An Introduction to Living Systems Medicine by Kevin Eakins, ND LSM FCT HOM, Feb 2011.
Before anyone gets smart and reminds me that there’s no need for medicine to treat dead systems, I will first acknowledge that the sub-title of this article – where it refers to Living Systems Medicine – is perhaps self evident to the point of banality. However, I do wish to convey a deeper meaning here and that is: most medicine today may per force be practised on living beings but is it truly designed for living systems?
What’s the difference, you may ask, and what does it matter anyway? Without attempting anything comprehensive, this is what I want to address in this article. Think of this as a taster, an aperitif. Maybe one day someone will come along and deliver the main course. Until then you’ll have to be content with responding to this starter.
Unavoidably I’ll have to deal with a few definitions in the paragraphs which follow. Hopefully I’ll get these out of the way quickly so that we can get to the essence of what I’m trying to say.
What constitutes the state of being “alive”? At first glance this seems pretty obvious – plants and animals. However, upon reflection the definition seems to be more blurred. The simplest protein structures exhibit intelligence and seek out environments where they can replicate and be alive. Simple atoms and molecules function in ways which are clearly non random. Whole ecosystems seem to function in ways which seek balance and harmony ; even the entire universe seems to exhibit intelligence.
Rather than reality being a world of two parts, living and dead, it seems that it’s more like a spectrum of aliveness from the curious non randomness of quantum physics to the consciousness of human life. We all share something – the question is what? Excuse me for the leap of faith but it’s clear to me that we are talking about shared information and intelligence.
The best attempts that I have found that deal with this issue of innate, non localised intelligence characterise the phenomenon as information fields1. Like the unseen magnetic field which directs the metal filings so are we interacting with our own information fields that help us function at all levels from the micro to the macro. This leads me to the first statement I’d like to make to define what constitutes Living Systems Medicine (LSM):
All reality is alive and is all connected in some way. This connection is not physical in the sense that all matter is one solid lump but rather the connection seems to be that we all share and exchange a pool of information that makes us all more intelligent. Any medicine which purports to be a medicine which is truly designed for living systems must recognise that all matter and energy is in some way underpinned with a shared pool of information and intelligence. It is the interaction of matter, energy and information that counts rather than any of our (ultimately) random definitions of separateness.
Let’s take an ecosystem example within the body to illustrate the point I’m trying to make. The gut is home to many bacteria. We are reliably informed that these bacteria outnumber our own cells by about 10:1. Think about that for a moment: our guests outnumber us by 10 to 1. In terms of numbers it would be more accurate to describe us as bacteria carriers! Our attempts to kill off these “normal” bacteria inevitably result in disease. Not that I unreservedly recommend it in all situations but nevertheless the widespread practice of supplementation with probiotics demonstrates how we have now come to accept the importance of our many tenants.
First we learned about the “good” bacteria that were useful for defending us against the “bad” bacteria but now it appears that some of the so called “bad” bacteria are also necessary for a healthy gut! Furthermore all these little guests are recognised as critical for the process of digestion and nutrient synthesis and absorption. Now we hear that they communicate with our immune system and play a vital role in regulating inflammation and even seem to have some role in regulating obesity. Let’s see, that’s three key systems that these foreigners contribute to: the immune, digestive, and endocrine systems.
To my mind these bacteria are beginning to sound like an organ of the body just like any other. The fact that they are physically separate entities does not ultimately matter. It’s their function that matters. Their contribution to the health of the whole makes them an important member of the team and not whether I define them to be separate based on their physical separateness.
Nature does not care how it puts its building blocks together. It is quite happy experimenting with itself all the time. It has millions of years’ experience in the synergy of different organisms living together and developing new, more intelligent communities who sometimes transform into single, physical entities.
Now that we’ve muddied the living waters a little, let’s examine the systems side of things. Systems are entities built up from many complex parts that function together in ways which are meaningful and contribute to the continued existence of the whole.
Although today the human body is considered more than ever to be a living system it was not always so. Lest we forget, until relatively recently we all thought that human bodies were rather robotic, blindly following the laws of Newtonian physics as molecules diffused through membranes, respected the laws of osmosis and randomly bumped into each other in the hope of generating all the reactions necessary to keep us alive.
