Is your body a type of machine, like a car or a cell phone, or is it a living thing?

I know that's seems like a weird question, but your answer to it determines whether you agree with the Western medical model or alternative medicine.

Western medicine increasingly sees our bodies as machines with interchangeable parts.

Heart isn't working right?

Okay, we'll get that damn thing replaced for you and rotate your tires while we're at it.

Does that sound like a human body?

Here's the problem, as I see it. There is no accumulation of substances that you can pile up to create life. Because life isn't just stuff, it's mostly relationships between stuff. That is to say, life is mostly due to fields. Electromagnetic fields and other types of fields. That's what makes life.

Western medicine takes what is called a reductionist viewpoint of the body. That means, no matter what the illness, we can always just take things apart until we get to the one thing that caused the problem, the one defective part in the body-machine. I've written about the reductionist paradigm in another article.

So, if something goes wrong in your life, some disease, condition or problem, you need to turn first to the fields to find out what happened. Then perhaps it will make sense to think about the substances and see what you can do there.

Machines are just piles of stuff. They aren't dependent on any field of life. That's silly. You just put the stuff together in the right way and the machine works. But human bodies (or any animals or plants) don't work that way. We've tried it a million times, and whenever we try to create life synthetically with piles of stuff, we just can't.

Many types of alternative medicine, including acupuncture, ayurveda, energy healing, etc., look at the fields first and try to correct them. Then you add substances (herbs, physical exercises, etc.) to round out the treatment. But they don't start with the stuff. They start with the fields.

Our health problems often begin in the fields, called meridians in Chinese medicine or chakras in Indian medicine, moving into our physical body later. When a problem manifests in the body, it's already late in the process. You can probably still do a lot by adjusting the fields, but you'll also have to deal with the physical issues too.

But you might want to leave the dangerous, expensive treatments like drugs and surgery as a last resort. Doesn't that make sense? If you've got a very powerful, but very deadly, treatment, wouldn't you want to use that last rather than your first line of defense?