John Ball - Understanding Disease: A Health Practitioners Handbook

Culled from his training and experience in orthodox practice (Dr Ball was a GP from 197081), and also from teaching at various schools and colleges of complementary medicine, the author has written a book which addresses the former from the standpoint of the requirements of the latter. Its primary purpose is to describe pathological processes in the language of orthodoxy while offering explanations in simple and clarifying terms. It is a book of immense utility. Those who have come to health care through a route other than medical school will appreciate the value of a systematic analysis of disease, and through familiarity with the language of pathology be able to communicate with their medical colleagues. There is no doubt in my mind that there are only gains to be made out of bringing these two apparently disparate approaches into communion. The process is, I believe, similar to any 'marriage of opposites', a necessary step in the direction of wholeness and maturity.

The medical doctor, traditionally observing the tenets of his Hippocratic Oath, is not permitted to divulge medical knowledge. The times are changing in this respect as well as in respect of acknowledging the limitations of this system of medicine. The treatment which it offers is often suppressive, usually productive of iatrogenic side-effects and leads to various long term though often unacknowledged consequences.

The premise upon which most forms of complementary medicine stand is that the symptoms are the language by which the diseased organism finds expression. They are the outward evidence of the internal disorder, providing the healer/physician with a true guide, like Dante's Virgil, a lead into the hidden interior wherein the disturbance is centered. Furthermore, the symptoms are understood to represent the best possible adaptation which the organism can muster in order to save itself from a deeper, more permanent and more destructive form of disturbance. From this point of view it is self evident that any form of treatment which suppresses the symptoms will inevitably lead to the eventual intensification of the suffering.

However, this conclusion is usually not drawn because it is assumed that the disease is an entity in itself, a unique syndrome of symptoms, independent of the sufferer and therefore dealt with as if it were an enemy attacked and destroyed. This view closes the mind to further possibilities, because once the symptoms have been extinguished it is deemed a priori that the disease has been vanquished. Another reason for the lack of a true interpretation of the disease is due to the habit of compartmentalising the information which is received from the patient. Spirit, emotions, mind and body are each treated as though separate; even the physical body is subdivided and specialists consulted whose role is to examine, diagnose and eventually treat the parts.

Practitioners of complementary medicine tend to emphasise a synthetic and embracing philosophy of healing; it is because of this bias that they need to pay particular attention to the paradigm of Western medicine, itself an outcome of the reductionist and casual model of reality. This model is powerful because the manipulation of concepts leads to mastery of matter. However, mind may be divorced from feeling in the interest of expediency. This unilateral view is responsible for much mischief, for feeling associates while reason isolates. Suffering is a common concomitant of civilisation; its alleviation may be sought through an awareness of soul processes and the reconnection to the spiritual heart, the feeling centre of our life's purpose. Having made this statement it must nonetheless be born in mind that the great insights of science may be used for the benefit of man, no less in the field of healing. Medical science, with its store of observation, the accumulated evidence of centuries of recording and correlation contains testimony to both the miracle of life and the tragedy of disease. It is a description of the physical field within which we find ourselves. Unlike the treatment which is offered on the basis of dubious premises, the description of the body and the pathology it is heir to cannot be refuted.

Misha Norland.