Part of the Meta Biologic Evolution series by Alan Steinfeld

The Old Medical Paradigm
By Alan Steinfeld

"The Principle which gives life dwells in us, and without us, is undying and beneficent, is not heard or seen or smelt, but it is perceived by the man who desires perception." -Mabel Collins, The Idyll of the White Lotus (1884)

In the book, Death by Modern Medicine, Dr. Carolyn Dean verifies that from 1990-2000 about 7.8 million people have died due some medical cause.  This number includes fatalities from wrong prescriptions, poor operating procedures or the most epidemic iogenic disease. Infections caught in hospital that resist any form of antibiotic intervention.  I am not saying don’t use doctors or hospitals; I am just pointing out that there an epidemic of immense proportions and people are not talking about it. Western medicine; powerful, life saving at times has become the monster it has sought to destroy.  And that there are alternative.

       In the following series of articles we will outline the cause, provide  reasons for change and suggest options to lead the world into a greater paradigm of global health. In this first article we will look a the source of the problem., which is an outgrowth of our worldview being the mechanistic way we have adopted for the body.  
    
The Old Paradigm
There is a global crises being swept across the world by a system of belief that has wiped out any challenge to its structure.
Throughout the scope of human history, the perception of the world has been seen from two distinctly opposing views. One approach sees the world as a logical linear process that reduces everything to what is purely observable by human senses. This has been called mechanism. The opposing view assumes a nonlinear approach to phenomena and senses that there is a holistic fundamental element in all creation that cannot be logically reasoned by the analytical mind. This has been called vitalism. Vitalism presupposes that there is intelligence behind the life force and it is the predominant causal factor in an evolving universe.      
Mechanism
At present, the orthodox approach to science and medicine is given by the mechanistic theory of life: Living organisms are regarded as nothing more than complex machines governed by the laws of physics and chemistry. The main reason why most biologists continue to adhere to this is that it works. It provides a framework of thought within which questions can be asked and answered about the physical-chemical processes of life. This theory dismisses vitalism as a survival of a primitive belief system that will eventually retreat further and further as technological advances are made (Sheldrake, 1995).  It assumes life is an anamlolies in an otherwise lifeless universe.

    This approach to our existence has been present for about the last hundred years and assumes a linear and rational view of life. Yet many people, particularly those living close to the earth see it other ways.  Sioux teacher Vine Deloria, a Professor in the Center of Native American Studies at the University of Colorado and a Lakota Sioux writes “In order to maintain the fiction that the world is dead and that those who believe it to be alive have succumbed to superstition…If you see the world around you as a collection of objects for you to manipulate and exploit, you will inevitably destroy the world while attempting to control it. Not only that, but by perceiving the world as lifeless, you rob yourself of the richness, beauty, and wisdom to be found by participating in its larger design.

However, the rational approach starts from the idea that everything is explainable and that mystery is in some sense the enemy. This means that it prefers pejorative and even wrong answers rather than admitting its own lack of understanding.  Molecular biologists call ninety-seven percent of our DNA “junk DNA.” In The Cosmic Serpent, author Jeremy Narby says that this “reveals not only its degree of ignorance, but the extent to which it is prepared to belittle the unknown . . . It would have been just as easy to call it mystery DNA, for instance.”
With the failure of many efforts, science has been left in a position of having to postulate theories of life’s long origins it cannot demonstrate. After dismissing theology, science finds itself in the position of having to create a mythology of its own (of inert amino acids sparked in a soupy pond of potentials) to assure that what cannot be proven to take place today had in fact taken place in some primeval past  In his book The Immense Journey, Loren Eisely, the great philosopher of natural history, stated, “If anything, the growing list of catalysts, hormones, plasma genes, and other hobgoblins recently discovered in the workings of Life only serve to underline the complexity of its existence.” Eisely quotes the German biologist Von Bertalanff as saying, "The physical-chemical organization of the simplest cell is far beyond our capacity." Eisely concludes, "When it was revealed that even the supposedly simple amoebae was a complex, self-operating chemical factory, the notion that it was a simple blob turned out to be a monstrous caricature of the truth."

Another problem with the mechanistic model for biology is that it fails to understand how evolution can be epigenetic: how new structures appear which cannot be explained in terms of the unfolding growth of structures which were not present at the beginning of development (Sheldrake, 1995). Despite this and seemingly other unanswerable questions like intelligence, generation, and regulation, the mechanistic approach persists. Now with new knowledge and theories, the mechanical underpinnings seem to be giving way. It now appears that the evolving, mindless, goal-directed behavior attributed to genetic programs is remarkably similar to those which vitalists say are teleological in nature. Teleology is an Aristotelian term that means nature has a destiny that it is fulfilling.