June 5, 2014

Single Dose of Antibiotic Found Effective in Quelling MRSA

This is a really big deal. The experts in epidemiology are terrified of MDROs (Multi-drug resistant Organisms) and the very real threat of a devastating global pandemic. Though such a disaster is perhaps inevitable we haven’t been developing new antibiotics because they don’t tend to be profitable for the drug companies. Quoting from the New York Times article:

“This is a bit of a light at the end of a dismal tunnel in the development of new antibiotics,” said Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University, who was not involved in the new study. In an editorial accompanying the research, Dr. Henry F. Chambers, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, said the one-shot antibiotic infusion could transform the treatment of acute bacterial skin infections and alter how these infections are managed. “These patients could potentially just get an antibiotic and not be admitted to the hospital at all,” Dr. Chambers said in a telephone interview. “The big question is, how much money do the drug companies want in order to be able to do that?” he asked. “It won’t be chump change.”

 This is all hopeful, though for most of us it is best seen as a reminder to maintain our own vigilance regarding the responsible use of current antibiotics: use only under the supervision of doctors, take the full course of the medicine; lobby to eradicate the irresponsible use in Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) where approximately 80% of all antibiotics are used, allowing pathogens to develop adaptation and resistance.

High Tech, High Touch: The New Health Paradigm

English: A Yin-Yang symbol transformed into Heaven and Earth, with the Chinese characters for each. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, it is considered that Heaven is Yang and Earth is Yin, so that is how they are represented here. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Our sense of well-being affects every moment of life. From the moment we wake, our experience of our health and how we feel colors our day. We know ourselves. Interesting and dangerous that the Western healthcare system largely ignores our self-knowing. Doctors, nurses or research scientists, etc., aren’t fundamentally “bad” people who willfully ignore us—but the objective, empirical scientific medical paradigm actively does. It factors out personal wisdom and interpretation. It looks exclusively to the numbers; this approach is intrinsic to empirical science. In other words, Western medicine factors out you and me. Talk about throwing the baby out with the bath water!

Putting Ourselves Back Into the Equation of Health

When we think about our healthcare system, we collectively groan and sometimes we mutter curses—sometimes we don’t just mutter those curses. There is something wrong; we know it and feel it. Many problems of Western healthcare are not news to us. Generally the problems are twofold: first, it costs too much or is inaccessible for some, second it can be ineffective—causing more problems than healing. But these two general classes of problems in our healthcare system don’t fully explain the disgust we often feel. The capability of Western healthcare is really quite extraordinary; why then are we so vaguely certain that Western healthcare sucks? We know this because we can sense that the scientific approach to health doesn’t really care about who we are; Western medicine has taken us out of the health and healing equation. We’ve been neutered and disempowered. No wonder we feel resentful! We’ve got to get ourselves back into the healthcare equation. For our health’s sake, we need a new paradigm of healing.

Now, talk of a new paradigm of healing isn’t anything new. But what is this new paradigm? Call it a high touch, high tech paradigm. Simply put it is a paradigm, or way of understanding health, that puts us back into the equation. A high touch, high tech (HTHT) health paradigm puts us back into the equation but doesn’t leave conventional science-based medicine behind. However, the high touch, high tech paradigm is a biased equation: it puts us first.

What is High Tech?

High tech medicine is all that springs from the scientific, empirical based approach to medicine. It begins with objective measurement and assessment; it then makes repairs and corrections; the purpose is to fix and cure. And no one would argue that when high tech medicine is successful it isn’t often miraculous. Yet clearly high tech medicine is not enough. It is not enough when it is too expensive, inaccessible, and unsuccessful; it is not enough when it does more harm than good; and it is not enough when it causes us to lose ourselves in the healing process.

Characteristics of High Tech Medicine:

• We practice medicine like we fix a car.
• We don’t ask the car how it is feeling.
• We run diagnostics.
• When something is wrong, we assess until we find the problem.
• We fix. We cure.
• Medical Research.
• Western Medical Training.
• Insurance Industry & Practices.
• Pharmacology.
• For Profit Medicine.
• Focused on sickness, disease, and dysfunction.

What is High Touch?

Many people have defined high touch approaches to medicine, but high touch fundamentally stands on the acknowledgement, engagement and empowerment of the Self. High Touch medicine acknowledges and starts with Self-knowing and wisdom. It requires that we cultivate the ability to listen to ourselves—to our body, mind and spirit. We have to dialogue with ourselves. Our healthcare practitioners must talk with us and participate in an exploration and cultivation of our sense of well-being. We listen, and importantly we respond. High touch medicine is Self responsible medicine.

