The Myth of Normal 12

If we could begin to see much illness itself not as a cruel twist of fate or some nefarious mystery but rather as an expected and therefore normal consequence of abnormal, unnatural circumstances, it would have revolutionary implications for how we approach everything health related. The ailing bodies and minds among us would no longer be regarded as expressions of individual pathology but as living alarms directing our attention toward where our society has gone askew, and where our prevailing certainties and assumptions around health are, in fact, fictions. Seen clearly, they might also give us clues as to what it would take to reverse course and build a healthier world. Far more than a lack of technological acumen, sufficient funds, or new discoveries, our culture’s skewed idea of normality is the single biggest impediment to fostering a healthier world, even keeping us from acting on what we already know. Its occluding effects are particularly dominant in the field where clear sight is most called for: medicine. The current medical paradigm, owing to an ostensibly scientific bent that in some ways bears more resemblance to an ideology than to empirical knowledge, commits a double fault. It reduces complex events to their biology, and it separates mind from body, concerning itself almost exclusively with one or the other without appreciating their essential unity. This shortcoming does not invalidate medicine’s indisputably miraculous achievements, nor sully the good intentions of so many people practicing it, but it does severely constrain the good that medical science could be doing. One of the most persistent and calamitous failures handicapping our health systems is an ignorance—in the sense either of not knowing or of actual, active ignoring—of what science has already established. Case in point: the ample and growing evidence that living people cannot be dissected into separate organs and systems, not even into “minds” and “bodies.” Overall, the medical world has been unwilling or unable to metabolize this evidence and to adjust its ways accordingly. The new science—much of which isn’t all that conceptually new—has yet to have significant impact on medical school training, leaving well-meaning health providers to toil in the dark. Many end up having to connect the dots for themselves.