Now Age Minute - 9.6.09
Art vs. Science - A Holy War for the American Soul
Despite the self-serving stoking of his ignorant herd in the debate around health care reform, Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley is quietly doing something quite useful to improve health care in America. According to a recent article from the NY Times:
"A growing body of evidence suggests that doctors at some of the nation’s top medical schools have been attaching their names and lending their reputations to scientific papers that were drafted by ghostwriters working for drug companies — articles that were carefully calibrated to help the manufacturers sell more products...
...With a letter last week, a senator who helps oversee public funding for medical research signaled that he was running out of patience with the practice of ghostwriting. Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican who has led a long-running investigation of conflicts of interest in medicine, is starting to put pressure on the National Institutes of Health to crack down on the practice."
It was an ordinary day back in 1964 when something happened that took my family in an extraordinary direction. My six month-old sister had been suffering from asthma. Despite visits to the pediatrician, there was no improvement. On this day, while my mother was in the laundry room of our apartment building, she encountered an elderly woman, to whom she mentioned the situation with my sister. The woman suggested that my mother take my sister to a chiropractor, instead of the pediatrician, to deal with my sister's asthma. She also said there was a chiropractor in the building. My mother took the suggestion, knocked on the chiropractor's door, and, low and behold, after two adjustments, my sister's asthmatic symptoms came to an end. That began a dramatic shift in my family's orientation and philosophy towards health care, to a natural and holistic path that we've been following for forty-five years.
I recently asked my mother about that fortuitous event, and how she came to take the elderly woman's advice to seek out a chiropractor for her child's asthma, way back in 1964? Let's face it, even today, most people would laugh, or politely disregard such advice. She replied, "Being extremely open-minded and always trusting my gut instincts, felt she (the elderly woman) was a messenger. And looking back, possibly an angel in disguise. So why not give the chiropractor a chance?"
After a fifteen year hiatus, I recently returned to the work I am most passionate about, that of offering presentations, and leading discussions, on diet and health. The entry point of the conversations are always the same: why is there so much confusion amongst modern Americans about what's best to eat, and why? After all, the human/food relationship is as old as human life itself. You'd think we'd have it down by now. My reasoning for the confusion lies in our cultural worship of "expert" scientific, objective analysis, at the expense of artistic, personal experience.
While the objective of science is to determine specifically what's "there", unless you're involved in the process of analysis yourself, you must trust the work of the scientists involved. One reason is because scientific research can be purchased by those interested in promoting a particular outcome, one that brings a financial return on their investment. Hence the hiring of medical doctors to sign their names to research papers written by marketing whizzes at drug companies. The same is true about the food processing industry. How else could a poison like margarine become a serious, healthy replacement for butter? And, since the governmental regulatory agencies are in bed with the industries they were created to regulate, there's no mommy or daddy in Washington looking out for your well-being. It's time to wake up and smell your liver failing, as a side effect of that statin drug you're taking for your cholesterol "problem".
Art, on the other hand, we're told lies in the eyes of the beholder. That means each of us gets to evaluate the painting, music, or poetry based on our own experience. And that process happens in our guts. It's true that opinions of critics and others can sway our opinions, but that happens in our heads. It's only when we truly trust our gut, as my mother seems to do so naturally, that we have an actual personal experience to judge. It's the same discernment that says real butter is always better than processed margarine, no matter what the "experts" say.
How is it so easy to fool so many people, you ask? It's because the entirety of our society has come to live in the left side of our brains. America is all about the numbers. We don't have quality of life, but quantity of life. Our lives have been quantified and commodified, to the point that we're downright stupefied by the onslaught. The outcome of this social transformation is that, over the past few decades, cities and towns have become "markets", products renamed "brands", and us people...we've morphed into "consumers".
The way I see it, the only way out of this quantitative quandary is to open up the right, creative sides of our brains, while we learn to connect and trust in our guts. If you accept the notion, as I do, that we're created in the image of our creator, then we, too, are here to be creating something special and unique, rather than just consuming things generic and processed. Only then can we become the masters of our own health and lives as individual, artistic creations. Just ask my mother.
Craig Gordon
