Human history is filled with numerous dramatic revolutions of understanding that led to great leaps forward. We discovered fire and the wheel, language and writing. We found that the earth only appears to be flat, that the sun only appears to circle the earth, that matter only appears to be solid. Each of these discoveries threw open the doors for new developments and gave birth to a new historic period.

Today we refer to each of these new revolutions of understanding as a paradigm shift.  The term “paradigm” comes from the Greek  paradeigma (pattern). It was first used in the scientific world to denote a conceptual framework shared by a community of scientists. Today it is used in a very broad sense to signify the totality of thoughts, perceptions, and values that form a particular vision of reality.

The current shift in paradigms began in the 1920s with the paradoxes and apparent contradictions that emerged when research into the structure of atoms and the nature of subatomic phenomena  forced Werner Heisenberg, Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, the giants of modern physics, to expand their consciousness and impelled them to think in new categories about the nature of reality. Many of these paradoxes were connected with the dual nature of subatomic matter, which appears sometimes as particles, sometimes as waves.

The harder they worked at clarifying the situation, the sharper the paradoxes became, until they finally noticed that the paradoxes appeared whenever one tried to describe atomic phenomena in classical Newtonian  mechanistic, clockwork, terms. Eventually physicists began to realize that the world is not a collection of separate objects but rather appears as a web of relations between various parts of a unified whole – dynamic patterns, events rather than objects.

It wasn’t long before others began to recognize this central aspect of the new paradigm – its shift from  “objects” to “relationships”– as uniquely applicable to other disciplines.  By the 1970s this shift, from objects to relationships, which had begun in the field of atomic physics, led not only to profound changes in how the other sciences viewed reality, but rapidly became a general framework for envisioning  how various aspects of society organize themselves.  The new paradigm proved applicable to the  biological world of plants and animals, as well as to the personal world of  human beings. One could use it in explaining and understanding politics and economics, education and medicine, ecology and religion. It included the old, mechanistic paradigm as a partial truth – one aspect of how things work – while allowing for other equally valid ways. It was larger in its perspective, capable of embracing new observations and reconciling apparent contradictions, capable of recognizing and balancing paradoxes, of thinking in “both / and” terms, rather than in terms of “either / or.”  It predicted things more accurately, and encouraged exploration.       

The parallels between the paradigm shifts in atomic physics and the practice of medicine, which have emerged since the late 1970s, are remarkable.  It was the early leaders in the budding holistic health movement – disenchanted with conventional medicine – who first recognized that the paradigm shift in the sciences from a mechanistic and reductionist view of human nature to a holistic and ecological vision, was applicable to medical care. They clearly saw that the chief source of the crisis they perceived in health care was rooted in the Cartesian image of the human body as a clock-work. They were extremely critical of the prevalent system of acute, hospital-based, drug-oriented medical care, and that future health care would have to go far beyond the scope of the conventional bio-medical model in order to deal with the large network of phenomena that influence health. Not that it should abandon the exploration and treatment of the biological aspects of illness, but that it would have to relate those aspects to the general physical and psychological conditions of human beings in their natural and social environments.

Initially progress was slow. New paradigms are nearly always received with coolness, made fun of, opposed, and even rejected as heresy  (consider Copernicus, Galileo, Pasteur). Institutions change slowly, and many North Americans, as habituated consumers, still equate health with hospitals, physicians, prescription drugs and technology. But gradually what was once considered “medical care” is becoming “health care,” and wellness has become the primary focus of medical practice.

The great value of surgery and drugs continues to be affirmed, but they are seen as last resorts, not first choices.  The most sophisticated modern diagnostic techniques and research studies are employed, but indigenous and folk healing traditions are also valued. Professionals have begun to respect therapeutic practices that were previously depreciated, such as nutritional therapies, chiropractic spinal manipulation, homeopathy, meditation and massage. They have also drawn on the healing practices of other cultures (Chinese acupuncture, mineral baths, yoga, etc.).

Moreover healing is increasingly considered a fully collaborative partnership between professionals and patients, in which learning is as important as treatment, and self-care is considered a key component of healing. The “treating process,” says Norman Cousins – a prominent early proponent of the  “physician-patient partnership” – no longer seeks only “to do that which the body itself may be incapable of doing, but at the same time attempts, to the fullest possible extent, to restore the body’s own healing capabilities.” In fact, “there is never a time when the nourishment one puts into one’s body or one’s mind is not essential to health,” (Anatomy of an Illness, by Norman Cousins).

Much has been accomplished over the last two decades, but we have barely scratched the surface.
New advances continue to be reported daily. Just this past month The Globe and Mail (Wednesday, April 15, 2009), under the heading “Health,” announced that “Stem-cell transplants can free diabetics from insulin shots,” allowing patients to manage the disease more effectively. In initial studies patients who first received chemotherapy to damp down their overactive immune systems, were injected “stem cells isolated from their own blood” and “most were able to stop insulin injections” because their own bodies had produced the insulin they needed, indicating that the technique is worth testing in additional trials.