Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is the late modern problem of chronic ambient poisoning (CAP)?
   • Chronic ambient poisoning, aka Alderman syndrome, is an ongoing, human-caused injury to habitats and to the body of life on which all species depend for continuation.
   • CAP manifests in humans as chronic exposure to a “cocktail” of ubiquitous poisons delivered acutely, intermittently, or continually via ingestion, inhalation, absorption, or penetration. This cocktail is ever-changing, additive or multiplicative in time, cumulative over time, and therefore particular to the individual.
   • The consequences of CAP in humans are modified by genetic, environmental, and behavioral factors, as well as by dynamic determinants of ongoing “dosage” of poisons and end-organ sensitivities.
   • Eventually, after insidious, complex exposure, individuals lose tolerance to one or more toxins.
   • Final common pathway diseases ensue that are detectable by modern gold-standard diagnostic evaluation (e.g. structural and physiological signs “provable” by legal, economic, and bureaucratic metrics).
   • Untold millions are affected knowingly and unknowingly, and are given a provisional or psychiatric diagnosis (e.g. CFS/ME or MCS) or an end-stage diagnosis like Parkinson’s Disease.
   • Codependent symptom alleviation may be achieved in some instances with SSRI medications.
   • Preventive cure may be pursued by N-of-1 elimination studies in cooperation with a willing and able doctor versed in the latest courses on EvolveMedicine.us.
   • Medical tourism to areas where clinical diagnostic acumen is still cultivated may help some patients.
2. What are the obstacles to solving the human-caused habitat disease that manifests as CAP?
   • The modern worldview as a whole (as manifest in the economy and other oversized, overmanaged social systems) externalizes life on earth and radically discounts the near future. It relies on overly simplistic metrics, “magical thinking” toward technology, and substitutes motion for action and data for understanding.
   • Specific aspects of the modern worldview obstruct ongoing experiential learning through pervasive, maladaptive assumptions: human exceptionalism, uniformity, comprehension, and control. These errors are institutionalized.
   • Moderns disregard: biological time, the unknown all, unwanted feedback, the consequences of land and water use, and cautionary tales and aphorisms that carry life lessons across generations.
   • The late modern social consensus relies on technical, legal, and economic “proofs” that undermine clinical skills, bar thinking and experiential learning, obscure trends and clues, and exclude patients whose biological realities do not conform to expectations (e.g. new epidemics of chronic illness).
   • Modern methods obscure the “big picture” by analysis without synthesis that leads to extreme reductionism with ungrounded molecularism, reliance on misleading virtual reality, and disregard for knowledge and wisdom. These errors are also institutionalized, and result in “theory blindness”.
   • Skepticism is not a method, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and statistical thinking is inimical to intricate and deterministic biological realities.
   • The gold standard for medical diagnosis during the modern era has been the autopsy, which suits end-organ damage but is useless for elucidating the effects of chronic exposure to a “cocktail” of ubiquitous poisons and therefore inadequate for the biomedical realities of the present moment.
   • Studies that crowd the modern biomedical databases are designed to fail in assessing the effects of ubiquitous poisons because:
     1. There is no “unexposed” group.
     2. No constituent of the poison can be ignored or weighted according to unfounded expectations.
     3. No meaningful “dose” has been defined for exposures, nor has individual susceptibility to that dose.
     4. Assumptions regarding aggregability of data are untenable.
     5. System failures oblige patients to seek care from a variety of conventional and unconventional sources and to help themselves as best they can, so all evaluation is post-treatment by various unassessable methods.
     6. Simplistic exposure assessments may bias toward the null, though effects can be unpredictable.
     7. The necessary clinical research-in-practice on which to base systematic study no longer takes place, or is exceedingly rare and piecemeal, or disregarded, not least because it is not billable or fundable in modern settings.
     8. Integrative medicine lacks an umbrella paradigm (there is one; see Resources).
3. What is the solution to CAP? The emerging medical paradigm for a living future, which:
   • Draws on decades of emergence in agriculture, architecture, design, psychology, theology, archaeology, and ecology.
   • Supports a vision of residential habitat restoration communities that cure humans with their habitats, and the biome with global warming.
   • Supports care of the individual by way of preventive N-of-1 sequential elimination studies with run-in periods to rid the body of toxins, especially those stored in fat (see Medical Detective).
   • Avails patients of tangible and intangible care and cure, and subjective and objective self-assessment.
   • Allows post-cure aggregation of information and knowledge to support the creation of new wisdom with understanding.
   • Encourages cooperation between habitat restorers and doctors of life, which can include veterinarians, physicians, plant pathologists, ecologists, wildlife biologists, arborists, and other relevant knowledge-keepers.
   • Presently includes as elements: biocentrism; contextualization in biomedical realities including biological time scales, thinking centered on the human scale and above; use of subjective and objective human capabilities; attention to intangible as well as tangible outcomes; integration across modern fields of study; recovery of lost wisdom, including indigenous wisdom; direct as well as indirect interventions; appreciation of complex causal webs; release of uniformity, conformity, and clumsy, ill-fitting constructs and processes; self-patterning for personal and small-group transformation for discovery; and the release of war/killing/death paradigms.
   • Prioritizes practical, experiential, resilient, embodied, continuous learning from life.