Skip to main content

Body Mind and Spirit


Brian Broom is a medical specialist in allergies and a consulting psychologist. His book Meaning-full Disease describes a phenomenon he has seen countless times in his professional life: that people's diseases often seem to follow a pattern and history that mirrors what is happening in their lives. Illness often seems to be a bodily metaphor for the underlying issues the person is dealing with. The book is filled with intriguing examples, such as a woman "putting a brave face" on her husband's depression (her words) developing a chronic rash on her face.

The model of disease underlying Western medicine has no time for this approach. Broom describes the Western medical paradigm as "the body is a biological machine. Body and mind are separate entities...and it is appropriate to deliver healthcare by focusing solely on the body. 'Real' disease will be adequately and completely explained by physical mechanisms; thus, mind, soul or spirit aspects are peripheral or even irrelevant. Disease occurs in the individual's 'machine-body'; thus, disease is more or less an individual's bad luck and/or responsibility." Broom's questioning of this view and his positing of a broader, more holistic model seems to me to be supremely encouraging and hopeful. His model is quite in keeping with the discoveries of Ian Gawler whose cancer treatment, while not dismissing whatever techniques Western medicine might have available, involves a complete revision of lifestyle and the harnessing of the curative powers of diet and meditation.

Talking this afternoon with some colleagues about Christian healing, it strikes me that Christian healing, even at its most "spiritual" operates from the Western medical paradigm. Illness is something that happens in the body for fairly unpredictable reasons. The healer prays and evokes the power of the Holy Spirit to reach in, from the outside somewhere, and effect change in the physical machine of the body. Once the prayer is said and thanks are returned the person is deemed healed- hallelujah!- particularly if there is a temporary diminution of symptoms Seldom if ever are the lifestyle, spiritual, emotional, historical, genetic, familial or other factors that may have given rise to the disease considered, and certainly the long and difficult task of helping the sick individual make changes in these things is never attempted. I suppose it is the Western separation of body mind and spirit which lies behind this attitude. I think this inability to see people as multi-dimensional wholes keeps us repeating the patterns of illness in out lives and stops us getting well.

An early forerunner of Brian Broom's, Georg Groddeck said, "In the first place - I claim the validity of this sentence for all illnesses, every form of illness and at any age - the meaning of an illness is the warning "do not continue living as you intend to do." We are, according to Groddeck, symbol making beings whose existence is simultaneously expressed in the physical world via our bodies and in the world of thought and meaning via our minds. To Groddeck, and to those who came after him, such as Luis Chiozza, Body and Mind are not so much separate entities as different representations of the same underlying core reality. I will get well by knowing who I am and making the adjustments necessary for the health of my whole being. In contrast the approach of mechanistic medicine seems like the workshop advice "Don't force it. Use a bigger hammer."
Labels:

Comments

Kate said…
Yes. There is no doubt we are whole, complex beings. That's part of the problem, many doctors have only time to treat bits of us...
Enjoy that thing we all should call fleeting ...
22 October 2008 at 23:20
Kelvin Wright said…
I saw the doctor today. A new one. He was very human and treated me as though I was one too.He recommends popping me into the microwave for a bit and I've got to decide over the next couple of weeks whether or not to follow his advice. We'll see.
23 October 2008 at 17:56
Anonymous said…
Yes, it makes me wonder what good all that blather about 'holistic' medical treatment did. Seems no matter how much research is done, we fall back on our old ways repeatedly! However, a GP that I know slightly, a brilliant man, has written a book called 'When the Body Says No', about the body's response to stresses and life issues. His name is Gabor Mate, and you might find it an interesting read if you can find it.

Meanwhile, I'll pray that whatever you decide to do brings you healing and peace, dear Kelvin.
23 October 2008 at 20:01
Anonymous said…
And by the way, your photography just gets better and better - that is a glorious shot heading up this entry! Certainly as good as or better than any professional work I've seen!
24 October 2008 at 19:24
Kelvin Wright said…
Thank you Janice. The photo is a year or two old now. Next door to us is a secondary school with a lot of lovely trees in its grounds. I looked out my bedroom window one morning and the rising sun was shining through the fog just calling me to rush out and grab some pictures just as fast as I could get my trousers on.
24 October 2008 at 22:40
Kate said…
Ah! Now I see! Think how much BETTER the shot might have been if you hadn't stopped to put your trousers on!
25 October 2008 at 06:48
Kelvin Wright said…
True. Perhaps I should have carpe-d even more deim. But it's a girls' school. A middle aged guy running around the grounds early in the morning with a camera and no pants on? I might have lasted 5 minutes before I was wearing handcuffs and explaining myself to the duty sergeant.
25 October 2008 at 07:12
Alden Smith said…
"Mr Wright, you have told the court about the sun in the sky, the tree obscuring the sky, the fog in the sky and your camera pointing at the sky. Where pray, in this "orchestrated litany of skies" is the reason for you to be trouserless, with a camera outside a girl’s high school?"

"Your honour, I was only trying to use my common sense and seize the day."

"Mr Wright, common sense tells us that the world is flat. One also has to use ones intelligence."

"You can't use that line about common sense! that's my line, I said that to Tillerman once on his blogspot!"

"Ah, Tillerman; .... well that throws a whole new light on things. You realise of course that that man has a brain the size of a small ball bearing, an ego the size of Texas and actually believes the world is flat? ....He hasn't been encouraging you along the lines of motorcycles has he? ... yes I see he has... have you read the Wind In The Willows Mr Wright? no? yes? .... Think Toad of Toad of Hall Mr Wright, Think Tillerman, Think equivalence Mr Wright ... Think Toad in the road going "Poop, Poop" Mr Wright .... with friends like that.....

discharged without conviction, stand him down Mr Foreman."
25 October 2008 at 22:52
Kathryn said…
Wonderful scenario, both of you!! And just adding more proof that we all are very complex beings. (Some more so than others).

Wishing you well, as always, Kelvin. And still praying for your good health - body and/or mind! :-)
27 October 2008 at 18:12
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...
10 comments
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...
3 comments
Read more

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...
8 comments
Read more

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...
Post a Comment
Read more