When the body says no
"The Vancouver oncologist Karen Gelmon does not favour the war metaphors often applied to cancer. "The idea is that with enough might you can control, with enough might you can expel," she says. "It suggests that it's all a battle. I don't think that's a helpful way of looking at it. First, it's not valid physiologically. Second, I don't think it's healthy psychologically.
"What happens with our body is a matter of flow - there is input and there is output, an you can't control every aspect of it. We need to understand that flow, know there are things you can influence and things you can't. It's not a battle, it's a push-pull phenomenon of finding balance and harmony, of keading the conflicting forces all into one dough." What we might call the miliatary theory of disease, sees illness as a hostile force, something foreign that the organism must battle and defeat. Such view leaves an important question unanswered
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No disease has a single cause. Even where significant risks can be identified - such as biological heredity in some autoimmune diseases or smoking in lung cancer - these vulnerabilities do not exist in isolation. Personality also does not by itself cause disease: one does not get cancer simply for repressing anger os ALS just from being too nice. A systems model recognizes that many processes and factors work together in the formation of disease or in the creation of health. We have demonstrated in this book a biopsychosocial model of medicine. According to the biopsychosocial view, individual biology reflects the history of a human organism in lifelong interaction with an enviroment, a perpetual interchange of energt in thich psychological and social factors are as vital as physical ones. As Dr. Gelmonn suggests, healing is a phenomenon of finding balance and harmony.
We cannot remind ourselves too often that the word healing derives from an ancient origin, meaning "whole" - hence our equation of wholesome and healthy. To heal is to become whole. But how can we be more whole than we already are? Or how is it that we could ever be less than whole?
That which is complete may become deficient in two possible ways: something could be subtracted from it, or its internal harmony could be so perturbed that the parts that worked togehter no longer do so. As we have seen, stress is a disturbance of the body's internal balance in response to perceived threat, including the threat of some essential need being denied. Physical hunger may be one such deprivation, but in our society the threat is most often psychic, such as the withdrawal of emotional nourishment or the disruption of psychological harmony".
