A proposal to “Whole” our knowing: Clinical medicine in the Noosphere

Abstract

A significant challenge facing healthcare clinicians during communication with their patients relates to the context and frame of reference of the conversation between practitioner and patient. Individuals often have unique perspectives on the origin of their health and disease patterns. These perspectives are influenced by their “knowing” of themselves and the world they inhabit. This concept of “knowing” derives from a perspective encompassing physical, psychological, and cosmological domains. Contemporary medicine has traditionally focused heavily on the physical contributions to health and disease, whereas historically, cultures have drawn their “knowing” from their personal and spiritual relationship to planetary health and cosmological processes. A critical convergence of these perspectives is emerging in a broader and more inclusive way of “knowing” in the 21st century. One of the most potent models of knowing derives from the evolutionary sciences. We now know that each of us emerges out of a fourteen-billion-year evolutionary process. Each of us is suffused with the same energy that transformed clouds of atoms into radiant stars and ignited life on our planet. Modern science has demonstrated that our self-healing processes were constructed over 200 million years of mammalian evolution. From a cosmological perspective, healing can be understood as interventions that amplify the self-healing capacities of our bodies. This process of amplification is unique to each person. This is the N-of-1 era where respect for differences in “knowing” requires a broad-based understanding of the entire spectrum of relationships that an individual experiences with their environment and lifestyle.