Far more than a lack of technological acumen, sufficient funds, or new discoveries, our culture’s skewed idea of normality is the single biggest impediment to fostering a healthier world, even keeping us from acting on what we already know. Its occluding effects are particularly dominant in the field where clear sight is most called for: medicine.
The current medical paradigm, owing to an ostensibly scientific bent that in some ways bears more resemblance to an ideology than to empirical knowledge, commits a double fault. It reduces complex events to their biology, and it separates mind from body, concerning itself almost exclusively with one or the other without appreciating their essential unity. This shortcoming does not invalidate medicine’s indisputably miraculous achievements, nor sully the good intentions of so Case in point: the ample and growing evidence that living people cannot be dissected into separate organs and systems, not even into ‘minds’ and 'bodies.’ Overall, the medical world has been unwilling or unable to metabolise this evidence and to adjust its ways accordingly. The new science - much of which isn’t all that conceptually new - has yet to have a significant impact on medical school training, leaving well-meaning health providers to toil in the dark. Many end up having to connect the dots for themselves.
