| Medicine Now and Then, Article #2 |
 |
 |
 |
|
Some 450 years ago a revolution took place. Sir Isaac Newton laid down the first principles of what we now think of as the roots of science. From this a movement developed, it was the beginning of modern science and scientific theory. Shortly after this movement took root, the world was broken up in two groups, in a kind of revolution. They were those healers who operated through the church and those that now prayed to a new set of gods, the gods we think of today as science. The split had many reasons but none of these reasons really had anything to do with healing, nor with treating people, except indirectly.
 The main reason for this spilt was that the new science group declared that no treatment technique or medication should be used unless, it could be proven to work through scientific process, trail and error, we now think of as research, the scientific theory. You could no longer attribute fact to what you believed, rather only to what you could prove. Results had to be documented scientifically, before they could be considered valid and hence used. To the scientist, it no longer mattered what you believed, only what you could prove. The church on the other hand had for hundreds of years, taken healing as a matter of faith, God healed, and the healer healed in the name of God. The science advocates believed that faith was no longer enough. One had, through experiment and scientific processes, to prove that whatever was done when a healer attempted healing had a scientific basis, it had to meet the criteria set by the priests of science, who now called themselves “physicians.” The treatment or medication had to be proven effective, what was done or used had to be duplicatable, and no matter how many times it was used, it had to work, over and over, again and again, consistently.  In many ways the two groups did exactly the same things. For example, a priest healer might use a specific herb to treat a malady and along with this herb he prayed to God. When the patient got better, the healer would tell the patient and his family, “It was God’s will!” If the patient died, that too, was God’s will. The scientific healer might well use the exact same herb to treat the exact same patient and when the patient got better he would tell the patient “Because of my years of experience and scientific study, I selected the exact right medicinal herb to heal you!” If the patient died, he might say to himself, but not necessarily to the family, “Well that herb did not work, may be I used the wrong dosage or the wrong herb, oh well, back to the drawing board.”While the proponents of science and religion have battled with each other for 400 or more years, medicine grew into its own independent field of study. Anatomists braved religious-based laws against dissecting human bodies in order to learn about anatomy. Surgeons had many wars during which they practiced their surgical skills and herbalists were replaced by mega corporations which push life-saving drugs for staggering profits. For several hundred years bleeding, leaching and cathartics ruled the discipline of medicine. It was not until world war II and the discovery of penicillin that most historians agree that medicine finally moved into the era we currently call “modern medicine.”  There were, as with any revolution, casualties in the science versus church revolution. The largest and most costly to human kind was the separation of the physical body from the mind and the spirt. While most primitive witch doctors and shamans knew that to recreate health you had to treat mind, body and spirit. The campions of science over church however, have lost sight of this and so today physicians treat your body, rarely your mind, even less likely your spirit, and almost never will they treat the life force energy that which makes you, you. To the modern physician, these latter aspects mind, spirit, and life force energy cannot be seen nor felt and therefore they are not well applied to scientific theory, so they are ignored and considered to be of little or no consequence. Some, very few, heretic practitioners are clear that the science camp has thrown out the baby with the bath water and all that is left is the lathered up body, without mind, without emotion, and without a life-giving spirit ad without life force energy. They say because of this medicine treats only the physical body and not the person, and that this is why we extend longevity of the body, but not the quality of the life we live. In our next article we look at what happens to Western Medicine and the people of science as they enter into the 20th Century....... Article #3, The History of Western Medicine Part Two.
For more information about Dr. Lawrence go to his website, click here.
|
The Birth of Modern Western Medicine
Allen Lawrence, M.D. is a graduate of UCLA, UC Irvine Medical School, Internship at USC County Medical Center, Residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Cedars Sinai. Dr. Lawrence has a 
