The Future of Healing
by Michael P Milburn
The Future of Healing: Exploring the Parallels of Eastern and Western Medicine by Michael P Milburn is an outstanding treatment of a difficult and important subject. In some ways it is almost as path-breaking as Fritjof Capra’s classic, The Tao of Physics.
The comparison highlights, however, an important contrast. Capra’s title declaimed clearly, if subtly, that the ancient Chinese Tao long foreshadowed modern Western physics. Milburn’s title, like his book, strives to be even-handed. While his text reveals many areas where the Chinese approach to healing seems to be far more systematic, comprehensive and sensitive than that of the West, he repeatedly emphasises the complementary character of the two traditions. It is hard to escape the impression that commercial and political realities make it difficult for a Western writer, particularly one practicing in a health profession, to be overtly critical of Western orthodoxies.
Milburn’s success is to be found in the fact that this does not detract from the value of The Future of Healing. He illuminates in a powerful manner the reasons for the growing popularity in Western communities of Chinese healing and well-being traditions, and the failing credibility of Western mainstream medical practices. He explains the value inherent in practices that focus on herbs, qi meridians, breathing and other physical therapies, and the unity of body and mind. He delivers the coup de grace, however, with an historical review that reminds how much modern Western medical theory and practice owes to the once fashionable, but now absurd, notion that life can be understood and maintained like a mechanical clock, an invention imported from China.
Milburn’s third chapter, headed A Story of Clocks and Genes: Uncloaking the Old Biology, recounts how the old biology is a way of thinking about living systems that emerged from the mechanical ideas of Rene Descartes and Isaac Newton. The metaphor of the clock became an instrument of transformation, an inspiration of much modern Western science and technology.
The clock became for many a more powerful metaphor than God for understanding and explaining the universe, giving rise not only to scientific and industrial revolutions, but also the exuberance of the European Enlightenment. It can be something of a shock to realise that much contemporary medicine and science is deeply rooted in an old biology that has been shaped by this metaphor of the mechanical clock.
At the same time, Milburn is tireless in drawing attention to work in a new biology that uses an understanding of energy fields at the quantum level to bring the West into the same framework of reference as long cultivated in the East. While Milburn does not labour the point little doubt is left about the inadequacy of the old biology. This applies not only in the context of the harm inflicted unwittingly on the environment by the notion that it be treated like a machine. It has become critical as science seeks to expand its frontiers with the mapping of the human genome and with vaulting aspirations in the field of genetic engineering, where there is still a strong disposition to treat life like a complex machine that can now be taken apart and put together again..
Milburn shows how in the West the application of quantum theory to the understanding of biological organization has created a new biology. A theory of complex, dynamic systems, which offers fresh perspectives on embryology, evolution and the mind-body relationship, reveals a hierarchy of complex living systems, rising through quantum, molecular, cellular, physical, social and environmental levels. Forms of electricity and magnetism are recognised as means of communicating information, organising coherence and energising activity.
Milburn’s detailed knowledge of the work being undertaken in these areas can give the false impression that such activity is mainstream and in the process of changing scientific and medical orthodoxy and culture. Familiarity with this work from other sources reveals rather that it remains difficult to gain recognition and support for such cutting edge activity, challenging as it does so much investment in established education, commerce and industry in the West.
Of course, like Capra, Milburn and others have explained, Chinese medicine has been concerned for several millennia with phenomena in living systems that the West is only now beginning to address seriously. Words like qi capture phenomena that have long Western awareness.
Qian Xuesen, the American educated ‘father of Chinese space technology’, could not but have been mindful of this when he remarked, in a February 1986 symposium sponsored by the newly formed China Qigong Science Association, that ‘many facts show that an intensive scientific study of qigong will lead to a full development of man’s mental as well as physical abilities’. Qian has even foreshadowed a new scientific revolution in the 21st Century, perhaps bigger than the revolution brought by quantum mechanics and relativity in the early 20th Century.
Milburn’s style is not to speculate on a new scientific revolution but his work provides all the information necessary to invite serious reflection on such a possibility. Indeed, The Future of Healing addresses one of the central challenges facing mankind today. But it does this with the humility and caution that is recommended by so many of the I Ching commentaries attributed to King Wen, the founder of the Zhou Dynasty three thousand years ago. Although such humility and caution can lead to misunderstanding amongst contemporary readers, it may in fact be most appropriate. Just as King Wen had to find a way to lead a revolution against a corrupt and tyrannical ruler, so Milburn is in reality, with the utmost tact, seeking to explain the need to overthrow a corrupt and tyrannical scientific rule, which has accumulated so much power that it has begun to inflict harm with a tyrannical lack of discretion on much that is essential for human and other forms of organic life.
Later chapters of Milburn’s book are headed The Mysterious Link Between Mind and Body and You Are What You Eat. These explain basic fundamentals of human well-being that have been trampled on by a Western science careless of some of the most remarkable and sensitive qualities of living creatures. Milburn explains with great tact the consequences of the Western hubris that supplanted a Christian God with a mechanical clock. He does this by showing how a Chinese tradition that has worshipped neither Christian God nor mechanical clock has long sought and nurtured an understanding of the subtle energies that are fundamental to the integration of life in its many forms.