For many of us, nature is the way that opens us up to a sense of that wholeness. When we experience the world of nature, we can sometimes almost idealise it as a 'miracle of creation and natural laws'. The pattern on the wing of a butterfly seems to be so beautifully and aesthetically formed that it simply must reflect that miracle. However, the Nobel physicist Murray Gell-Mann suggests another perspective alongside that. In this view, the universe and the earth too have had their traumas, their lack of symmetry and perfection, their stories which could all have turned out differently if there had been a different distribution of 'fundamental laws' and 'frozen accidents'.
Infection is also something that our conventional systems have a mastery in.
But the advance in interest in complementary health suggests that we are beginning to think that only a very small part of our physical symptoms are 'merely' mechanical or open to technology alone as effective treatment. There are many options open to us in healing, but all of them rest on their own philosophies whether they are made explicit or not. In this article I have tried to suggest that if we have some idea of our general guiding philosophy, it will be easier to discriminate between the many options that are presented to us in the complementary health world. It will also be easier for us to know when our conventional medical model can be of use to us too. I don't want to suggest that it is a simple matter, knowing our philosophy.