The Two-Sided Coin part 2: Innate intelligence

In part 1, I made the argument that going to the doctor is an exercise in the limits of knowledge.  If you are reading this post, the limits of medicine are probably familiar to you.  However, it is hard to know what else to do. 

Faced with the shortcomings of conventional medicine, most of us turned to the growing field of natural alternatives.  I decided to make a career out of this choice by attending a four year natural medical school here in Portland.  I learned that herbs, diet changes, bone manipulations, and energy work can all get to a deeper level of healing in the human body.  They work more in line with human physiology and certainly cause less harm than drugs and surgery.  However, natural alternatives never worked quite as well as I wanted them to. 

None of my tricks as a naturopathic doctor worked consistently from patient to patient.  I might see three people with chronic migraine headaches, and I’d end up guessing which treatments would be best for each one.  They were educated guesses based on intimate knowledge of both human physiology and my treatments, but they were still guesses.  This fact isn’t often admitted by the medical profession, but I’ve come to realize it as the truth. 

But what about the enormous amount of knowledge that we’ve accumulated about the human body?  Don’t we know how it works?   Don’t we know how we get sick and how we die?  Well, no.  Not really.

The more I study human physiology, the more I am in awe of the amount that we don’t know, and what we are just beginning to figure out.  The near-miraculous complexity of the human body is enough to send any atheist running for the nearest religion- at least, as long as they have a good anatomy and physiology teacher.

Please consider some of the amazing things that your body does:

-Your liver monitors and filters every bite of food that comes into your body, neutralizes and excretes hormones, heavy metals and other toxins, stores fuel, controls blood sugar, breaks down ammonia, makes cholesterol, creates the compounds that clot your blood, and stores just about everything.  All that and its anatomy is pretty boringly simple.  Oh, and it can regenerate after having 90% of itself lopped off by a knife.

-Your brain receives every piece of sensory information in your environment, and then neatly filters it down to just the right amount of information you need.  And in fact, a piece of your brain the size of one grain of sand contains over 100,000 neurons  making over 1 million synaptic connections.

-Just to sit and read this screen requires billions of synchronized and harmonized maneuvers.  Some of them, like the pumping of your heart, the contraction of your back muscles, and the function of your retinas in your eyes, we can explain.  Others, like the consciousness required to incorporate this blog into your own life, we can’t.

-Every birthed child is the result of an unimaginably complex journey from two-celled zygote to human being.  Embryologists do a great job of describing what happens along the way, but have no idea how it happens.  Imagine the exquisite timing that is required to avert disaster.   If the heart started beating one second before all the arteries were closed up?…

-When a person performs a math exercise, the brain lights up.  When a mathematical prodigy gets into the “zone” and starts performing complex mathematical tasks, brain activity shuts down.  What part of the body takes over?  We don’t know.

-Every day, millions of cancer cells are found and killed in a coordinated and efficient attack by your immune system.  The logistics involved in such a consistent, day in and day out maneuver are mind-boggling.  Check out these pictures of Natural Killer cells disabling a cancer cell.

Immune cells approaching healthy cancer cell.                                  Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 

 Integrity of cancer cell is gone as the light-colored T-cells punch holes in its membrane.

-Sometimes, when a chiropractor adjusts a patient’s neck, a torrent of emotions is released.  It could be joyous laughter, or uncontrollable weeping.  When this reaction happens, it’s a surprise to the doctor and the patient; impossible to predict and unknown in origin.  It is as if the body can hold information and memories in different parts of itself that can then be released.

 

In part 1 of this series I listed an impressive array of researchers and practitioners that hold the medical knowledge that we have in the world.  They range from geneticists to acupuncturists, and from cardiac surgeons to shamans.  I made the point that these days, no one doctor can hope to learn everything there is to know about the human body.

But regardless of this truth, it is also important to realize that the combined KNOWLEDGE of all of those brilliant minds is but one side of the coin.  When it comes to investigating the what and why and how of everything between your ears and inside your skin; we’re just getting started. 

A complete health care system accepts that knowledge is complementary to the other side of the coin:  the innate intelligence of every patient. 

Let’s face it:  there is an awful lot that your body knows that we don’t.  If only we paid more attention to what it had to say…

In part 3, I will describe what the two-sided coin of health care looks like.  I will explain how BodyTalk uses the combination of knowledge and innate intelligence to quickly change the health of a human being.

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