Koob Olaf - If the Organs Could Speak

DR OLAF KOOB, MD, born in 1943, studied Medicine and worked as a school doctor in Freiburg and Wanne-Eickel. He has been a drugs counsellor, a general practitioner in Weimar and Berlin, a school doctor at the Berlin Therapy Centre for children with special needs, and spent many years collaborating on a research project into drug-related diseases and social factors. He currently lectures and leads seminars in Germany and around the world and is the author of many popular books on medicine and healing.

The Anatomical Zodiac Man from The Very Rich Hours of the Duke of Berry

IF THE ORGANS COULD SPEAK

The Foundations of Physical and Mental Health

Understanding the Character of our Inner Anatomy

Olaf Koob

Temple Lodge Publishing Ltd.

Hillside House, The Square

Forest Row, RH18 5ES

www.templelodge.com

Published in English by Temple Lodge 2018

Originally published in German under the title Wenn die Organe sprechen knnten, Grundlagen der leiblich-seelischen Gesundheit by Info3 Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2005

Info3 Verlag 2005

This translation Temple Lodge Publishing 2018

Original translation by Pauline Wehrle reworked by Temple Lodge Publishing

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. All rights reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Inquiries should be addressed to the Publishers

The right of Olaf Koob to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 912230 64 8

Cover by Morgan Creative featuring detail of a self-portrait by Albrecht Durer

Typeset by DP Photosetting, Neath, West Glamorgan

Printed and bound by 4Edge Ltd., Essex

Sandor Marai

Our western world, that appears to be so enlightened, behaves with regard to many practical questions that are vital to life in an extraordinarily paradoxical way. Two examples may make this clear: firstly, the ignoring of old age and its fruits acquired over a lifetime, along with the illusion of eternal youth. The ratio of young people to old people in our society is, though, shifting dramatically in favour of age. Whilst celebrating the ever-rising life expectancy underlying this, the problem of caring for the old, now almost insoluble in our society, is overlooked. In short, people want to grow very old, but on no account be old!

Medicine can serve as the second example. Since the middle of the nineteenth century rational scientific medicine has been making every effort imaginable to get rid of illness. We supposedly understand the causes of illness and are developing the means to overcome it, primarily by means of more and more effective and above all more expensive remedies. This health market, with its services to society, is now a very important pillar of public expenditure. It has the greatest economic potential and fastest rate of growth, even at times of recession. This market would completely collapse if its remedies really brought about a cure and drove illness away. For then we would not need them any more!

A third paradox is of particular concern in this book. The human physical body is valued today more than it ever was before. Body-care cosmetics, ways to improve the body with supplementary remedies, dietary foods or medicaments, changes of body-shape by means of cosmetic surgery, and many other such ways in which the body is altered and affected, supply a wide market that, just like the health market, is a significant part of a prospering economy. Yet although so much value is placed on making the body look good and function well, so that, ideally, we are scarcely even aware of it any longer, we understand virtually nothing about this body today, its functions, or the developmental and formative principles underlying our organism. Even apparently cultured people or those who are highly esteemed in society will soon admit that they find it difficult to say where the adrenal glands are, what we need a thyroid gland for, how a liver is organically structured and a lot more. Whereas human beings increasingly want to determine matters for themselves in their democratic social systems, and whereas we will, it seems, fight tooth and nail for our personal freedom, there is an almost incomprehensible lack of understanding of how our own body and its individual organs and organ systems such as kidneys, bones and muscles or blood are built up and function, how their co-operation is organized, how they are more or less capable of regenerating themselves, what helps them and what harms them. Where questions such as these are concerned, an otherwise enlightened person has returned to the Stone Age.

Olaf Koob wants to change this. With the vision and experience of a holistic physician, he describes the world of the organs in their harmony as the body, soul and spirit of an individual person. He trained originally as an orthodox doctor, learning to think analytically and studying the whole in its parts. His method of presentation is, however, one of synthesis, describing the parts as the expression of a whole. And the whole is more than the sum of its parts! Much in the organism only becomes clear for instance through the organs collaborative or also contrary actions, through the action of very diverse soul forces, and through increasing individualization during the course of life. The author offers a survey of the most diverse medical systems, and describes their common essence. Orthodox medicine, naturopathy, homeopathy, Ayurvedic medicine, Chinese medicine and anthroposophic medicine are so familiar to him that he works out of what they have in common and what is special to each. So the organs really begin to tell their story, and it is up to the reader first to learn to hear it and then to learn to understand it.

This is not a formulaic or programmatic book, nor a reference book, but one to pick up to read again and again. At a time in which medicine is passing through great change, because an understanding of illnesses (pathogenesis) is slowly being replaced by the understanding of health (salutogenesis), and individuals are increasingly called upon to be responsible for nurturing their own health, it is indispensable to gain ever greater insight into ones own body as a living and feelingand in other words ensouled organism, and to learn what specifically and individually helps it or, on the other hand, harms it. Explanatory presentations by a physician are essential here. This book can help us trace the secrets of our own body, to see it as a wonder of creation, to marvel at it time and again with reverence and gratitude, because it is seeks to serve us, selflessly, for a whole lifetime.