Our cells were all soggy bags of water held together by fatty membranes while they passively waited for the next nerve impulse, hormone or nutrient to come their way. You’ll excuse me for doubting the simplicity of this picture but I think Mother Nature can do a bit better than that and it appears it can.
It’s now recognised even within mainstream biology that this is a hopelessly simplistic and even misleading picture of what’s happening. It seems that throughout the apparent chaos of molecular movement, there is intention and meaning to every action and reaction. No longer is it heresy to imagine that every cell is in constant communication with the body as a whole.
Let’s run the numbers on this one: approximately 10,000,000,000 cells each one of them in communication or potential communication with the other 10,000,000,000 cells. This is 1018 communications or potential communications at any one moment. Hold on a minute, this is impossible, right? Well, no one has proven that it’s impossible.
Clearly my intuition tells me that it’s not possible but then I understand that I’m handicapped by a lifetime of Newtonian (or is it Cartesian) consciousness. It appears I must defer to one who was never burdened with the outdated legacy of Newton’s original genius – as the LSM home page quotes Shakespeare:
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
The fact is that as research unveils more and more of the wonders of the body we see more and more the wisdom that Horatio was given. Nature has left no technology stone unturned (apologies for the dreadful mix of metaphors) to facilitate this quasi-instantaneous state of inter-connectedness. In addition to hormones, neurotransmitters and nerve impulses our bodies use electromagnetic fields, AC current, DC current, bio-photons, semi-conduction and quantum tunnelling of electrons, the piezoelectric effect, the liquid crystal properties of connective tissue, and probably many other properties of physics yet to be discovered.
To quote Albert Szent-Gyorgyi who commented in 1937: “Life is too rapid and too subtle to be explained by slow moving chemical reactions and nerve impulses.”
OK, as Elvis would say there’s a lot of shaking going on but why doesn’t everything just get lost in the mix? Why aren’t all these messages lost like my experiences as a teenager trying to chat up a girl in a noisy disco? Truly an impossible task for anyone who has tried it… Well it seems that there must be structure, priority and meaning to the dialogue.
My assumption is that all this communication is embedded into the web of the same information fields I referred to earlier. In this way every communication is not simply lost into a meaningless vacuum but rather directed to its intended recipient in some incredibly miraculous coordination of dialogue within the intelligent community to which it belongs. Furthermore each packet of information exchanged is given an appropriate level of importance based on its meaning for the system as a whole. Finally where appropriate all related information packets are combined and synthesized into higher level “bundles” of information that provoke system wide responses.
What happens to information which is not particularly important? Well, I would suggest that each packet of information is registered in some way without needing to generate an immediate response.
However, for those messages that do provoke a response, the latter changes the situation at the cellular level where the dialogue was initiated and so the originating signal is consequently adapted to the new circumstance and fed back into the system which responds in kind. It’s like an orchestra that’s decided to play jazz as it abandons the score to play variations on a theme. The notes are constantly changing but nevertheless remain true to the theme which incorporates the needs and desires of its individual musicians and at the same time the identity of the orchestra as a whole.
So I’d like to reformulate my previous statement about living systems and what this means for a medicine which is truly designed to treat them:
All living systems function within and with the help of information fields that direct, coordinate, prioritise, synthesize and add meaning to all exchanges of information that occur within their internal and external environments. These fields inform the systems they affect but are also informed by these same systems in a bilateral process of learning which leads to ever-increasing levels of intelligence.
Any medicine that truly seeks to treat living systems optimally must at least be aware of these fields and their co-dependent relationship with the systems. In the best of all worlds that medicine should seek to influence or use not only the physical system which can be observed but also the unseen and unobservable information field that characterises it.
A truly optimal living systems medicine should address and embrace both of these entities.
It seems the universe is a one big school of learning and we are all the students, the curriculum and the school itself. Clearly any medicine which calls itself a living system medicine must somehow embrace all of this in how it operates.
