When systems go wrong

Moderate challenges to the mind–body generally lead to recovery and even to improved resilience. Challenges that are successfully met result in better immunity, improved fitness and more appropriate coping styles. However, the information system can go wrong and develop less efficient modes of working. These states of “dys-regulation” prepare the ground for disease to take hold. They may arise because the challenge to the body is too great or too persistent, or the person is vulnerable psychologically (various styles of thinking and feeling can undermine recovery), biochemically (due to genetic, nutritional and ecological factors), or structurally (because of deep patterns of tension, a lack of fitness or flexibility).

The system may be overwhelmed because a person fails to notice the body’s messages of distress and change habits that prevent recovery. It is the seamless mind–body network – not just brain-based intelligence – that adapts to changing internal and external conditions. The new medicine will recognise this. Faced with an illness, an injury or a social crisis, the new medicine, which aims to unite the best of complementary therapies and conventional medicine, will aim to re-establish balance. Michael Hyland’s theory that disease begins as an information error suggests a new and important way of thinking about health. There are two kinds of “error” in the mind–body. One is the type that conventional Western medicine deals with when it looks at the body as a biological machine, identifying a biological disease such as diabetes, cancer, heart disease or arthritis.

Conventional treatment involves fixing the “broken part” or removing it. This might involve replacing a missing hormone, killing bacteria with antibiotics, reducing blood pressure with a drug, suppressing inflammation with steroids, replacing a blocked artery with an artificial graft, or cutting away a cancerous tumour. There is another type of error affects the information in the whole network. In this case, no single organ or biochemical system can be targeted and repaired, because the information that produces health and healing processes is spread over the entire network.

In the case of the latter error, approaches that aim to create health or to trigger healing responses by acting on the mind–body as a whole are most likely to be effective. And, just as networks can take in many different kinds of information, so the mind–body can respond to diverse kinds of input – diet, botanical medicines, movement and touch. So too can it pick up more refined information – from art, communication with a therapist, and perhaps even the subtle information conveyed by a homeopathic medicine or the effect of an acupuncture needle.

The entire mind–body could be influenced by lifestyle choices that have an impact on the biochemical, structural and mental information systems. We can imagine the whole system of information flow – the body’s intelligence – as a choir of myriad voices. But it is a choir without a score or a conductor. The parts sing themselves and each voice hears the entire chorale and responds more or less harmoniously. The voices are biochemical and electrical messages, structural impulses, communications from the conscious and unconscious mind.

This is an example of complexity in action: the information flow emerges from the interweaving of biochemical, the structural and mental information systems, but it simultaneously forms and shapes them all. Perhaps the information flow that makes complexity possible is what the traditional healers refer to as “life force”. If this is the case, then the body’s intelligence may correspond to complementary medicine’s “energy body”, but it would probably be more accurate to call it the “information body”.