My Personal Path Toward a Flow Theory of Illness and Health

   Every discipline is made up of a body of knowledge, a system of facts and figures. No matter what we may choose to study, we will invariably find ourselves becoming a product of our learning. Our studies become part of our thinking and make us into representatives of whatever knowledge we gain.

     And so it was for me in medical school. Through years of learning, I became a walking, talking agent of our well-established system and its way of understanding and responding to illness. The momentum of my formal education kept me sailing ahead for many years, addressing the health problems of my patients in the manner that both I had learned and they had come to expect.

     There is an interesting thing about learning though. In addition to acquiring knowledge and skill, we also receive a dose of the adventure of learning itself. Once we are out in the field using what we have learned, it may not be long before we are stirred by the desire for more educational experience.

     In my early years as a physician, I was content to achieve the type of success I had been trained to seek, using mainly drugs and surgery as corrective means. In acute cases, the objective was to remove the immediate threat to health. In chronic illness, I aimed at alleviating, controlling, or preventing life-compromising symptoms, sometimes difficult due to how far along the illness had progressed. And sure enough, over time I began to desire further learning. But it was not so much for more of the type of education I had had. Mine was a kind of generalized discomfort, a subtle yet growing doubt about the potential of the approach I was using. I was steadily becoming dissatisfied with the limitations on what I could achieve with my patients, given a focus that was limited to only the final results of a long-brewing disease process. Yet that was the model I had learned and the system in which I worked. I wondered if I had hit a dead end and should consider a career change.

     At that time I was thinking my future lay in ophthalmology – medicine and surgery of the eye. I had a dream in which I was sitting at a workbench, not unlike the one my father had in our basement. My patients were sending me their eyeballs in little cubical boxes. I would open each box, repair the eyeball, and send it back. These images alerted me to the fact that I was headed toward a career of treating eyes as separate from their owners. It was my mind's way of communicating to me the reality of a whole, interconnected human body, and the particular need I had for addressing each patient as such.

     Eventually I came to realize that I needed to immerse myself into what was then called preventive medicine. This was in the eighties, when nutritional treatments were just beginning to make their way into the practices of a few medical doctors. For me it felt like a kind of homecoming, since prior to my first entertaining of the thought of a career in medicine, I had been exposed to the ideas of certain family members who strongly favored natural healing methods. I had to do some searching, but the pioneers were out there, those physicians who had combined their knowledge of illness with insights about nature to discover ways to actually restore the balance of overall body chemistry whenever possible. And even when harsh or invasive treatments to combat advanced disease were necessary, there was usually an important place for support from biological resources, that is, methods that made use of substances nature, in her wisdom, had incorporated into successfully functioning life. So for years I learned from the trailblazers of natural medicine and enjoyed seeing the effects of treating with therapeutic preparations and doses of vitamins, minerals, and the like. I will forever be grateful to my patients who returned in follow-up visits with words that let me know they were experiencing an actual improvement in their underlying health, a restoration of overall balance and a strengthening of vitality.

     But soon I could feel the itch for expansion again. Like before, I sensed there was some limitation on my approach. And again, distinct from simply adding to the type of knowledge and techniques I was already using, my desire was to enhance my offering from another angle. I recalled the powerful dream I had had years earlier, still able to see it in my mind. Now, however, rather than representing the isolation of a body part, the eye in the dream became for me a symbol of the patient's entire physical body, as isolated from the whole of who they are. And the solution to my discomfort again became clear. The connection between my patients' physical problems and their ideas about themselves and their lives was too important for me to ignore. I needed to at least make an attempt to address not only their physiology, but everything about them. Much to my encouragement, I began to find a number of patients quite open to delving into their troublesome thoughts, feelings, and life experiences. For some, their own dream material provided a valuable resource for symbols leading us to insights about their personal realities. Others, who were at a loss to see any life problem that might be contributing to their general health condition, were nonetheless able to access subtle yet significant emotional blocks when we used techniques of relaxation and visualization.

     Through all of my professional experience, I entertained different ideas in search of a basic model to explain the relative states of health and illness that I observed. One important fact is that emotional tension, the generalized discomfort associated with disturbing thoughts, is identical to physical tension, except that the latter is localized in some part of the body. We may not be aware of it at the time, but tension in any muscle or connective tissue corresponds to a thought whose conflicting nature is the non-physical content of that tension. A second tenet is that health is a dynamic balance, not a fixed state, and it is maintained by a continuous flow of physical fluids, electrical energy, and thoughts and ideas. That flow ensures the continuous riddance of potentially damaging contents that are constantly being produced by life. The diagram below illustrates these in a singular, coherent model. This model, perhaps more clearly than any words, depicts the philosophy of my current medical practice.

     Looking back on my dream now, I can also see the use of geometric perfection – cubical boxes and spherical eyeballs – as a message about my futile attempt to use science as a tool to perfect and control whatever I found to be faulty. Experience eventually teaches us that true and lasting changes can never be forcefully imposed, but only gently invited within a setting of acceptance and encouragement. And as a final consideration, the eye in the dream might be seen to represent the entire, individual human being, again, not to be understood as isolated from the whole of the universe. But the further exploration of that will await a future writing.

(C) 2003 Dr. Stephen Reisman. All rights reserved.