| 'Conventional medicine has forgotten the primal aspects of caring.' |
 |
|
|
Modern medicine fails because it cannot cope with uncertainty.
|
When asked when human civilisation first demonstrated 'care', the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead held up a healed fractured femur from the Rift Valley in Kenya. Her argument was that the owner of the femur could not have survived without the food, water and care provided by others. It requires little imagination to believe that should another fracture have occurred in that community, that same carer would have been sought out for advice, as indeed they might have been for other maladies. With no science, a little luck possibly, and a bucket of folk belief and good will, the vital role of healer had evolved.
|
It can be argued that although different cultures subsequently developed disparate medical systems, the most prominent commonality was a sense of holism: the mind and the body were not seen as separate or distinct. Given a lack of scientific understanding, ill health and its restoration were inevitably seen in terms of beliefs, folk law, natural phenomena and religious observances. What was crucial was the identification of the individual within the precepts and ideals of the paradigm.
|
With the advent of scientific exploration of disease during the modern period, and the development of formal medical education, concepts changed dramatically. Foucault saw what he termed 'the medical gaze' as being crucial to the myth of the unassailable medical perspective. He saw the culmination of this approach as the replacement of the question, 'what seems to be the matter?', with the harsher scientific focus of 'tell me where it hurts?'.
|
Were Foucault still commentating in our own time it is probable that he would have incorporated two newer phenomena into his polemic. Firstly the bedside analysis of patients has been totally hijacked by investigative technology. Now clinical opinion is subsumed within the unquestionable accuracy of scans and tests. The doctor is no longer master-chef, merely the waiter serving the often unpalatable meal. The medical gaze has been replaced by the techno-gaze. This movement has its ultimate apotheosis in today's nanotechnology and genetic engineering. There are no boundaries: everything will be revealed to the scrutiny of molecular reductionism.
|
Except for uncertainty. Eighty five percent of people attending their GP have no clear-cut pathology. How does this approach help them? It doesn't.
|
Secondly, and specific to the UK, is the near complete politicisation of medicine. The transference of medical control to the state in terms of access and finance yet further denied the individual the opportunity to express their own beliefs and identity. With this, the dehumanising of systemic medicine became complete.
|
It is not surprising that out of these deficits there develops an 'alternative' system - a sort of 'anti-medicine', where personal beliefs are allowable (and indeed probably crucial), where human contact remains prominent within the encounter, where there is room for the healing breath of mother nature, where the reassurance of touch is sanctioned, where faith and belief are permissible and take their place among a more flexible but accessible and credible set of ideas.
|
Conventional medicine is not enough because it equates illness with disease and has forgotten those primal aspects of caring. Complementary medicine is demanded not because it has all the answers, or can rectify some of the human deficits within biomedicine, but because it can help frail human beings cope with uncertainty.
|
Charles Pither is medical director at the RealHealth Institute.
|