Characteristics of High Touch Medicine:

• We practice medicine as if we were cultivating a garden.
• We support and cultivate the conditions for health, like watering a garden.
• We manage the environments of healing.
• We are empowered.
• We are responsible.
• We listen to our holistic system—body, mind and spirit—and respond.
• We are engaged; we are in relationship with our healing process.
• We are biased toward our own Self-knowing and intuitive wisdom.
• High tech medicine supports a high touch holistic system, but does not dictate to it.
• We know health is always extant in us.
• We know that we always have access to the healing response.
• Focused on wellness, health, and integral & holistic approaches to the healing process.

High Touch, High Tech Is Biased

The high touch, high tech paradigm doesn’t throw any baby out with the bath water. We keep and utilize a scientific approach and understanding of health and healing. But we don’t allow the potency of high tech to disempower, devalue or disenfranchise Self wisdom and knowing. In fact, the high touch, high tech paradigm not only remembers the Self but starts with the Self. We bias the HTHT paradigm to start with the innate wisdom inherent in who we are. We understand that health is always in the body, mind and spirit and can always be cultivated and strengthened. Always! We know we are fundamentally okay.

HTHT & Western Approaches To Health

Our sense of self—our subjective knowing and wisdom—is critical to our healing process. It is at the same time patently imperfect. Our sensory capabilities don’t track important micro-environments of our physiological process. More often than not our psychology does what we want to do, and we believe what we want to believe, often in ways that do not serve our health and well-being. We go for the donut before the celery stick. High tech medicine can support us with capabilities and assessments that mediate the fallibility of our intuitive wisdom and self-knowing; high tech medicine can support and strengthen the innate health in our physiology. High tech medicine can provide invaluable information and feedback that we can use to help us support our healing process. But too often high tech medicine dominates and subjugates the Self rather than supports it. Our Western approach to health and healing is a high tech, low/no touch paradigm. Fundamentally, it is a medical system that has forgotten us. Perhaps even more disheartening, its potency has seduced us into forgetting ourselves and the powerful relationship we can have with our healing process.

Old Chinese medical chart on acupuncture meridians (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

HTHT & Alternative Approaches To Health

Many of us sense that there is something fundamentally wrong with conventional, Western approaches to health and we turn to alternative approaches. If we don’t understand the fundamental distinction between high touch and high tech, we can be down a rabbit hole in a hurry. Perhaps the first thing to know is that many alternative and traditional approaches to health and healing are not just high touch, but are in fact high touch, high tech. For example, traditional Chinese Medicine uses systematic and objective techniques (thus applying the high tech paradigm, even if it uses low tech tools such as the cun) to assess the condition of body, mind and spirit; but TCM (properly understood) uses these techniques to create balance and responsiveness in the Self, thus supporting the high touch paradigm. TCM is fundamentally based on the Taoist philosophy of balancing Yin and Yang which is another way of describing a high touch, high tech paradigm or approach to health. Ayurveda is also fundamentally a high touch, high tech paradigm.

English: Yin & Yang (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The second thing to know is that very often we misuse and misunderstand alternative approaches to health because we apply these approaches from the high tech, conventional, Western paradigm. We judge their usefulness and effectiveness solely on controlled studies using numbers, statistics and measurements. We use them to fix and cure; we use them as just another tool in the car mechanics toolbox. (For example, acupuncture becomes simply a tool for pain management.) When alternative and holistic treatments are used in a way that is subservient to the high tech, Western health paradigm, we continue to lose the Self and the potency of a high touch Self healing paradigm. We miss the importance of supporting the Self to listen and remember itself as it comes into relationship with its healing process.

High Touch, High Tech: A New Paradigm of Healing

Those of us who live in cultures dominated by the conventional Western approach to health and healthcare face huge challenges when we try to embrace a high touch, high tech paradigm of healing. We have to be giant-slayers. The conventional healing paradigm is a 2.5 trillion dollar for profit industry; it is deeply invested in our sickness and disease. Many businesses and people make vast amounts of money attending to our afflictions. The conventional Western healing paradigm is not likely to change of its own volition. Importantly this juggernaut is all too dependent on our own individual disempowerment. Recent healthcare reforms, and Obamacare, does not fundamentally change this dynamic.

If we believe in ourselves and our ability to heal—and it is SO important that we do—we have to understand and practice this new paradigm of health and healing, knowing that we will have nominal social and economic support. Yes we can find people and professionals that will support us and the holistic high touch, high tech healing paradigm—but we have to seek them out. We have to trust and believe in our own Self-knowing. We have to learn to listen and then respond to our own wisdom. We can engage healthcare professionals, experts and coaches from both High Tech and High Touch realms to help us cultivate and manage our healing process in body, mind and spirit. We must remember ourselves. But if we can begin to do this as we come into relationship with our healing process, not only will we be healing ourselves we will begin to heal the world.

