The Causal Web

When doing medical research, we often ignore that we are an integral part of the web of life. We reason destructively. We draw artificial lines that separate our bodies from our surroundings, and that break our bodies down into systems, organs, tissues, cells, metabolic pathways, and molecules. We forget that we are more than the sum of the pieces we understand, and use our limited methods to look away from the infinite unknown and pretend that we know more than we do. We fool ourselves.

That’s not good enough. Not now. Four decades have passed since Dr. Mervyn Susser recognized that ecological thinking applied to the causes of diseases. He saw that onset of disease was not an event or a cascade of events; it was a web. Knowing that a valid model of disease would be more like karma than dogma, he taught his students to expect countless tiny and apparently unrelated actions to converge to create present reality, including illnesses, a perspective more recently exaggerated and popularized as the butterfly effect. Even so, we still see illness as the enemy and do our best to obliterate it. We do unnecessary collateral damage to our bodies and accept it as integral to healing and cure.

To see the big picture, we can sustain a healthy respect for the unknown and honor the limits of our logical minds, which can comprehend only a few of the myriad variables that impinge on us through our interbeing, that is, the continuum of life in time. When we do this, we can partner with our peers to understand and alter the dynamics of our illness and its cure.