Rene Descartes ushered in the scientific revolution in 17th century France by introducing the concept of analytic, reductive reasoning. Descartes believed that man, through analytic, reductive reasoning, could attain to an absolute and certain truth about the world. He wrote, “All science is certain, evident knowledge. We reject all knowledge which is merely probable and judge that only those things should be believed which are perfectly known and about which there can be no doubts.” Descartes conceptualized the world and everything composing it as a machine, stating, “I do not recognize any difference between the machines made by craftsmen and the various bodies that nature alone composes.” Essentially, Descartes taught that mechanical laws universally govern all phenomena–inorganic and organic. Mathematical formulae can be used to express the intricate workings of nature, making the laws of the world predicable and nature an object to be controlled by man. Descartes considered the human body as a machine, likening a healthy man to a fine timepiece. He erected a firm division between mind and matter, asserting, “There is nothing in the concept of body that belongs to the mind; and nothing in that of mind belongs to the body.”
This mechanistic view of the world and nature is adequate to describe the fixed motions of the planets and describe heat energy and work exchanges between well-defined systems and surroundings. It is even useful when applied to the study of how the material body functions as it anabolically and catabolically utilizes the material energies stored within organic food stuff. However, the successes found using the restricted world view of the scientist-materialist have led western physicians to treat and study humans solely as machines. When people are machines, physicians are mechanics. Mechanics occasionally performs routine maintenance, but mostly intervene to execute emergency repairs. He delves into the machine, seeing which parts function properly and which ones not, replacing nonfunctional elements with new ones, trying to put the machine back into some semblance of working order.
In this world view, the body is reduced to structural elements, proceeding from molecules to single cells, from cells to tissues, from tissues to organs, from organs to a unitary body machine. The western physician’s primary method for understanding the functioning of the unitary body is not by studying it as a totality, as a system; but instead separating the whole into ever smaller parts so to discern the nature, composition, amount and function of each constituent. Focusing upon parts and not the human monad has led western physicians to conceptualize disease as being present when the human machine has a faulty component which must be removed for the good of the whole, such as an inflamed gallbladder, or is the host to abnormal cells which are interfering with the operation of other organ systems and must be destroyed with poisons, such as cancer, or contains infectious agents which can be eliminated by using antibiotics.
Perhaps the greatest deviation from the original, shamanistic world view came when Louis Pasteur isolated, uniquely definable microorganisms, showing that certain ones were responsible for specific infectious disease states. The germ theory of disease postulated that a single microorganism could produce specific symptoms of disease in healthy animals, leading western science to explain the source and spread of epidemics and developing effective remedies against them.
As a result of the great success that medicine obtained by using the doctrine of specific-cause for infectious diseases, they began applying similar doctrine to noninfectious illnesses. And because only a single cause was sought, the multitude of contributing factors occurring simultaneously in the patient, such as nutritional state, living environment, psychological status and so on, were ignored. That the environment of the patient, both internal and external, could profoundly affect his or her susceptibility to disease was excluded by the new model. Consequently, the narrow view of a single specific cause for each and every disease has severely limited the scope and effectiveness of modern medicine to produce and maintain healthy individuals. Medical treatment has come to be equated with the control of specific symptoms rather than the cure of the disease. This belief in single cause diverted western medicine from an appreciation of the context and complexity of human processes from which the degenerative diseases emerged–diseases primarily responsible for accelerated aging and the premature ending of life, so often associated with unnecessary functional disabilities and losses.