Emerging Medicine

Emerging Medicine

Emerging medicine uses new frames and constructs to catalyze an epochal transformation in late modern medicine for the purpose of preventing the sixth extinction. This purposeful post-post-modern change supports life-positive, cure-positive care that is human-scale, contextual to life on earth, responsive to new ailments, patient-led, local, and dedicated to a living future for our species as an integral part of the body of life on which human health, survival, and thriving depend. Evolve Medicine, a non-profit organization, is designed to support a grassroots change in mainstream medicine that will enable it to keep up with changes in biological systems.

Working Frames

Earth

The 'blue marble' of Earth seen from Apollo 17.
The most inclusive context of Emerging Medicine is Earth as astronauts have seen it from the moon, or as satellite cameras have imaged it from space. The whole of the planet in context is biological as well as geophysical and chemical—that is, living as well as dead.

Body of Life

Illustration showing habitats of the Cascadia bioregion.
The biome, or life on earth, can be viewed as a complex superorganism or as the sum or aggregate of all living, biological entities. It is thus an imagined body that reveals the interconnected nature of all life. This body of life—as it has developed since the fifth extinction—is now imperiled by humanity’s late modern way of life, which is spending the future of life; it can be rescued only by humans who restore habitats and reintegrate with them in a sustainable balance. However, restoration and reintegration are not sufficient to cure the body of life, which is suffering from chronic ambient poisoning; such poisoning is not limited to humans, and so affects the bodies of species and habitats that have yet to go extinct[1][2][3][4]. We have—perhaps—a century to reverse the downward spiral of life that we set in motion.

Body of the Habitat

Ponderosa pine forest habitat.
Two and a half millennia ago, Hippocrates wrote of the importance of airs, waters, and places[5]. Now, with the institutionalization of medicine, doctors and patients have lost sight of the adverse consequences of habitat damage and also of the positive effects on health, well-being, and survival of the body of life in which humans evolved. Emerging medicine can support doctors in recognizing the urgent need to revitalize the habitats on which they and their patients depend for life. To see this need requires that doctors grasp that life is “externalized”—that is, “valued at nothing” by the late modern economy. It also requires an appreciation for the invisible material aspects of being and interbeing—such as temperature, humidity, and radiation—that form local climates and ecological niches.

Body of the Species

Artistic rendition of the collective human species.
In Eastern religions such as Christianity and Hinduism, it is not unusual to recognize members of a religion or sect as a “body.” English-language terms such as the “body politic” also recognize aggregations of humans. In emerging medicine, doctors will find it useful to view all humans as members of the body of the species because few ailments affect humans alone, and the new epidemics are most easily detected in other species such as bees, birds, amphibians, insects, and others indicative of healthy biodiversity.

Key Constructs

Nested Bodies

Together, the nested frames described above compose a key construct of Evolve Medicine: nested bodies. Unlike the late modern construct of human exceptionalism, which leads doctors to view life outside the human body as a source of “enemy agents,” this biocentric, post-post-modern construct features our interdependence with the lives in which we nest. In this working construct, the individual body is viewed as nested in aggregate bodies such as the human species, the body of the habitat, and the body of life on earth. These aggregate bodies thus form our living context.

Sevenfold Body

Just as late modern urbanist views cut humans away from the body of life, so they divide the flesh from the being that it generates. If doctors are to enable grassroots self-care and cure, a new construct of the body is required that allows patients to hone subjective perceptions and to access their beings for the care of their bodies, as adepts did in ancient times. The initial Evolve Medicine construct of the body uses the modern view of flesh as comprised of organ systems and divides being into six aspects or levels that are useful for self-care and -cure. These aspects are derived from the “five heaps” or aggregates attributed to the Buddha, the energy body of classical Asian civilizations, and interbeing, a fusion of ecological constructs with the theological concept developed by Thich Nhat Hanh[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13].

Sensations

In health, sensations enable the creation of relief, comfort, and well-being through constructed pleasures and placebos. In sickness, the sensory organs and sense consciousnesses can be developed into an exquisitely tuned instrument for monitoring difficulties and for guiding interventions by their effects on energy, awareness, and behavior. For example, taste organs may prompt culinary pleasure or warn against food poisoning, the auditory nerve may appreciate a musical performance or prompt fear or love, and the detection and exploration of pain and suffering can enable healing from within via placebo or care state creation and continuation.

Energy

The body operates and exquisitely orchestrates electromagnetic fields that may act precisely and independently, as with the rhythmic contraction of the heart, or diffusely and interdependently, as with a whole-body sexual climax. The resting energy body has its own subtle structure, discernible through classical Daoist and tantric practices. Body and being can use the energy body for power in martial arts, for personal transformation, or for self-care, as through qigong. Practices using the energy body empower relief, well-being, and self-healing of all kinds.

