Article January 1, 1991 Issue

Lifting medicine above the limitations of matter

Patricia Tupper Hyatt

Radical changes are taking place in society's thinking about how best to alleviate suffering and restore the sick and dying to health and usefulness. At issue is whether humanity will continue to approach healing and medicine from the premise that disease and health are essentially physiological phenomena, or whether serious attention will be given to the growing recognition among some physicians and lay people that disease and cure are far more mental and spiritual than previously thought.

Scientific materialism would reduce all life and mind to chemistry. Even thought is viewed by many as a physical process. This view is represented in books like Molecules of the Mind: The Brave New Science of Molecular Psychology, where Jon Franklin writes, "... every human thought, hope, fear, passion, yearning, and insight results from chemical interactions between transmitters and receptors." He goes on to assert, "The chief difference between us and an Apple computer is complexity."

Although there are scientists in the field of brain/mind research who challenge this totally materialistic view, none of them deny the underlying material basis of consciousness. The materialistic, or mechanistic, view of man has fundamentally shaped today's medicine and care of people.

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