Categories - Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything - page 29

In languages with two, it's black and white. Add one, it's red. Next up, green or yellow. For six,
green splits in two, creating blue. You get the picture. What's odd about this conformity across
cultures is that the spectrum is continuous. There are no seams in a rainbow, and yet we see
them anyway. This illusion is based in biology and refined by language and culture. The red,
green, and blue cones of the human retina place a hard limit on the visible spectrum. Within that
continuum, the seams we see were teased out by evolution, enabling us to distinguish food, wa-
ter, and predators from their surroundings. And language is layered on top. Once we have
words for colors, it's near impossible to un-see the seams.
When categories are absorbed in a culture, they become nearly as irrevocable as they are invis-
ible. They retain power even when the ideas behind their conception are obsolete. For instance,
while Cartesian dualism has been dismissed by modern philosophers, neuroscientists, and phys-
icists, the system of Western medicine remains organized around mind/body reductionism.
Doctors specialize in physical problems. Psychiatrists focus on mental disorders. In orthodox
medical practice, the mind-body connection is a missing link.
I learned this myself in 2005 when I suffered terrible, chronic back pain while juggling a heavy
consulting load and writing Ambient Findability . I first blamed poor posture and bought an ergo-
nomic chair. It didn't help. After weeks of agony, I visited my doctor. Ignoring my hint that
stress could be a factor, she prescribed physical therapy and three Advil, three times a day. I fol-
lowed doctor's orders, but the pain got worse. In desperation, I went to Google with “back pain
stress.” I found and read a topic, Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection by Dr. John Sarno.
He argues that many musculoskeletal pain disorders are rooted in repressed emotion. To dis-
tract us from anxiety, our autonomic nervous system reduces blood circulation to specific
muscles, tendons, or ligaments, thereby causing oxygen deprivation and severe chronic pain.
For treatment, he suggests that patients acknowledge the psychosomatic basis and repudiate
any structural diagnosis. This means no pills, no physical therapy, and resumption of all normal
activity. It sounds a bit odd. But you know what? It worked. Completely. My back was healed
by a topic.
This experience made me see the missing link, the mind-body connection, that I'd never known I
was missing. It challenged my theory of existence and raised prickly questions about our cul-
ture. Suddenly, I was unable to un-see the weirdness of Western medicine. Science and techno-
logy bring us medical miracles, but success blinds us to the dark side. The over-prescription of
drugs and surgery is an epidemic. We're fixing things that aren't broken, and the cost is astro-
nomical. For instance, seventy percent of us suffer severe back pain, and in the U.S. alone this
results in tens of thousands of surgeries a year, but the herniated, ruptured, and bulging discs
commonly attributed to back pain are seen almost as often in the MRIs of healthy people. xxix All
too often, diagnostic classifications are made based on visible but harmless imperfections by
doctors who are blind to the invisible but powerful connections between mind and body.
Of course, we're not all in the dark. Many doctors regularly prescribe placebos. They trust in the
efficacy of mind over matter. And the market for complementary and alternative medicine -
over $35 billion spent out of pocket each year - shows some patients grow impatient with med-
ical orthodoxy. But mostly the $3 trillion healthcare industry rolls on.