Saturday, June 03, 2006
Thoughts...
Dualism : contends you must have both of the two components in question, rather than one or the other. In contrast to dualism two other philosophical positions concerned with the number of substances: monism and pluralism. Monism is the view that there is one elemental whereas pluralism maintains that there are many things which constitute the world.
A major problem faced by dualists is the inability to resolve the rift created between the two opposing elements. Typically the motivation for resolving conflicts between these two realms is to make the world more understandable. For instance, how is the interaction between mind and body explained? Descartes, for example, claimed that the pineal gland is the point of contact between the bodily and spiritual realm. The inability to rectify these two realms has inclined some to adopt monism. Modern Allopathic/ Traditional/Orthodox Science, for example, offers a monistic account of reality (physicalism), which eliminates the mental altogether, removes any problems of relatedness between mind and body by eliminating the spiritual all together. Mental events are reduced to brain states, thus leaving only the bodily realm, thus monism.
Epiphenomenalism : The accepted extension of the allopathic, reductionist, mechanistic view of the mind/body concept. Epiphenomenalism contends there is only a one-way causal connection from the body to the mind, but none from the mind to the body. According to this idea, Consciousness is just a byproduct of the body, much like smoke from a steam engine train. Thus all value and attention is focused of the “chemical” physical processes of the body and thus; the mind, soul, spirit and “consciousness”, “Individual Human Awareness” of the patient is cheaped or minimized.
Pleomorphism : microbial genera and species are not fixed and rely on he host’s environment to determine it’s form and malevolence. A paradigm in which the host organism or patient was an active participant in infection and disease - in contrast to Koch and Pasteur and the monomorphists who held the microbe to be all-powerful, the host organism a passive victim. Pleomorphism means downgrading the microbe, since the host, by resisting the latter's onslaught, could alter its characteristics and make it return to a normal form as again. The patient has control over the bacteria, not the other way around. The microbes are the result, not the cause of disease
Monomorphism - a dogma meaning again that microbial genera and species are fixed and eternal, that the form of each microorganism associated with a specific disease always stays the same and always causes that same disease.
"Accepting Pleomorphism meant acknowledging the host organism's, the patient's capacity to defend itself (him or her) against, and dominate, the microbe.
Monomorphism, on the contrary, enhanced the role of the microbe in disease, and consequently that of the physician who combats the microbe. This is the principal reason for the instinctive hostility of the majority of physicians to Pleomorphism and Holistic/Alternative Medicine in general."( Divided Legacy, Harris Counter . pg. 39)
Pleomorphism was a great threat to this "control" factor. This control factor means;
"control of the disease with poisons that need monitored and controlled, controlling therefore, the patient and their pocket book."(Ibid, pg.39)
The phenomena of life are forced into categories (disciples; i.e., cardiology, oncology, EENT, etc.), which can be manipulated to make a living from the practice of allopathic medicine. The monomorphists have identified their doctrine with science itself, as science itself, that Monomorphism is a law of nature, which it is not. This viewpoint has, through the years, taken on such an aspect of truth that to question it now seems a scientific sacrilege.
The followers of Koch proclaimed Monomorphism with 'religious fanaticism', stated Max Gruber in 1885. F. Loehnis stated in 1922 that the intransigence and verbal violence displayed by the various factions in this conflict resembled certain historic theological quarrels.
