Do the successes of modern medicine overshadow its limitations in addressing the mind’s role in healing? How do belief, expectation, and placebo effects reveal untapped dimensions of recovery? Could integrating ancient traditions, lifestyle factors, and spiritual practices create a more holistic approach to health?
Transcript
Dispelling the Dogmas of Science, Episode 11
Is Mechanistic Medicine the Only Kind That Really Works?
According to the mechanistic materialist orthodoxy, the belief system or worldview that we’ve been discussing in this series, the body is a machine. Your body, my body: it’s just inanimate, a machine, and we’re “lumbering robots,” to use Richard Dawkins’s phrase. The body, therefore, as a machine, can be treated by medicine chemically or physically. If you leave the mind out of it, then you get mechanistic medicine.
Of course, it’s impossible for mechanistic medicine to ignore minds totally, because there are a lot of people who are mentally ill, a lot of people suffering from depression, and so on. But the mind is ignored as much as possible, in favour of chemical and physical methods of curing people.
There’s no doubt that these work, and there’s also no doubt that mechanistic medicine, modern medicine, has been extraordinarily effective. Over the last century or so there’s been a tremendous reduction in infant mortality, an enormous increase in life expectancy, a reduction in epidemic diseases, the development of antibiotics, enormous improvements in surgery, and, of course, the triumphs of modern dentistry. I don’t know anyone who would want to go back to 19th-century or medieval dentistry.
I got some sense of this when I was living in India in the 1970s, in the bazaars of Hyderabad. You could see dentists plying their trade using time-tested methods. They had pairs of pliers, they had a system, they had things to strap people onto the chairs so they couldn’t move or writhe in agony.
