Complexity and Medicine

Complexity is the name for the universal tendency of parts to organise themselves into more complex wholes.We humans are so much a part of our world that we often take many of its properties and qualities for granted.We fail to remember that weight, water, light and warmth, although totally familiar to us, are also rather mysterious. Complexity can be seen at the most basic level: who could predict, for instance, that bringing the gases hydrogen and oxygen together would give you something to drink! Complexity operates too on the biggest scale of all. After the Big Bang, when time and space first began, our pattern-forming universe produced stars and galaxies; planets formed. Life – miraculously it seems, but also quite naturally – emerged out of this universal process.

Organisms are alive precisely because the whole is always greater than the sum of its parts. Medical scientists until now have tried to understand life by isolating its biochemical properties in a test tube, or by examining dead tissues.While this approach has certainly proved very useful in understanding how the human body works, it can only reveal our chemical nature. Modern technology now lets us see into the intricate design and workings of the living body. As science discovers how the parts communicate, form wholes and self-organise, medicine will change quite profoundly. It is too soon to know what medicine would look like if it were based on mind–body connectedness and the flow of information that keeps us well, but there are similarities between such an approach and the traditions that gave birth to complementary medicine.

These traditions all include notions of mind–body wholeness, energy flow, harmonious living and therapeutic relationships, along with knowledge of how to encourage self-healing. Science is becoming increasingly interested in this territory and the possibility that complementary therapies might provide us with further clues about human health. Complex processes are not like sequential ones, where A causes B, which causes C.Whole-system processes are networked; they happen all at once, and communication is across the whole system in all directions, so C influences A even as B influences Z – and back! This realisation has enormous practical implications: scientists developing artificial intelligence, or predicting weather patterns or ecological consequences, need to know how to predict whole-system behaviour. It is of even greater relevance for medicine to understand how the processes of life interweave, and how the whole and the part continually reshape one another.