I like the work done by the Institute of Functional Medicine…here’s and article by them about the heart and cardiovascular disease. They tend to take a whole being approach that focuses on function and not just structure. This is a parallel with Chinese medicine where their “organ” systems describe metabolic/physiological/emotional/mental functions (say assimiliation-the “spleen”) throughout the body. Now if they would just charge reasonable prices for they conferences and textbook! In any case they do have some good info available on their website…
http://www.functionalmedicine.org/YearoftheHeart/Default.htm
http://www.functionalmedicine.org/files/library/year-heart-overview_001.pdf
Owen
Much thanks for the link Owen, it looks like really valuable work they are doing and like it is going in the right direction. I would certainly like to get their textbook too; I think a more holistic, systems approach to physiology and medicine would be a great next step and that it could benefit herbal medicine if we used that kind of textbook rather than just the normal medical texts and physiology books.
In ‘Conscious and Healing: Integral Approaches to Mind-Body Medicine’ (which has a superb forward by Ken Wilber on the integral vision of healing, which you can read here http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/misc/integral-med-1.cfm under a different book name, and is otherwise an awesome book) there is an interesting article by David Michael Levin titled ‘Meaning and the History of the Body: Towards a Postmodern Medicine’ that looks at the history of interpretations and models of the body. According to Levin the movements in medicine over the centuries has been from abstraction to concreteness, from exteriority to interiority, from qualities to causalities, from states to processes, from analysis to holism, and from mechanical isolation to systemic integration. The historical progression of models of the body has been from the rational body, to the anatomical body, to the physiological body, to the biochemical body of cells and molecules, to the psychosomatic body, to the body of psychoneuroimmunology, to the body of experienced meaning. Functional medicine seems fairly high up on that developmental chain, and it is good to see an example of that.
The questions this raises for me are what levels in all this does herbal medicine draw from, how could having better clarity over the levels we are drawing from contribute to the clarity and effectiveness of the models we use in herbal medicine, how could this assist in the better integration of different models within herbal medicine, and how could we work more from higher levels or models?
P.S. I think this discussion of levels of models of the body would be good to have on the integralherbalist.co.uk forum. I might link to your article and then copy and paste this response over. You are of course welcome to copy your posts over if you wish, or put up links to this site. What do you think?
Yes, lets move this discussion into levels on the forum. Also lets create a resources page to compile any links or attachments we post into one spot so we have a growing database/bibliography.