I’d like to finish this article with a summary of living system properties and for each property suggest a corresponding comment on what this may mean for the medicine which seeks to treat living systems holistically and fully. Once again I invite your comments.
| Living System Property | Some of the meaning this imparts for a medicine that’s truly designed for living systems |
| Individuality or uniqueness | Every patient is unique and even though most of them exhibit one of a finite number of similar patterns of pathology, the more tailored or appropriately nuanced the treatment the better |
| Openness – the ability to exchange matter, energy and information with external entities | Every patient is subject to the very considerable influence of his/her environment ; due cognisance must be taken of this not only in testing and assessment but also in treatment |
| Intelligence – the ability to exchange information internally and externally and use that exchange for the benefit of the whole | A patient may be presenting with a serious illness but we should assume that the body has responded intelligently to the stressors to which it has been exposed until now ; our therapeutic input should be so as to enhance healing by raising that level of intelligence rather than making any single gross assumption based on an over-simplified model of pathology2 |
| Dynamism – the property of constant change based on continual exchange of information, energy and matter | Every test result is a function of when and how it was carried out – it gives us a static rather than a dynamic representation ; so the medicine must be capable of setting that result into the wider context of understanding process as well as results |
| Non linearity – since living systems are assigning meaning to and prioritising all the information that’s flowing back and forth, not all inputs, outputs or exchanges are treated equally | A therapeutic input does not have to be BIG in any physical or energetic way in order to achieve big results (in other words, you don’t need a hammer to crack an egg). |
| Inter-connectiveness - this is the property of holism whereby all parts interact and influence each other to create a more meaningful whole | Every therapeutic input will have both positive and negative effects ; even if the primary effect is positive there will be the secondary and tertiary and other subsequent effects may or may not be positive so the medicine has to at least try and take this into account |
| Complexity – the property of meaning despite apparent randomness or in other words chaos in a system is not random but rather highly meaningful | Every simplification is a compromise ; if that simplification correctly guesses a higher order priority of meaning within the system then it’s likely that the therapeutic input will produce (overall) a positive result ; if not it’s time to go back to the drawing board3 |
| Identity – the property of “knowing” who I am | Each part of the system plays a role and some are less glamorous than others – what keeps individual egos in check? – in my opinion it’s critical that each part have a sense of belonging to a greater whole ; an LSM medicine needs to acknowledge the vital importance of the wider intellectual, emotional and spiritual dimension4 |
Notes:
1) For more about information fields I refer to two truly brilliant books: Morphic Resonance by Rupert Sheldrake and Science & the Akashic Field by Ervin Laszlo
2) Or as Hippocrates said it more elegantly, “First, do no harm”
3) How often do we judge the patient for being non-responsive to our valiant efforts? Instead of blaming him or her for our shortcomings we need to revisit our assumptions. The medicine has to be able to review itself and ask the question – what did I miss here?
4) In my opinion this is where cancer arises. The cell is simply put under so much stress that it decides to rebel and then goes its own merry way, wilfully refusing to listen to the pleadings of its family. In fact it decides to build its own family and live off the fat of the land for a while (or is it the glucose of the land?). This process of devolution is doomed to failure since it kills the living system which feeds it. I imagine that the desperation has to be pretty extreme before this course of action is even considered. If this sounds like I am assigning the property of consciousness to every single cell in the human body then you are right, that is exactly what I am doing.
Yes Kevin, I think “our” GIT bacteria are a sarcode/s ie an organ/system. However it’s a great pity we can’t speak Bacteriaese (as in Chinese). Perhaps they nourish and protect us because we provide them with food and a good home,warm and wet, and carry them to a source of food. Only problem for them them is we are now and again apt to poison them indiscriminately with ABs, bet they curse then.
Here’s another flight of fancy. Now imagine 10s,0f 1000s of years in the past a conversation along the lines of this “Say Clostridium, this ape’s got promise. Man, he eats way too much red meat for my liking but my great grand uncle Bifidus says that’s good for building neurones, something to do with a good supply of omega3s. My friend Candida reckons that’s much more promising than trying to reverse engineer that monkey of a chimpanzee, no don’t get me wrong he really gorged on all those fruit sugars, but then they said all it’s good for is swinging through the trees and a few steps on 2 legs. Clumsy hands and wobbly feet , no way it can take us round the world.You ought to have a word with Helicobacter up there, if you can get back up there. Yes this vehicle’s got potential, let’s develop HIM. Through him we can rule the world.”
Now, this might be a poor translation and it may suffer from too much anthropomorphising but I think all these “lower life forms” have more intelligence and lead richer lives than we give them credit for .