Author Topic: Medical decolonization  (Read 2273 times)

guest55

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Re: Medical decolonization
« Reply #30 on: November 12, 2021, 07:01:03 pm »
On the Body as Machine
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Thinking of our bodies as machines has led to widespread, unhelpful, and even militaristic approach to medicine.
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It used to be that when I looked in the mirror, I saw many things: a body; a collection of cells; a fantastic kind of machinery. I didn’t see these things because they were a reflection of reality, or because the body and brain are, in fact, machines. I saw them because I was born in America, and that is my culture.
This thinking does not derive from American culture at all but rather Western culture. The Industrial Revolution began in Britain, America's former colonizer!
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The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Britain, continental Europe and the United States, in the period from between 1760 to 1820 and 1840.[1] This transition included going from hand production methods to machines, new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes, the increasing use of steam power and water power, the development of machine tools and the rise of the mechanized factory system. The Industrial Revolution also led to an unprecedented rise in the rate of population growth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution

Continuing with the article:
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In our country, we have what’s known as a mechanistic understanding of our bodies. We imagine ourselves to be machines made of meat and bone. We see the doctor as a mechanic whose job is to find the broken parts and fix them. For at least a century this has been our primary metaphor for talking about sickness and health, about how our bodies work and break down. In its popular 1960s television special, National Geographic flatly described the human body as “The Incredible Machine.”

The body is incredible, but my view of it as a machine — the validity of that metaphor — started to break down in the process of researching my book, “The Geography of Madness,” about the so-called “cultural syndromes.”
Entire article: https://undark.org/2016/07/06/mind-machine-medicine-militaristic-healthcare/

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The Body Is Not A Machine
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The origins of the machine metaphor

Once dissections became common and anatomical drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and Andreas Vesalius began to circulate in the early 1500s, it became pretty obvious that bones and muscles were just fancy systems of levers, ropes and pulleys. Nothing mysterious, just things. But it was not until the early 1600’s that the French philosopher René Descartes replaced vitalism with scientific materialism.  Most people think, “Oh yeah, Descartes. He is the cogito ergo sum guy who created the big nuisance of the mind-body problem, isn’t he?”  Yes, that’s him. But give the guy a break! Convincing the world that the body is a machine was a very big deal. He got into plenty of trouble for proposing the radical concept of the body as a machine. Suggesting that the mind too was a machine would have been touching the third rail!

As the industrial revolution transformed society, the metaphor of body as machine became increasingly influential. By the start of the 20th century, the idea dominated thinking in biology and medicine, probably because it is so useful. It has improved our lives by encouraging detailed analysis of the body’s mechanisms at all levels, from the details of anatomy, to understanding how hormones like insulin regulate chemicals like glucose.  It encouraged reductionism, the idea that everything large could be explained by analysis of smaller things. We are now down to genes, molecules, and atomic forces.  What an extraordinary bounty we have reaped from a metaphor! The metaphor of body as a machine provided a ladder that allowed biology to bring phenomena up from a dark pit of mysterious forces into the light where organic mechanisms can be analyzed as if they are machines.
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The body is not a machine

However, the body is not a machine. Machines are products of design, bodies are products of natural selection, and that makes them different in fundamental ways. The organic complexity of bodily mechanisms is qualitatively different from the mechanical complexities of machines. Machines have discrete parts with specific functions connected to each other in straightforward ways. Bodies have parts that may have blurry boundaries and many functions and the parts are often connected to each other in ways hard for human minds to fathom.  Bodies and machines fail for different reasons. Engineers can start from scratch if they need to in order to fix weak spot in the design of a machine. If only our human spine could be redesigned from scratch!  Its limits and compromises are the source of vast pain, but natural selection can’t start fresh, so we are stuck with a substandard design that can be improved only by small changes. The Table illustrates the substantial differences between machines and bodies.  These differences are, however, often ignored, in large part thanks to the power of the metaphor, and the fear that setting it aside will lead to the resurgence of vitalism.

For many scientists, hearing the phrase “the body is not a machine“ arouses an attack on vitalism that is almost automatic. They assume that any derogation of the machine metaphor is an attempt to sneak in vitalism in a new vestige. Their wariness is understandable. Naïve talk about the life force or energy fields has to be weeded out of medicine as steadily as crab grass from a lawn. However, far from endorsing vitalism, my thesis is that the metaphor of body as machine is as pervasive and pernicious now as vitalism was in the Middle Ages. OK, that is an exaggeration. The metaphor is not AS bad as vitalism. It does, however, distort thinking in ways that slows progress.

One powerful example is how we teach biochemistry and physiology. We describe systems using idealized diagrams with boxes and arrows. For instance, every medical student memorizes (then forgets) the chain of chemical interactions that make blood clot. This knowledge is essential for understanding clotting disorders, but the diagram is distant from the reality.

Current research often relies on tacit models of body systems as if they were designed. A multi-billion dollar effort has been started to discover the “wiring diagram of the brain.” But is there a master wiring diagram? The White House Brain Initiative will be most effective when based on recognition that there is no one normal genome, no one normal brain, and no one wiring diagram. Similarly, huge efforts continue to discover the functions of each location in the brain. The amygdala, a tiny almond shaped area deep in the side of our brains, has often been described as the locus of fear learning. Yes, if the amygdala is damaged, fear learning suffers. However, many other regions are involved in regulating fear, and the amygdala serves many other functions including social responses, self-control, aggression, and learning to get positive rewards.

This is a serious business with major costs. In psychiatry, thinking about the mind as a machine has led to a debacle about diagnosis. Many neuroscientists want to abandon the standard system because they cannot find specific brain abnormalities for any of the major disorders. They are sure that for every disease there is some findable broken part. If only.  Many mental disorders are, like heart failure, failures of systems with multiple causes and diverse symptoms.
https://evmed.asu.edu/blog/body-not-machine