The Holistic Challenge: Claiming Your Empowered, Healing Self

WE’VE BEEN HURT, or will be…. perhaps we even find ourselves dealing with some chronic condition. How severe—from mortal to maintenance—we may not know. But given the fact that all of us are in fact mortal, and live in bodies, most of us are going to have to figure out how to heal from something. Undoubtedly at some point, we will know someone we love who is dealing with health challenges. At some point in our lives, we have to choose whether or not (and to what extent) we interact with our Healthcare system.

Which brings us to this: Why is it that when we interact with the Western biomedical healthcare system we feel so awful, so often? Rather self-evident, you say?! But that’s not what I’m talking about: Beyond the pain and discomfort that we experience due to our afflictions there is often something deeper going on—a deeper hurt—that  has implications for our health, well-being and recovery. At this deeper level, there are two fundamental experiences that we tend to encounter.

FIRST, WE LIKELY FEEL BETRAYED in a more or less subtle way. We feel betrayed by our bodies and the extraordinary stuff and matter that we all too often take for granted. The strength and stability of our bodies have deserted us and, seemingly, there is not a lot we can do about it. We are more or less out of control—and importantly it is our “Self” that has lost control.

SECOND, WHEN WE TURN TO OUR WESTERN SYSTEM of healthcare we compound our loss of control by engaging with a system that intrinsically devalues our Self. Now our doctors, nurses and caregivers are for the most part, fine and compassionate individuals—but this is not about them. It is a healthcare system that intrinsically devalues the Self. Our Western biomedical system rests on a scientific, empirical paradigm that is predicated on pulling the human element out of the picture and dispassionately observing, measuring and assessing. We benefit ever so much from this approach. And yet this means when we engage with the Western biomedical system, the Self aches for acknowledgement. It aches for recognition. With the right doctors, nurses and caregivers we glean an inkling of this recognition and acknowledgement during our interactions with them but truly, due to the time constraints intrinsic to modern medicine, these moments are ever so fleeting. We are left with numbers, levels, measurements, images and assessments that tell us whether we are healthy or not—we are left with a piece of paper and a prescription in our hands. Our Self is completely irrelevant to the process.

ON BOTH A PERSONAL LEVEL and on a systemic level our Body becomes disconnected from our Mind/Self. Further, the health we seek is out there somewhere (in the hands of a doctor, or a pill, or a procedure) but in any case disconnected from ourselves or an empowered Self. When we become seriously hurt or sick, we tend to break apart: the Body from the Mind/Self and these from the intrinsic or innate health that is always expressing in a holistic system. Bringing these parts of us back together is the Holistic Challenge of healing.

Now, at one time in the not so distant past we could chalk this discussion up to new age-y feel good psycho-babble. But Western, empirical science and medicine now know what alternative healing traditions have be saying for millennia: the Mind/Self are critical components of the healing process. An integrated, coherent, empowered holistic Self unequivocally affects and often is critical to the healing process. These effects can be measured. And because of the holistic nature of things, the cultivation of an empowered Self can have reverberations beyond just our individual afflictions. Our disease or dysfunction can become an invitation to integrate and grow ourselves in ways that have effects beyond our own body-mind-spirit.

THE OBJECTIVE, EMPIRICAL PARADIGM driving the Western biomedical system isn’t changing anytime soon. Thus the holistic challenge and the re-valuing and reclamation of the Self and our empowered healing Self is on each of us as individuals. We must be responsible and proactive. We can reclaim and re-empower our Self, but this hinges on the development of a pragmatic way of relating to or understanding the significance and implications that “holistic” health and healing have for our lives. We need to do more than simply use the phrases “body-mind-spirit’ or “holistic healing,” we need to know what it means to live these phrases; we need to know how to implement these phrases in our daily lives.

A few ways to begin to cultivate an empowered, holistic healing Self:

• Understand the Fundamentals of a Holistic Healing Model.
• Learn to recognize the feelings of disempowerment and the devaluation of the Self, as it occurs in ways that are gross or subtle. Learn to recognize how we tend to see health as something that can be lost, or that is outside of ourselves rather than an innate potency that we can cultivate always… in particular when we interface with the Western biomedical system.
• Have a plan or routine. Use the Holistic Healing Model to develop strategies for reclaiming an empowered healing Self. Build support systems that validate and acknowledge your empowered healing Self. Design ceremony or ritual… doesn’t have to be “Woo-woo” or overtly “spiritual,” could simply be a walk somewhere that feels special or validating to who you are.
• Hire a coach, consultant or therapist with the requisite skills and understandings to help you develop holistic ways of responding to your health challenges and life routines.

One Thing To Know

The Mind/Self affects the body. Empirical studies and modern medicine validate what alternative approaches to healing have known for millennia.

One Thing To Do

Begin to learn the deeper implications of what it means to approach health and life from a holistic perspective or paradigm.

One Thing To Believe

You are AS important—if not more so—to the healing process as any doctor, diagnosis, medication or procedure.

Related articles

• Theory (americandreammaker.wordpress.com)