Perceptions

In this first construct offered by Evolve Medicine, perceptions include every automatic or habitual response, from simple spinal reflexes to subliminal social biases and adaptive or maladaptive habits. Put differently, this aspect of being includes all conditional responses, including the filtering of contextual sensory data and other deeply subconscious reflexes and reactions that may be triggered by a variety of stimuli. These begin to accumulate before birth and may seem to happen to you rather than to constitute continuing habits that are yours to manage.

Understanding

Here we late moderns have an unprecedented advantage: frames, constructs, and processes of the modern era enable our species to gather objective knowledge of our context and so to take responsibility for life on earth. Emergence will prepare us to live up to this by restoring appreciation of the intangible, subjective, and evolved; to advance our ability to learn experientially in real time; and to adequately and resiliently respond to biological reality by updating our processes of gathering information, knowledge, and wisdom about life so as to care for it rather than kill it.

Awareness

This is the least tangible, most undeveloped, and most glorious co-creation with our species’ context—living, dead, and artificial. This aspect of the body joins all aspects of body and being with the life that is inside and all around, in the moment and over time, and so with our personal and shared becoming and doing. It is the field in which we interface with space, time, and life, and develop the capacity to sync with life in time and over time. With awareness, energy, and experience, we can change very quickly by choice, and engage with the body of life in such a way as to rescue it before it dies.

Interbeing

Thanks to ecology and theology, emergence is developing very quickly and in ways unprecedented. This is evident in the world-wide grassroots movement toward sustainability, especially in habitat restoration and in off-the-grid self-sufficiency[14][15][16][17].

New Terms and Definitions

Vitacide

Vitacide is the sterilization—i.e. killing—of life on earth. Even as our species aggravates its galloping consumption of the body of life by disseminating pesticides, herbicides, and other ecocides into the environment to do unpremeditated damage to all life forms—including our own—we continue to destroy and consume local bioregions and subregions and to extinguish evolved species and local habitats. We do this out of a lack of awareness of our context and the underdevelopment and neglect of our interbeing.

Fertility as Multiplying Life

In addition to functioning as a superorganism that is devouring the body of life[18], humans are—if anything—too plentiful. Reduction of death and natural increase of the population together speed the end of life on earth. In the initial view of Evolve Medicine, women who have access to birth control are at liberty to define fertility as suits their vision of a living future.

One such vision of fertility is the adoption and restoration of a habitat. Another is exploring structural anthropology to identify and try out kinship structures that involve child sharing. A third is to use Daoist celibacy practices to divert sexual energy to other centers. All of these allow lifelong and broad-spectrum methods for facilitating the evolution of human communities that live monastically—in the old or new way[19][20]—so as to better care for creation.

Doctor of Life

In the working emerging paradigm, doctors may withdraw from the medical-industrial complex to practice medicine on the human scale and above. Specialists in preventive medicine and public health as well as primary care doctors who do research in epidemiology—clinical or population-based—may transition to life care by developing new curricula in habitat and global medicine—as well as by collaborating with plant and veterinary pathologists, geo-physicists, and others whose expertise can support the care of humans with all species in all places.

Emerging Medical Team

Evolve Medicine proposes a clinic care team to include: an M.D. doctor of life (with optional Ph.D. in field biology); a bodyworker who does hands-on care; a counselor who does talk therapy; and a habitat restorer who integrates physical activity with habitat restoration, prioritizing forests for rapid increase in biomass and the mitigation of climate disruption. To rescue our nested bodies, we would be well-advised to create transitional habitats resistant to climate change. The human reversal of vitacide and prevention of the sixth extinction has already begun; doctors can take advantage of a growing body of experiential learning about restoration (see the Society for Ecological Restoration).

Medical Eldering

As an emerging medical elder[21], the work of the individual doctor’s wisdom years entails developing a professional legacy that guides junior colleagues to rescue the body of life. When physicians have finished their lifeworks but are still keen to save life, they can self-educate to mentor mid-career and newly-trained doctors. Some may choose to create experimental habitat restoration clinics and communities with patients who are chronically exposed to poisons or whose tolerance has failed.

Lifework

In the initial Evolve Medicine view, the lifetime is divided into three phases: preparation, lifework, and legacy. The idea is to sustain a resilient life plan that supports dynamic acquisition of knowledge and skills, selection of and engagement with vocational practice that ends in a capstone period, and wisdom work in medicine as a means for co-creating a living future.

Emergence in Other Fields

Many fields have been forming a new post-post-modern worldview linked to sustainability, provisionally labeled as “emergence.” In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, “emergent” properties of a system are not possessed by any single part; instead, these properties emerge when multiple parts interact as a wider whole. This can be seen retrospectively in the emergence of the Axial, Classical, Medieval, and Modern epochs.

During the emergence of the modern era, travellers such as Von Humboldt and Columbus recorded changes in the body of life and its climate caused by colonial consumption and destruction of habitats. Thoreau and Darwin made careful recordings of widespread losses in nineteenth century and through the whole of biological time. Early in the twentieth century, W. C. Allee developed ecological theories detailed in Animal Aggregations[22], which was advanced by Levins and Lewontin in their mathematical models of overadaptation with loss of resilience and risk of extinction. Since then, scientists have been documenting acceleration of loss of species and habitat across the planet[23], to which humans are responding with dissemination of information as well as global efforts to restore habitats.

