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Subject: Re: Dan Dugan Casting Aspersions
Dan Dugan wrote: I would not trust a doctor who devotes his or her career to the study of a guru who preached against the germ theory of disease!I must say that I am personally grateful to Dan for making it possible to discuss a number of interesting more principal scientific issues on this list, that are not discussed at present on other anthroposophical lists. Are germs causes of diseases, and in what sense? To my understanding, the understanding and concepts of the nature and causes of diseases through history reflect and interact with the general dominant concepts and experiences of society at any time. During Antiquity and the birth of a more scientific medicine, the paradigmatic model of an imbalance between the humours of the body dominated this understanding. In one of the basic works of anthroposophic medicine, written in cooperation between Ita Wegman and Rudolf Steiner, this "model" was also carried further in a new form as a description in passing of diseases as an expression of the imbalanced work of more vegetative, more psychic and more spiritual activities in different organs and parts of the body. During the last centuries, a more monocausal, mechanistic thinking, based on the model of a one-to-one relation between "cause" and "effect" that in a more strict sense only is approximately achievable in closed, mechanical systems, has became more dominant in the research and conceptual understanding of diseases. This model has had great success in clarifying some important aspects of the role of "germs"; fungi, bacteria, viruses, in the development of infections and the treatment of infections with antibiotics in different forms, sulfonamides and other therapeutics. With the increasing spread of resistent bacteria, developing as the result of the widespread use of antibiotics, not only for people, but also as habitual preventive treatment of diseases in badly kept animals, and through them the constant infusion of antibiotics to humans through the food, this strategy for treating infections seems slowly to be coming to an end. It will, I think, necessitate a rethinking of the problem of infections once more. I also think that such a rethinking sooner or later will look more at the problem from an ecological perspective out of the relation between man and microbes as a system where different "germs" at different times and in different, but by no means all circumstances can push man into going through an "infected" stage, when the balance between them is disturbed, on a basic level or a more short term basis. This will mean a shift from the mono-causal perspective to a more clear understanding or and perspective on infections as a result of disturbed interaction between man and the microflora/fauna. A slowly developing field of research; Psycho-Neuro-Immunology, is now beginning to look more closely into how psychological, neurological and immunological factors interact in man (one of the two actors/partners in infections) as a widened basis for the understanding of how diseases develop also more generally. This research in a number of years/decades I think will also make a more empirical-theoretical understanding and judgement of the role of more existential attidudes for the development and state of the immune system, like the opinion by Steiner, discussed by Dr. Philip Incao, possible. Regards, Sune Nordwall, [...]
http://hem.passagen.se/thebee/indexeng.htm
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