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New medicine views the body as a complex system
through which information flows. A shoal of fish is
an excellent example of this type of complexity.
Although each is a separate animal, when fish come
together in a shoal they behave as a single entity.
Complexity is the name for the universal tendency of parts
to organise themselves into more complex wholes.We
humans are so much a part of our world that we often take
many of its properties and qualities for granted.We fail to
remember that weight, water, light and warmth, although
totally familiar to us, are also rather mysterious. Complexity
can be seen at the most basic level: who could predict, for
instance, that bringing the gases hydrogen and oxygen
together would give you something to drink! Complexity
operates too on the biggest scale of all. After the Big Bang,
when time and space first began, our pattern-forming
universe produced stars and galaxies; planets formed.
Life – miraculously it seems, but also quite naturally –
emerged out of this universal process. Organisms are
alive precisely because the whole is always greater than
the sum of its parts.
Medical scientists until now have tried to understand life
by isolating its biochemical properties in a test tube, or by
examining dead tissues.While this approach has certainly
proved very useful in understanding how the human body
works, it can only reveal our chemical nature. Modern
technology now lets us see into the intricate design and
workings of the living body. As science discovers how the
parts communicate, form wholes and self-organise,
medicine will change quite profoundly. It is too soon to
know what medicine would look like if it were based on
mind–body connectedness and the flow of information
that keeps us well, but there are similarities between such
an approach and the traditions that gave birth to
complementary medicine. These traditions all include
notions of mind–body wholeness, energy flow, harmonious
living and therapeutic relationships, along with knowledge
of how to encourage self-healing. Science is becoming
increasingly interested in this territory and the possibility
that complementary therapies might provide us
with further clues about human health.
Complex processes are not like
sequential ones, where A causes B,
which causes C.Whole-system
processes are networked; they
happen all at once, and
communication is across the
whole system in all
directions, so C influences A even as B influences Z – and
back! This realisation has enormous practical implications
scientists developing artificial intelligence, or predicting
weather patterns or ecological consequences, need to know
how to predict whole-system behaviour. It is of even
greater relevance for medicine to understand how the
processes of life interweave, and how the whole and the
part continually reshape one another.