WHAT IS INTEGRATED HEALTH? THE EXTRAORDINARY POWER OF THE PHYSIS

The extraordinary power of the physis is available and constantly active in every animal, including humans both male and female, and in most cases medicine takes the form of encouraging the physis to do its job. The surgeon removes a growth or sets a broken bone but leaves the physis to do most of the work by healing the injuries. Most of the drugs administered by physicians, conventional or traditional, provide the physis with the means to restore health. Indeed, most injuries and ailments, cuts, bruises, indigestion, headaches, colds, fevers, every viral invasion, are restored by the physis, completely independently and unaided. Every day we are inundated by germs and toxins we don't even know about because the physis, or its subsidiary the immune system, takes them all in its stride. Only if it is weakened by excessive stress, exertion, lack of sleep, lack of exercise, overindulgence or the like, do the defences of the physis fail.

I do not intend in any way to belittle the massive and extraordinary capabilities of conventional medicine, which have developed to an almost miraculous extent in the last 300 years, but it deals with a relatively small section of health maintenance and, I have to say, does it so expensively that it is hard to imagine that it can sustain its current drain on world resources. Indeed, its principle weakness - its high cost - has inadvertantly become its strength, in that money is power and the disproportionate budgets conventional medicine demands have led to disproportionate emphasis being given to it by governments. Furthermore, some governments spend billions of pounds on 'health care' and yet the health of those nations is no better than nations that spend far less. The extra money is not producing health. Traditional medicine on the other hand has proved itself effective and sustainable over thousands of years.

Conventional medicine has taken on the challenge of explaining everything about the body by science. It has made marvellous strides, but in so many ways has only scratched the surface. It may take a hundred years before it has fathomed the passwords and codes of the brain, the addressing of hormones, the dynamics of muscles or the secrets of memory. Traditional medicine on the other hand has never challenged Nature. It has always conceded that Nature knows all its own secrets and how to maintain itself. All we can do, all we need to do, is to help (like putting petrol and oil in a car, but leaving its maintenance to the expert).

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