Open Space - a minimum?

[Harrison Owen]

Filiz -- I don't know that you read what you quoted in my book, "The Practice of Peace," but you could have, 'cause I said it. And Paul -- the fact that medicine (and even more so Public Health) does some good, (and it does) I don't think changes things that much. Some years ago I was at the National Institutes of Health with basic responsibility for patient, public, and professional education in the area of heart lung and blood diseases. That in itself does not make me a medical expert, for sure -- but it was a generally accepted "fact" at the Institutes and in the world of Public Health that just about 95% of all disease is self-limiting -- which means you will either get better or die, but that in any case medicine won't help that much. In the remaining 5% of the cases medical practice and public health does help -- but the way they help is instructive, I think. They assist the body until such time as it can take over -- and the actual healing process, if healing does occur, is a function of the body. The basic issue is that as much as we may know about the body, its complex interconnections vastly exceed our feeble understanding. And even when we have it right in general, each individual is unique. It is the old problem of putting Humpty Dumpty together again -- which as you will remember -- neither all the King's Horses nor all the King's men could pull it off. And I don't think we are in much better shape. But healing does occur, more often than not, and the hero is our old friend self-organization, or so it seems. It is a dictum among many physicians that he/she who practices best, practices least. Minimal intervention. Do as little as possible, and just enough to get the old body kick started. Anything more only invites massive doses of unintended consequences which often have lethal consequences. 

In writing what I did, my intent was not to provide information about medical and public health practice, which is obviously beyond my competence. My purpose was to use the physical body as a metaphor for the body politic -- and make the same point: He/she who practices least, practices best. Otherwise known as thinking of one more thing not to do. I believe this has been our experience in Open Space and I was suggesting that the same approach (minimalism) works well in the larger open space of our lives. 

Harrison 

  
Harrison Owen
7808 River Falls Dr.
Potomac, MD  20854
USA
301-365-2093
207-763-3261 (summer)
website www.openspaceworld.com


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: EVERETT813 at aol.com 
  To: OSLIST at LISTSERV.BOISESTATE.EDU 
  Sent: Monday, August 15, 2005 1:49 PM
  Subject: Re: Open Space - a minimum?



  In a message dated 8/15/05 9:03:24 AM, filiztelek at yahoo.com writes:



    I once read somewhere that body does the most of the healing process itself...all those medicine we take has just such a little role to activate certain actions, chemicals, interactions to happen in the body. but eventually the body heals itself...what a fascinating thought!



  Filiz:

  Well, you haven't lived when there were none of those drugs and the body didn't heal itself.  You never had to not go swimming in the summer because of the wild polio virus living in the water could make you sick or kill you or paralyze you for life.  An iron lung is no place to live.  Leg braces are no fun.  Joelle experienced that.  

  You never saw a child die from coughing (Whooping cough) or from a staph or strep infection that ran wild in the body which wasn't healing itself.  Before simple forms of cleanliness, ONE THIRD of all women who delivered babies in the hospitals of the time died of "childbirth fever".  Think about that FACT.  

  People forget really fast that we are healthy because of those drugs and practices that have saved millions of lives and allowed people to remain healthy.  

  That's one of my 'hot buttons', the idea that modern medicine doesn't prevent disease, that the body does all the healing, etc.  It's all baloney.  Life is immeasureably better now because of vaccinations, immunizations, drugs, etc.  Immeasureably better here where we are safe from the malarial mosquito but we refuse to allow the rest of the impoverished world to use a marvelous mosquito killer called DDT.  We think it is better for people to die, or be horribly sick, than to use, effectively and carefully, a chemical that has been proven to work very, very well.  It has side issues, but compared to human life, they are side issues.  Silent Spring was a cannon blasting a brush covered machine gun nest, total overkill that has negatively affected the lives of tens of millions of people.

  Now, I'm almost off my soap box.

  Be well and be thankful for medical science.

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