The Body as Machine

When I received a cancer diagnosis over four years ago, my training in science meant that my second response (after panic) was research. This is the fourth in a series of posts touching on issues that led me to alternative treatments. My hope is that these brief articles may provide a starting place for others struggling with their own health decisions.

Cell biologist Dr. Bruce Lipton taught in medical schools for over ten years. In his brilliant book,The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles, Lipton argues that the fundamental problem with the current medical system, and why it fails on so many levels, is that it is based on incorrect models derived from outdated science.

Rene Decartes developed the foundations for the mechanistic view of the universe in the 1600s. Decartes was so convinced that the world apart from the human mind was purely mechanistic that he called animals “automata,” and claimed that their apparent pain was no more than an automatic response to stimulus (1). The fact that, unlike machines, animals are capable of growing, self-healing, and reproducing does not seem to have impinged upon Decartes’ reasoning. Yet the use of animals for experimentation was a direct outgrowth of Cartesian philosophy that continues to this day.

Isaac Newton’s physics came a century after Decartes – long before there were tools sensitive enough to detect the inconsistencies in Newton’s theories.

But physics, the foundational science for all other sciences, changed radically beginning eighty years ago. The biological sciences, still grounded in centuries-old models, did not change. Furthermore, the central dogma of modern medicine, that our genes determine nearly everything about us (including our susceptibility to disease) has been soundly disproved (2), yet medical science and research continues to proceed as if the model of genetic determinism were true(3), and the mass media duly follows along.

Regardless of all the talk in recent years about how the body may be influenced by the mind, the biological sciences, including medicine, are still grounded in the idea that our bodies are machines. If bodies are machines, then when they “break down” they can be fixed by taking them apart and making adjustments (surgery) or by the application of the correct combination of chemicals.

(1)Descartes, Rene, Discourse on Method, 1637.
(2)Lipton, B. H. PhD., The Biology of Belief, 2008.
(3)Lipton, B. H. PhD., The Biology of Belief, 2008.