Symptoms as Defenses I
Too often, physicians and patients alike assume that a person’s symptoms are the disease and that simply treating these symptoms is the best way to cure the patient. Such treatment is on a par with trying to unplug a car’s emergency oil light because it is flashing. Although unplugging the bulb is effective in stopping that irritating flashing light, it does nothing to change the reason it is giving its warning.
The word symptom comes from a Greek root and refers to “something that falls together with something else.” Symptoms, then, are a sign or signal of something else, and treating them does not necessarily change that “something else.”
In 1942, Walter B. Cannon, a medical doctor, wrote The Wisdom of the Body.(1) this book, which is a classic in medicine, details the impressive and sophisticated efforts that the body de ploys to defend and heal itself. A growing number of physiologists, including Dr. Hans Selye, who is considered to be the father of stress theory, have taken Cannon’s work further, recognizing that symptoms are actually efforts of the organism to deal with stress or infection. Rather than viewing symptoms simply as signs of the body’s breakdown, these medical doctors see symptoms as defenses of the body that attempt to protect and heal it.(2)
Concepts in new physics offer further support for the notion that living and nonliving systems have inherent self-regulating, self-organizing, and self-healing capacities. This ongoing effort to maintain homeostasis (balance) and to develop higher and higher levels of order and stability has been described in detail by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ilya Prigogine in Order Out of Chaos, by Fritjof Capra in The Turning Point, and by Erich Jantsch in The Self-Organizing Universe. (3)
Next: Symptoms as Defenses II
1. Symptoms as Defenses I
2. Symptoms as Defenses II
3. Symptoms as Defenses III
4. Symptoms as Defenses IV
Beste Gesundheit,
Werner
1. Cannon W. (1942) The Wisdom of the Body. New York: Norton
2. Seyle H. (1978) The Stress of Life. Revised Edition, New York: McGraw-Hill. p.12
3. Prigogine I,. Stengers I. (1984) Order out of Chaos. New York: Bantam
3. Capra F. (1982) The Turning Point. New York: Simon and Schuster
3. Jantsch E. (1980) The Self-Organizing Universe. Oxford, England