Eastern medicine is ’systems medicine’. It addresses itself to ‘how things work’ given the complexity of systems working within systems, systems working in concert with systems and systems reciprocally affecting systems.

The systems approach is now  influencing research and clinical practice. Western medicine is overcoming a historical constraint and expanding it’s scope of research. Western medicine is acknowledging the role of ‘quality of life issues’ predisposing people to one or another illness. However, I would point out western medicine seems to be running around ‘noting correlations’

Correlations do not establish causality. Correlations merely allow us to see two variables tend to frequently occur ‘together’, they are said to be ‘correlated’. The Kaiser study (see Adverse Childhood Experience and Illness) notes a correlation between childhhod distress and illness. That’s well and good but what does it really tell us. A lot of prisoners are raised on Top Ramen, does that mean, Top Ramen causes crime? No. There are other relevant variables; ‘Top Ramen is cheap, prisoners at San Quentin are often from low income familie, etc., etc.

As we grapple with new understandings of systems within systems, we have a tiger by the tail. Our science is not up to the task. There really are too many variables (might cell phone towers be predisposing us to brain tumors?).

We don’t know. We can’t know. We have hit the limits of our understanding.

This is the context within which HMO’s and PPO’s operate.