Isaac Newton

If you’re healthy and those close to you are healthy, you probably don’t think very much about our medical system. Maybe you go for a check-up once a year, maybe you pay a visit to your doctor when you get a really bad cold. But if you’ve been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, or any chronic illness, our health care system is suddenly an intimate partner in your life, a partner that could guide you back to health or keep you sick.

I don’t know about you, but when it comes to my intimate partners, I like to know about their past, what motivates them, what their core values are, and how they got to be the way they are today. I like to know – when they give me advice, feedback, suggestions – what is informing those thoughts, so I know what makes sense for me to listen to, and what should be ignored.

I think many – if not most – people have no idea how our medical system got to be the way it is today. But if you’re challenged by a chronic illness, and you’re counting on your medical care to heal you, you need to know. So today I will offer you a brief history of some of the relevant events that led us here. This history was offered by Bruce Lipton, PhD in his new book Spontaneous Evolution: Our Positive Future (and a Way to Get There from Here), and I’m simply paraphrasing and shortening it here because I believe it’s information you need to have. I’ll be interviewing Lipton, who is the internationally recognized leader in bridging science and spirit, in mid-May. If you want to be notified when that interview becomes available and you want access to listen to it, just enter your name and email in the box with the red arrow to the right of this post.

A Science Tale

Once upon a time, scientist and philosopher Rene Descartes said there was a body and a mind, and that these two unique entities interacted and effected each other. He said this duality was important – that the mind mattered when it came to the body. But then Isaac Newton came along.

Newton showed that he could predict the nature of the universe through physical mechanics alone. He could explain how apples fell and planets moved. According to Newton, everything in the universe was a machine, from a wristwatch to the human body, and you could learn everything there was to learn about it by simply taking it apart and studying the pieces.

Science adapted this notion of Newtonian mechanics and we ditched the concept of the mind altogether. And once we bought into this idea of a material universe and a limited mind, we decided that to understand life, all we needed to do was study the physical elements that comprise it, just like we would a wristwatch. It’s this Newtonian concept, known as reductionism, that led to the focus on anatomy, and then, breaking down the human body even more to cells and tissues, biology, and then, studying the fundamental particles that make up the body in biochemistry.

From these studies we learned that our biology is predicated on proteins. Proteins are responsible for our physical makeup and our behavioral characteristics. Proteins, we discovered, are made of amino acids, which are like breaded strings whose sequence is unique for each protein. But how do our bodies know which sequence of amino acids to use to create each protein? Where is the memory in the protein? That’s where DNA comes in.

The Central Dogma

Our DNA is the memory molecule responsible for carrying our hereditary traits. DNA is the physical blueprint, the template that carries the info for building the proteins that comprise us. Francis Crick, who was one of the two scientists who discovered the DNA molecule, described the flow of information in this process and coined it the Central Dogma. He said the information in the DNA (your genes) is transferred to the RNA (which is like a photocopy of your genes) and that RNA is used to code the sequence of amino acids that make up the protein. In other words, information flows only one way – from our genes unfolding into our body.

Why should this matter to you?

Here’s why: The Central Dogma says that information doesn’t go from the protein back to the RNA and then back to the DNA. But proteins make up the body and the body interacts with the environment. So the Central Dogma says information can’t go from the environment through to the protein and then back to our DNA. In other words, our experiences in the world in no way can change our heredity.

Victims of our heredity!

Well if our DNA controls our traits and our lives and we didn’t pick our DNA and there’s nothing we can do to change it, then we’re victims of our heredity!

And it’s here that the prevailing mythology of our current medical system was born. Our traits were programmed at the moment of our conception and the Central Dogma said we can’t change it because information doesn’t flow that way. So we’re victims. And once we bought into the idea that we were victims, we needed to find someone to rescue us. And science was happy to do that. And so they began to create a seemingly endless supply of chemistry and molecules – of drugs – to compensate for our defects. And with this, we suddenly let go of the idea that we had control over our lives and offered ourselves to the medical community to fix what we ourselves couldn’t handle.

Sound familiar?

We thought if we could throw enough money at this, if we could make enough drugs, we could heal ourselves. So we developed a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry and we built a medical system with this victim position at its foundation. But there were a few tragic flaws here. One, we never actually proved the Central Dogma. It was a theory that we were so sure was right we never bothered to test it. And, this is all based on a Newtonian paradigm, a human body that is mechanical and material in nature. What we left out was the mind.

Epigenetics

The new field of epigenetics, which Bruce Lipton is at the forefront of, shows that genes and DNA do not control our biology; that instead DNA is controlled by signals from outside the cell, including the energetic messages emanating from our positive and negative thoughts. Lipton believes that our bodies can be changed as we retrain our thinking, which he talks about in his groundbreaking book The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter, & Miracles.