With the publication of W. H. McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples in the 1970s, historians became aware of the impact of epidemics on human history. Now, bubonic plague is recognized as a cause of the emergence of the modern era. The new epidemics that are just now being defined herald the emergence of a new era that will, in part, be defined by changes in human and habitat ailments and the human adaptations that will catalyze survival in the way of modern medicine’s reintroduction of the anatomical gold standard with empirical definitions of pathologies and later with the interventionist medicine of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Put differently, humans create new epochs in response to paradigm gaps revealed by changes in context that present unforeseen challenges. Now, at the end of the modern era, our species is being taken to task by the consequences of its own conduct, which threatens its own future as well as the future of evolved life. That is, we are consuming and contaminating the biome at an alarming rate. All fields of endeavor, including medicine, must adapt and evolve without delay. The following fields have much to offer medicine as doctors develop new ways of seeing that enable them to face new ailments that damage the human microbiome, human health and well-being, and all of the species and habitats that comprise the body of life.

Agronomy

Late modern mass production of chemicals became a cornerstone of the post-WWII economy, including industrial farming, which was followed by antidotal organic farming that hearkens back to traditional methods. Traditional farming has a history that dates back before the time of Hippocrates[24]. These methods work with life rather than embattling it, and offer clues to disorders of the human microbiome[25] and gastrointestinal tract, as well as ailments of modified habitats racked by industrial agriculture[26].

Theology

Throughout history, mystics and contemplatives have discovered and rediscovered unitive thinking—that is, perceiving how everything fits together to form a big picture. This ‘big picture’ then invites the recognition that is apprehension, which precedes comprehension. Discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Gospel of Thomas reopened theologians to larger timeframes that invite evaluation of modern boundaries, including those that have riven science from religion[27][28][29][30][31]. Pope Francis’ raising of ecologic concerns[32] and the new popularity of Saint Francis illustrate the growing theological aspect of deep ecology, as do Earth Ministry and Simple Way.

Ecology and Field Biology

Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring[33] made the public aware of the dissemination of human-made poisons and their consequences, particularly those of DDT on birds. At that time, late moderns demanded action when the frames and constructs were not ready, which resulted in the creation of fixed bureaucracies that purport to manage the unknown. This could not but fail, specifically by attempting to handle an ever-growing flood of synthetic chemicals one by one.
The radical destruction of life continued apace for the next 50 years, and is accelerating now. To date, scientists have generally passively documented an on-rushing loss of evolved life, recording the extinctions of species and habitats[23] and the related global warming and wildfires that accelerate them. Ongoing catastrophic loss of the last 300 million years of evolution threatens the sixth extinction[1]. This is on course to end the Anthropocene[34] with the dominant species that defined it: humans.

Many people have been advocating for preserving one species or another, but now biodiversity is emerging as an integrative metric for the health of whole habitats. Fortunately, habitat restoration is expanding rapidly, as is epochal change that may enable humans to rescue the habitats that remain. Doctors can assist by exploring ways to diagnose chronic ambient poisoning and to treat lives in and with their contexts through Integrative Medicine, biofiction, and the Evolve Medicine community.

Extinction studies and restoration ventures are increasing the knowledge base available to doctors of life[23][26][35].

Architecture and Design

The progress towards emergence in architecture and design evident in many TED Talks has a localist[36], experimental beginning in the cob house movement in the lower Gulf Islands of B.C.[37]; to Mike Reynolds’ Earthship Biotecture; and most especially to the Seven Petal Living Building Paradigm[38] as demonstrated by Seattle’s Bullitt Center. Also proliferating have been EcoNest, net-zero building, Passivhaus, and off-site construction options such as Method Homes. The field of architecture is thus a model for contextual, sustainable, human-scale, localist, feasible, and practical emergence. Living building clinics with an Evolve Medicine type of care team[21] would be immersed in life and in a good position to respond to it, and to restore it in real time, and so to give doctors a chance to emerge empirically and experientially—as always.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Kolbert, Elizabeth (2014). The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2014. ISBN 978-0805092998.
  2. ^ Levins, Richard (1968). Evolution in Changing Environments. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN: 978-0691080628.
  3. ^ Diamond, Jared (2005). Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN: 0-14-303655-6.
  4. ^ Wallace-Wells, David (2019). The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. New York: Tim Duggan Books. ISBN: 978-0525576709.
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  10. ^ Dalai Lama; Tsong-ka-pa; Hopkins, Jeffrey (1987). Deity Yoga. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1981. ISBN: 978-0937938508.
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  26. ^ Guarino, Ben (15 October 2018). “‘Hyperalarming’ study shows massive insect loss.” Washington Post. Retrieved 15 October 2018.
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  37. ^ About Cobworks Cobworks. Retrieved 19 August 2019.
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