nourishing obscurity

Microdave er Flaxen Saxon writes of the placebo effect in medicine but also of Steve Jobs:

Jobs decided to eschew conventional medical treatment and opt for a treatment regime based on diet, herbs, acupuncture and spiritual consultation (God help us all!). After 9 months of ineffective ‘treatments’ he elected for surgery. By this time his tumour had spread and extensive surgery was therefore necessary.

That may well have been so but I find myself midway between the two positions.

The essential problem with faith healing is that you have to get it right, meaning you have to be interpreting the words right, you have to have an efficacious religion in the first place.   People who think they’re miraculously going to be saved with no groundwork from themselves, no dues paid and with a dodgy religion, are going to be in for a shock, methinks.

Also, that attitude of self-entitlement does not seem the most efficacious in that situation.

There are so many pitfalls in it.    So if Jobs thought his new age way would give all those things he sought, it seems to me he was deluded.   Which is why he reverted to standard procedures in the end.

The human mind, the organism, has certainly triumphed over matter in the past and the spirit has too.   There are too many inexplicable cases.  And the ability of the metaphysical or even counter-physical has the physicists scrambling for explanations:

Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing this phenomenon, known as the Casimir force, so that it repels instead of attracts.

The force is due to neither electrical charge or gravity, for example, but the fluctuations in all-pervasive energy fields in the intervening empty space between the objects and is one reason atoms stick together, also explaining a “dry glue” effect that enables a gecko to walk across a ceiling.

For some reason, faith or a capacity for faithfulness is one of the factors, obsession with a cause or belief, along with wellbeing at home, feeling socially secure and being on the receiving end of love.   Not to mention enough money to cover all contingencies.

As for faith healing, something like the Scientologists’ refusal to allow medical treatment is not efficacious because it is imposed from without, by someone else else telling you it works.  Some cult tells you you’ll be OK?   In that situation, I’d prefer the opinions of the medicos.

There are some medical procedures, at this stage, I’ll just not have done.   When I’m writhing around in internal agony later though, I may well be singing a different tune and as Flaxen Saxon points out, it may well be too late.

So somewhere in here is the way to go – to have faith, have a purpose in life or an obsession, include a charitable element to the mix, make at least some healthy choices, otherwise you’re on a one way road, but make some deliciously unhealthy choices too, have a positive outlook, have good friends, have variety in what you do but no variety in lifelong partner, have medical check-ups and when it starts to go pear-shaped, decide which procedures you’ll have and which you won’t.

And have enough money to cover costs and a tad more to enjoy life with.

Pretty obvious really, I should have thought.

Filed under: Society & human issues