Modern medicine, however, is still locked in a Newtonian belief system. And Big Pharma is certainly not about to hop on board with the notion that energy healing could have some merit when they sell chemicals to survive. But understanding this makes it so that you can use our health care system in the ways that it benefits you while also being aware of how it’s limited, and potentially limiting you and your healing.

When I learned the story of how the current medical system developed I was thrilled, because it supported what I already understood intuitively. The mind matters. Healing does not begin and end with a prescription for a drug. All of us were born into this system – a system that may feel like Truth because it’s the way things have “always” been. But in fact it is just a narrow paradigm of thinking that developed because of a few ideas that pivoted what we collectively believed to be true. And there is good news here. This is a story with a happy ending, because new science and new discoveries are integrating the mind and the body and creating a new awareness that revises the victim position and puts the power and control back in our hands (and our minds).

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Of all the shows out there, this one found me! I love this premise. I love the idea that our illnesses can be opportunities for transformation. Now obviously I am not suggesting that anyone go out and become a drug dealer. But I do think it’s worth noting that disease often serves as an unwanted but fabulous pattern-interrupt – an event that shakes up our lives and reminds us that we are mortal, that our time here is finite, and that the time is NOW, for whatever we want to do.

Chronic illness is much less romantic than terminal cancer. Thirty or forty years of slow degradation seems so anticlimactic compared to a two-year blaze of glory to the finish line. I’m being facetious, but the point I’d like to make here is that a sudden and dramatic diagnosis has the power to provoke a massive shift in how you operate your life, whereas chronic illness – with all its day-to-day moderate ups and downs – can keep you in a rut.

Do you remember how you felt when you were first diagnosed? The shock, the vulnerability, the fear? That’s a deeply uncomfortable but very powerful window of opportunity to create real change. When you are stripped of who you thought you were and where your life was going, you are available for a foundational shift in a way typically much  more difficult to access. It is an opportunity to choose from the depths of your being who you want to be and what you want to be doing while you’re here. Have you thought about that lately? Are you doing what you love? I know you have challenges, more than many, but how can you take just one step today toward creating the life you truly want?

Want more inspiration? Read The Basement or go back to the main page to Get Inspired.

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But I don’t like leafy greens. So I don’t eat them very often (at least not yet), even though I know I should. And so, the phrase haunts me at every meal.

You see, every time you put something in your mouth, you are either increasing the health of your body, or taking away from it. Every meal is an opportunity to effect real and significant change in your body. Every meal is a point for you, or against you. As people living with chronic illness, the quality of the food we choose is perhaps the most important decision we make, and we make it every day, several times a day. Our bodies only work as well as our individual cells, and our cells only work as well as they can with the nourishment we provide. If that nourishment is poor, our cells will, in the extreme, go haywire, and short of that, they simply won’t work as well as they should.

The Food & Illness Connection

I spend a lot of time reading the posts on various MS pages on Facebook. Hundreds of people post every day, every minute, so reading it regularly teaches me what’s going on for people with MS every day, throughout the country. And one of the things I’ve noticed is that I often see three or four-sentence posts where someone is complaining of a symptom and in the very next sentence they mention the cookies they are about to eat, or the great cake they just had. And I’m amazed at the unfortunate ignorance in our culture (and specifically in our medical system) of the connection between the food we eat and how sick we are.

Food, especially sweets, is a comfort thing for many people. When you have MS, comfort is typically not your primary experience, and eating a few delicious cookies can go a long way to make someone feel comforted or treated, if not satisfied, at least for a little while. So I get why there’s a resistance to acknowledging the food-health connection and why even if a person gets it intellectually, it doesn’t necessarily translate into a willingness to change their diet. Ultimately, I believe it comes down to how much tolerance an individual has for discomfort, because only when that threshold is reached will most people be willing to make a change.

Unless of course we’re riding on the same proactive bandwagon, which I hope we are, in which case making changes toward awesome health is a typical day’s work.

Every time I sit down to eat a meal and I am not eating leafy greens, I am aware that I’m making a decision on behalf of my cells and thus on behalf of my health. The healing journey is a constant evolution, a regular weighing in and assessing of where I can improve, stack more cards in my favor, and be even healthier than I thought was possible yesterday. Leafy greens are one of my last holdouts, but I can feel the seemingly unmovable earth beneath me beginning to shift, to ready itself for the era of the leafy green.

Will I see you there, happily eating lettuce bunches? Will I be taking you with me? Or will leafy greens be a staple of your diet someday, just not yet?

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