, ie those who know them, who have thoughts about them.
We are killing each other. We need a type of Family Doctor.
Suffering is in all situations sympathic, and no one suffers alone. And further, those who are visibly suffering are obviously displaying the effects of a remote cause. They are incurable, unless the cause is found, or rather admitted, by those who hold them still in their thoughts. The true Family Doctor must bring in all those who know them to find out the cause, ah the multiple causes of their pain.
Gentlemen. The very idea is to lighten up. For if you are feeling good, then I say send those thoughts out, into that region where we are all connected. For listen to the truth. People can transfer and assimilate each others physical beings, most prominantly it appears in the area of sickness; but also this must be going on in their general health, because health is not simply the absence of sickness, but an aggregate of conditions which also are involved in sympathetic interlockings between people who know each other.
This focuses, once again I must say, our attention on the reality of people knowing each other. This theory does not suggest that people are not individuals, but that they are not individuals in this area of illness and mere physical being. But they are members of a group, and this group can be identified, the amazing theory goes on to say, as those whom one knows in their thoughts. Is there some question who it is, you know in your thoughts? Id say think of family and friends, and consider who you might be draining of life . . .
People actually can identify each other in their thoughts when that other person is not there, and the recognition is certain, though of course there are states of mind in dreams and in confusion when people are blended. But that leads into a different study. This study is based on the simple assertion that there is no case where a person is sick all by themselves, but always there is something else going on with a person they know at the same time. And that something else going on is equally important to address, in fact is the way to address the first observed illness as an isolated case. In a society with this understanding, the first medical action taken when a person is taken sick would be to LOOK AT EVERYON ELSE. For the person who is conspicuously ill is not the cause of anything and has not the cause of their illness within themself; but they are suffering the obvious effects of something else. And yes! Examining those around them, or those who have a dwelling within their thoughts, should turn up the cause of their illness. Do not examples abound!
We have the capacity and the might to inflict our horrible imaginings upon others, and we placidly watch them suffer.
God! This begins to sound obviously true. Thank you. I am feeling a little faint with the pressure of how true this might be. I will lecture upon this further, hopefully, and invite the comments of Victor Strabimus.
Posted by mortimer at February 1, 2005 02:47 AM
Comments
Sir:
Pre-Enlightenment (and Anti-Enlightenment) societies knew differently. From the earliest civilizations, the black and white arts studied the efficacy of curses, spells, charms and talismans. The culture that believed in the "evil eye" was predicated on the view that the state of a person's health is not simply demarcated by the boundaries of the skin or extremities, but rather, that one's state of being (physical and mental health) is a fluid, ethereal field, integrated within and dependent upon surrounding factors and conditions, rather like the electromagnetic field itself.
Even in contemporary culture, pockets that give credence to earlier models still flourish. Among New Age devotees and practitioners of so-called "alternative medicine," it is common to inquire not only of the patient's family relations and status, but also that of immediate friends and associates.
When a patient is queried on the status of familial relations the inquiry is typically thought to be related to genetics. Gene therapy, and genetic research in general may be understood as the apotheosis of Cartesian Rationalism: contained within the individual is the entire "blueprint of life." At the same time, ironically, a germ of atavistic belief lies at the heart of modern genetics: since all individuals carry the same fundamental set of genetic matter, then all individuals are, in this sense, not true individuals but innumerable replicas of the same pattern (Italics mine). It does not demand a great leap in logic therefore, to loop back (rather like the double-helix structure itself) to the pre-Enlightenment position: if all individuals are essentially the embodiment of recurrent patterns, then health--ill or otherwise--is not actually "located" within the narrowly defined boundary of the physical body, but is, in effect, distributed over a network of intersecting forces--the good or ill health that surrounds and affects every individual.
So the model can be seen not so much as a multitude of separate bodies "containing" good or bad health, but more as a school of fish swimming in a lake that contains both zones of salubrious water (health) and zones of pollution (illness). Or, if you prefer a physiological conceit, variegated cells all simultaneously growing, pairing, replicating and dying within a macro-organic complex.
The reason that voodoo and other forms of sorcery "work" among believers is because the "witch doctor" and the patient/victim both share the same subjective experience of inhabiting a "fluid" medium where positive and negative influences are believed to be actively transmissible. After all, the barrier of skin that separates inside from out is, as any physiologist knows, highly permeable, and as many adherents know, ultimately illusory.
A number of cultures throughout history have practiced healing rituals based on the belief in associative and relational health-sickness. Both the Mayans and Sumerians, for example, would regularly select a proxy for radical excision in the name of curing the afflicted. When a member of the aristocracy suffered from the gout, angina or migraines, courtiers and courtesans were brought forth to have their bowels, hearts and brains extracted and mashed into a fine slurry or burned in ritual emerald-inlaid bronze crucibles or tossed to the royal hounds so that the demons bedeviling the aristocracy were appeased, and would relent in their torments. While this practice appears to contemporary eyes as monstrously barbaric, the fact of the matter is that it proved to be highly efficacious medicine.
Finally, on a personal note, I once conducted an "experiment" in alternative healing upon my former wife. Over a three-year period she had suffered intermittently from a recurring severe throat infection. Having pursued the traditional Cartesian-Rationalist medical treatment, she had her tonsils, adenoids and sinusoidal polyps surgically removed. Nevertheless, the infection persisted, though there was not much more that could be removed, short of decapitation.
Then she was put on a battery of antibiotics, but these also proved ineffectual. Ultraviolet irradiation changed nothing save our medical expenditures. After that, she consulted an alternative-holistic specialist who prescribed a regimen of herbal teas, lichen poultice and gargling of seaweed extract--all to no avail.
As a last resort, I suggested an approach that occurred to me after having read an article on "imaging" in The Journal of Wishful Thinking. Quite simply, I clasped my hands around her neck (please, I know what you're thinking, but I can assure you, ladies and gentleman, that at no time have I entertained thoughts of malice toward my former wife before, during or after our futile marriage).
Thus, I summoned in my mind's eye, as vividly as I was able, a tiny motile star, an infinitesimal scintilla of blinding incandescence, which I imagined hovering, floating and bobbing sprite-like from one lumpy node of cottage cheesy infection to the next--burning, cauterizing the virulence out of her system. To our mutual surprise, she awoke the following morning wholly cleansed and relieved of the pernicious malady that had vexed her for so long.
This admittedly unexpected result made me curious to experiment further with the imaging technique as applied to other maladies. I have, however, so far been disappointed in this effort, at least as far as my wife is concerned, ever since her mysterious, and to this day, wholly unexplained disappearance.
As ever, I remain,
I. Victor Strabismus
Posted by: I. Victor Strabismus at February 4, 2005 10:50 PM
I haven't had a cold in twenty-five years. Everyone around me is coughing, and actually dieing slowly. How the hell do you spell diying? Pills and medicine are useless - never take anything unless you want to get the thing all over again. Anything that is stopped during its course will return with greater force. Like rampant commercial building.
Posted by: violaceous at February 13, 2005 12:22 PM
