To begin to consider the relationship of 20th century physics to health management, some basic understanding of physiology is required.
The modern accepted estimate of the number of cells in the human body is fifty trillion. At any one time, the number of activities being co-ordinated by our nervous system is quite literally infinite. Much of this activity is directed toward the healing process which is constant and rhythmic.
Healing rhythms speed up because of trauma from accidents, injuries, surgery and emotional insults but the ongoing phenomena of organ replacement (healing)begins 8 weeks after conception and continues throughout our life. Because this amazing drama is ongoing and silent, we need to be made aware of its presence and priority in our life. These miracles deserve our attention because the quality of cell replacement has more to do with the quality of our life experience than any other single factor.
During a twelve month period 95% of all the atoms that make up your 50 trillion cells are replaced "without a sound". Your skin is new every four weeks. Gums holding our teeth are replaced every two weeks. Our stomach lining is replaced every four days. The surface cells of our digestive system that make first contact with our food are recreated by the millions every five minutes.
New atoms flowing throughout our liver are replaced every six weeks. The content of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen in our brain tissues are different today from a year ago. The flow of atoms through our skeletal system renews bone environment every three months. Damaged nerve cells grow new branches. The brain is now demonstrating a repair system that was totally unknown a few years ago.
The balance and effectiveness of these continuing rhythms of cell replacement have everything to do with the quality of life experienced by each of us. The conductor responsible for orchestrating this phenomenal process is the nervous system.
Up until fifteen years ago most medical text books described the nervous system as something like a telegraph line; signals are propelled along wires (nerves) by electricity from brain to body and from body to brain. In the 1970's another nervous system was discovered demonstrating signals being propelled through the blood by chemicals from brain to body and body to brain. Since 1970 cells in the brain that create these chemicals that carry signals, and receptors in the brain that receive these signals, are also present throughout our body (bowels, stomach, heart, liver and spine). These combined signals of instruction and information from both nervous systems predominantly determine the balance and quality of cell replacement. These two nervous systems are major players in our health, energy and attitude.
Since 1970, the accumulating evidence demonstrated by these brainbody chemicals called messenger molecules include the following phenomena:
One hundred years after they began to emerge, the insights of quantum physics remain a total mystery to most people. If we can comprehend what the discovery of messenger molecules (neuropeptides) means, understanding the quantum is only a step further. Thanks to messenger molecules, events that seem totally unconnected, such as a thought and measurable bodily change, are now seen to be consistent. The messenger molecule is not a thought but it is co-created with a thought serving as a point of transformation between the imperceptible and the perceptible. The same process happens everywhere in nature except we do not call it thinking. When we get to the level of atoms, the landscape is not one of solid objects moving around each other like partners in a dance following predictable steps. Subatomic particles are separated by huge gaps, making every atom more than 99.99% empty space. This holds for hydrogen atoms in the air and carbon atoms in the wood the tables are made of, as well as all the "solid" atoms in our cells. Therefore, everything solid, including our bodies, is proportionality as void as inter- galactic space.
How could such vast reaches of emptiness, dotted at far way intervals by specks of matter, turn into human beings? To answer that question requires a quantum (or imperceptible to perceptible) perspective. By comprehending the quantum, we enter into a vast but virtual reality, spanning from quarks to galaxies. At the same time, the quantum reality turns out to be very intimate to us, indeed the faintest shadow line separates the human body from the cosmic body.
In his monumental project to make all of physics follow a few predictable, rational laws, Isaac Newton explained nature's workings in terms of solid bodies, straight line motion, and fixed constants that ruled all physical events.
This is a model of nature as a complex billiard game. Because matter and energy stayed within set rules, there was no need to theorize about a hidden world. Everything happened above the table. The following diagram describes Newton's world:
Here A is a cause and B is an effect. They are joined by a straight line describing the process we are familiar with in the world of senses (perceptible world). If A and B are two billiard balls, making one hit the other is a perceptible and predictable event.
Quantum physics was born in the beginning of our century out of the observation that a few things could not be explained without a detour from the traditional above board process of Newton to include an additional dimension under the table.
The word "Quantum" - from the Latin word for "how much" describes the smallest unit that can be called particle like. A photon is a particle of light because it cannot be split into finer particles.
Light was observed to behave as a wave A, or a particle B. These two behaviours are totally different from Newtonian physics since waves are non material and particles are concrete. Light somehow can act like one or the other depending on circumstances. In order for this to happen its plural potential of both wave and/or particle must include another dimension under the table.
To see light as a wave is done with a prism that breaks white light down into separate wave lengths that are observed as colours of the rainbows. But also if you turn light down until the smallest possible amount of light can come out, it comes as a particle instead of a wave.
No dimmer switch is capable of this but physicists have broadcast light so that it exposes its graininess and photon status. In order for a light wave to become a photon (particle), it must take a detour beneath the table. In this unknown or imperceptible realm not covered by Newton's laws, the transformation takes place.
Nature sets up its laws so that light can be either A or B, and both are kept inside the boundaries of the same reality below the table by building in a point of transformation for each one.
Our focus of thought or feeling does not touch matter above the table. Thought accesses intelligence below the table where a simultaneous transformation is demonstrated as a messanger molecule above the table to initiate the ongoing physiological processes. Without the production of the neuropeptides no physiological process can take place.
The mind and the molecules (body) are both above the line. A is a mental event or thought, all the other letters are physical processes that follow from A.
If you want to lift your little finger, the signal (thought) draws from the dimension below the line (imperceptible) to manifest a messenger molecule B that activates an impulse C, causing a muscle to respond D, resulting in lifting your little finger E. What exactly happens in the imperceptible zone in not known by anyone.
The neuropeptides' magic is that it can respond simultaneously to the mind's commands. It does this, possibly, by sitting on the borderline between the imperceptible and the perceptible:
The mind and body are both above the line. A is a mental event, a thought; all the other letters are physical processes that follow form A.
If you have a fearful thought A, all the other letters are physical processes that follow from A. If you feel afraid (A), then the other letters stand for signals to your adrenal gland B, the production of adrenaline C, the pounding of our heart D, elevated blood pressure E. All the physical changes that take place in the body can be connected in a logical chain of cause and effect, except for the space after A. This is the point where the transformation from thought to matter first occurs; and it must occur or the rest of the events will not happen. Mind does not touch matter above the table.
The intelligence zone under the table is the know how that provides the orchestration of literally infinite numbers of processes that have been materialized from the imperceptible intelligence zone by neuropeptides.
Whereas physics established its pre-eminence in the early dawn of the scientific era (1600's) as the repository of precision and predictability and
Whereas biological, sociological and behavioural sciences have evolved out of this repository of precision and predictability of the 17th century and
Whereas medicine is practised today out of this same role model and
Whereas Newtonian physics provide physicians a working paradigm of health, illness, birth and death and
Whereas from this clockwork universe of traditional physics came the model of the clockwork body as a breathing machine and
Whereas this breathing machine is seen as ticking away in perfect deterministic fashion unless perturbed by mechanical breakdown called disease and
Whereas "The Golden Age of Classical Newtonian science is gone and with it also the conviction that Newtonian rationality, even with its various conflicting interpretations, forms a suitable basis for our present dialogue with nature" (Ilya Prigogine - Nobel Laureate 1977) and
Whereas this seventeenth century model has now exhausted its contribution to health management (crisis care) and in the process exhausted our ability to pay for same.
I would enquire of the panel on health reform the following questions: