Page 23 - Humanism 2019

The three aspects of population cultures, health care and subatomic particles. At the nanoscale level, matter
systems and individuals are best able to interact and keep can reveal the unique and often counterintuitive
the sphere in homeostatic health when individuals adapt properties of quantum mechanics, rather than the laws of
to their continuous dynamic environment. classical physics.

B. Starfield (2000), reported that the health care system is Dr. Alex Comfort (1984) a medical futurist and visionary,
the third-leading cause of death in the United States, after reported that “… anyone who is not shocked by the
heart disease and cancer. The notion that “one cannot be conclusions of quantum physics has not understood them
healthy as an individual living in an unhealthy society” … They certainly imply that the structure of the real
can be addressed when individuals have choices and can world is grossly counterintuitive, that the middle-order
adapt. After contemplating the varied angles and experience in which we live is artefactual, and that, as JBS
approaches for discussing, supporting and emphasizing Haldane suggested, nature is not only odder than we
the importance of “adapting” with regard to health care, I think but odder than we can think. … The trouble is that
followed my lucubrations, leading me to themes of what was philosophy is now experimental science, and a
quantum physics and medical pluralism. number of sacred cows — epiphenomenal mind, the
human experience of separate positional identity, and
Adapting Quantum Physics is Holistic and even the reality of the experiential flow of time — have
Innovative Health wandered into a free-fire zone. … What is worrying is
that when physicists mathematize all this, there is hardly a
Quantum physics as a new paradigm of medicine has neurologist or a psychiatrist around to carry back the
arrived. It has proved some of the “energy” healing news, even if he or she does not enter the debate.
modalities of Eastern medicine that have existed for Moreover, even if we do not hear the fatal shot, our
millennia, but modern medicine has been sluggish in patients will: their garbled version may be existentially
accepting it or adapting to it. Quantum mechanics is the more influential in shaping the new model of the universe
fabric for the technological advances including personal … than difficult mathematical proofs like Bell’s theorem.
computers, lasers, cell phones, and many others. Certain … we might well join our patients and read them, simply
cellular activities occur at the nanoscale level of atoms
to get an idea of what is afoot.”

Figure 1. Sphere of Dynamic
Plurality Requiring Adapting
to Define Health
Pink – represents Population/Cultures orbiting
around Health Care Systems Matrix and the
Individual
Blue – represents the matrix of Health Care
Systems situated to efficiently receive feedback from
both the Individual & Population/Cultures and
provide informative support for the Individual to
adapt and define health.
Red – represents the Individual exposed to varying
degrees of positive and/or negative stressors to their
Mental, Social and Biophysiological existence,
which interacts with Population/Cultures and the
Health Care Systems Matrix

HUMANISM IN THE HEALTH SCIENCES 2019 • VOL. 22 20