Abstract:
This is a two part article dealing with the common misunderstandings regarding so-called integration in medicine. More often than not, proponents of integration confuse the fundamental tenets and vicissitudes - seeing and declaring what they want to see rather than seeking to understand the historical moment and the logical basis of integrating TCM and conventional medicine. Part 1 attempts to define integration in medicine in unambiguous terms, dispelling the common misunderstandings propagated by many poorly thought-out adminstrators and teachers. Part 2 deals specifically with the issue of research methodologies in regard to integration and the epistemology that has led to the large-scale dismissal of anything other than the conventional approach.
Part 2
On Research Methodologies
The following is an excerpt from a paper titled Synchronicity and Qualitative Methodologies, which deals with the vicissitudes of research and the epistemological tenets of holism vis a vis reductionism.
Synchronicity is a principle of ‘acausal’ or non-linear relationship between seemingly disconnected entities. The appearance of separation is the legacy of an epistemology that departed from holism in an effort to differentiate, specify and analyze factors of linear-causality and their results.
“Science, assisted by mathematics, was able to describe the universe in quantitative terms that had impressive predictive power. Using the scientific approach, any phenomenon could be isolated and analyzed under repeatable conditions until even the most complex of processes were reduced to a collection of known elementary units acting predictably as a result of the forces between them.†(Peat, 1987)
The methodology based on linear causality - which seeks to reduce a multitude of causative factors to a single cause - is a recent development in the epistemology of human inquiry into the natural world. It is also, arguably, the single greatest overthrow of all that came before. This approach - which we call science, but which is actually a culturally determined set of axiomatic assumptions – has changed utterly how humans consider their place in the natural world.
“Darwin’s alienation of the outside from the inside was an absolutely essential step in the development of modern biology. Without it, we would still be wallowing in the mire of an obscurantist holism that merged the organic and the inorganic into an unanalyzable whole. But the conditions that are necessary for progress at one stage in history become bars to further progress at another. The time has come when further progress in our understanding of nature requires that we reconsider the relationship between the outside and the inside, between organism and environment.†(Lewontin: 2000)
The time has arrived to reconsider the limits of linear- reductionism as it maintains a doctrine of separation and specialization which hinders a more complete approach to healthcare in general and to integrative medicine in particular. “The narrow population-based RCT approach that has been widely acclaimed in evidence-based medicine fails to include qualitative measures, thereby missing important data regarding the meaning and impact of the therapy on patients.†(Johnston and Mills, 2004)
If one were to consider what is missing from the epistemology of conventional medicine, this missing piece would have something to do with a synchronous principle of non-linear causality. Although a synchronous principle of causality presents with its own biases and limiting parameters as well, nonetheless, contained within the inclusion of this single principle is a large portion of the remedy that will aid conventional medicine and science in obtaining a more complete approach to healthcare and healing.
The preference for empirical, quantifiable data that yet exists within conventional medical science is a hindrance to this more complete approach to healthcare and healing.
“Nothing happens in this world of causality that does not originate in some cause. So the idea of an
