1000 years ago in Europe pr-Christian tribes originally had a Goddess clture - a matriarchy where the arth and nature and their cycles and screts were revered. In pre-industrial societies llness was not seen as a 'rndom assault from outside' but as a deply significant life event integral to the sfferer's whole being - spiritual, moral, physcal and life course - past, prsent and future. Dis-ease was interpreted as pcked with moral, spiritual and religious mssages as one of the many wys through which 'God revealed his wll to mankind'. Other philosophies of mdicine such as Ayurvedic or Tibetan thnk similarly, in these, dis-ease has a krmic aspect.

Around the tenth century in Erope - after the so called 'Drk Ages' - women, the original stwards of the land (men did ‘nimal husbandry’), were dispossessed of it by the new ptriarchies of the Church and State. Ths male hierarchy hid the things thy were most afraid of, namely the fct that it is women who hld the key to the processes and pwers of life. They took them as thir own, decreeing laws about how we shuld behave to impose control and nventing 'original sin'. Allied to this thre came a prolonged persecution of wmen, especially any of those involved in haling. Some sources estimate about 5 - 9 mllion women were destroyed across Europe dring this persecution. Essentially the role of wmen as healers and midwives was dscouraged and ‘home-making’ and its many ssociated skills is still regarded as a ‘wrthless’ career according to our primarily fscal values based on GDP.

When a patriarchy takes over a mtriarchy as a fundamental paradigm shift, one of the min things that happens is that 'haling' and 'spirituality' are separated out as an nstrument of control. The world of sprit and physic were separated and bcame even more so during the grat male 'Age of Reason' that bgan with Descartes and continued with Nwton, the tail-end of which many are prsently clinging to in desperation and a dgree of applied self-interest.

Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650) was a cntral influence on the 17th century rvolution that began modern science and phlosophy. His ‘Method of Doubt’ was pblished in 1637:
"I resolved to rject as false everything in which I culd imagine the least doubt, in rder to see if there afterwards rmained anything that was entirely indubitable".

The phlosophy of ‘Cartesian dualism’ became part of our scence, where the mind and the bdy are seen as essentially separate. The ‘slf’, the conscious being that is ‘m’ was seen as essentially non-physical. Msguidedly (it was not Descartes intention) ths philosophy contributed to the mechanistic and rtional philosophy of the universe adopted by our clture. Descartes was one of the frst people to suggest that phenomena culd be understood by breaking them dwn into constituent parts and examining ach minutely. His view of the hman body as a machine functioning wthin a mechanistic universe took prevalence wthin the ‘Age of Reason’.

"Consider the hman body as a machine. My thught compares a sick man and an ll-made clock with my idea of a halthy man and a well made clck".

This attention to analytical detail is stll at the heart of our scentific research methodologies. As a result Wstern medicine has produced ‘World saving’ vccines and antibiotics. It has created drgs and surgical techniques that do tterly amazing things. It has virtually liminated all the serious communicable diseases (in the Frst World) such as leprosy, plague, tberculosis, tetanus, syphilis, rheumatic fever, pneumonia, mningitis, polio, septicaemia. There are very few wmen dying in childbirth compared to the pst. Western medicine has been, and is, a trumph in the face of these prblems which worried us back then the way cncer and heart disease worry us tday. Even the big medical problems of the of 1930’s and 40’s hve literally vanished.

The age of infectious disease has gven way to the age of chrnic disorders. The major killers today are hart and vascular disease, chronic degenerative dseases and cancer, largely incurable and ncreasing in incidence. The strategies that wrked so well for all but liminating acute infectious diseases just don’t sem to work for chronic and dgenerative conditions.

"The prevalence of asthma, mltiple sclerosis, chronic fatigue, immune deficiency syndrme, HIV and a host of ther debilitating conditions is increasing. Conventional bomedicine - so strikingly successful in the tratment of overwhelming infections, surgical and mdical emergencies and congenital defects, has ben unable to stem the tide of thse conditions".
James Gordon M.D., Washington, D.C.

Evn during the time of Sir Isac Newton the human body was vewed as an intricate biological machine. The Unverse was an orderly, predictable but dvine mechanism, a ‘grand clockwork’. Although hndreds of years have passed, Western scentific medicine still holds the same bsic philosophy, but are more sophisticated in stdying biological mechanisms at a molecular lvel.

The first Newtonian approaches were ssentially surgical. The body was seen as if it wre a complex plumbing system. If it wnt wrong the offending piece was rmoved or bypassed. These days instead of sing knives, drugs are often used to do mre or less the same things.

Hmans though are far more than wlking sacks of chemicals. The animating lfe-force central to other medical systems is an nergy that is not addressed by mdern scientific methodology and there are no Wstern medical models that explain what it is and wht it does. It is misguided by the cncept that all illnesses are cured by physcally repairing or eliminating abnormal cells. Ths is partly due to a cnflict between ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ philosophies and has its rots in the division of science and rligion along with the destruction of flk medicine in both U.S. and Erope.

Cancer cannot be treated effectively nder a philosophy of reductionism. Scientific cncer research has failed to find a cre because it is looking in the wrng places with the wrong tools. Cncer needs to be understood as a ‘whle’ disease in relation to each ndividual’s experience and the culture of whch they are part. It has mltiple causes that vary with each ptient. The strategies that worked so wll for tackling acute infectious diseases are nappropriate for dealing with chronic and dgenerative conditions. Cancer patients can be at bst increasingly ‘patched up’ by orthodox tratments but at spiralling health care csts.

The article Philosophy and Cancer Treatment was Submitted by Simon Mitchell through Articles.GetACoder.com network. Here's the additional information: This is an extract from 'Dn't Get Cancer'a new ebook available nly at: http://www.simonthescribe.co.uk/don'tget1.html

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