In the latter part of the nineteenth century, a gentleman named Robert Koch developed a series of postulates to help identify the causal agents for various diseases. The basic outlines of this approach were that, first, the germ had to be found abundantly in every patient and in every diseased tissue; second, the germ must be isolated and grown in the lab; and third, the purified germ must cause the disease again in another host. So there you go, and makes good sense, doesn’t it?
Koch had bacterial infections in the crosshairs, but since this is a matter of basic logic, the thinking supports questions about other issues, like viral infections and allergies.
So let me throw a couple other issues into the mix. I have commented before on what I take to be the very foolish practice of determing allergies by means of muscular tests — if you can’t hold your arm up when milk is dribbled on it, then you must be allergic to milk. But educated people do this, and the fact that Wilson thinks it is nuts doesn’t even appear to be slowing them down.
Third item: at the most recent ministerial conference in Monroe, Rich Bledsoe made the very important point that we have discovered that the world is a very complicated place, and that causation is frequently a matter of how things function in a complex web. Causation is not necessarily like a single file of thirteen cars having themselves a pile-up on the interstate. It is very rarely completely isolated, as it is when you put the eight ball in the corner pocket. A number of scientific developments have alerted us to this truth, largely by rubbing our noses in it — causation is not simple.
Now before we learned this, conventional approaches to things like medicine, or nutrition, or determining allergies, had a clear tendency toward reductionism. Koch’s postulates above make wonderful sense to me, but if you apply them a truncated form, and treat the patient in front of you as though he were simply a car needing a bit of work on the carburetor, then you will eventually provoke a reaction. As medical science advanced, we discovered we were (as often as not) dealing with complex systems, and not with just one thing in isolation. And in that environment, if a group of practitioners arise, claiming that they want to treat the “whole person,” they will be greeted with relief by many.
So I happen to believe that many of the criticisms leveled against conventional approaches to medicine, nutrition, allergies, and so forth, were quite fair so far as they went. The world is more complicated than that, and the human body is fearfully and wonderfully made. I am quite prepared to admit, and gladly, that the world is an odd place, and that we might discover odd treatments for odd ailments in odd places. I am singularly broadminded on the topic. It may well be that the cure to cancer is lurking, even today, in an average bowl of corn flakes. That would be okay by me.
So then, why do I find it funny when people determine allergies by the dribbling milk method? The central point to make is that it is not because the treatment is odd or funny. If you think about it, every treatment for every ailment is odd or funny. The whole world is odd and funny.
But if this is being done because we have now discovered complex “systems,” and the vast web of causation, and integrated approaches to the whole person, then shouldn’t the standards for being able to decipher it all go up, not down?
When systems get complicated enough, one of two things can happen. The first is that we winnow out the number of experts, and we get ourselves some real experts around here. Before, back in the simple causation days, we had five thousand experts. Now that we understand the enormous complexity of these systems, we have fifty experts and practitioners. But what are we to make of it all when an acknowledgement of the complexity of the systems turns everybody and his cousin into an expert and internet-trained practitioner? We used to have five thousand experts — now we have five hundred thousand.
This is the second thing that can happen when a sense of the complexity of the systems settles in — we now understand how complex everything is, so that now anybody can pretty much say anything he wants. Nobody appears to understand anything really, and so you can set up shop without fear of contradiction.
Returning to the top, Koch’s postulates could be applied in a mechanical and reductionistic way, but at the end of the say, they still make good solid horse sense. They make good sense because they are a matter of common sense and applied logic. They aren’t the end of the story, because systems are often more complex than one thing doing another thing, and you found both of them in ten minutes, look at you go. Isolating the butler’s fingerprints on the gun doesn’t give you the whole complex story, but it does give you a significant part of it.
In a similar way, here is my postulate. If there is an inverse relationship between the complexity of the universe and the education, training, and intelligence of its purported interpreter, then what you have is just one step up from shamanism, if that. My postulate, incidentally, leaves plenty of room for the independent genius, for the complex systems analyst, and the unconventional researcher. God bless all those guys.
What it doesn’t leave room for is a group of teenagers on a lark discovering one another’s milk allergies in the kitchen. Why don’t I believe those teenagers? Because the world is a complex place, and the body is fearfully and wonderfully made. There are many factors that could be involved in their reactions, and I don’t believe that as the complexity of systems goes up, the qualifications to interpret them goes down. I don’t believe that wisdom in the world can be achieved by means of diluted homeopathic training.