“We need people who can see straight ahead and deep into the problems. Those are the experts. But we also need peripheral vision and experts are generally not very good at providing peripheral vision.”
Peripheral Vision Can Help Us Solve This Crisis
We all want to feel safe, especially now.
Regardless of where you fall on the spectrum between “free spirit” and “control freak”, at some point even the freest of spirits among us meets their match and battens down the hatches. So maybe feeling safe means being in as much control as we feel we need to be so that we can freely live our lives the way we want to. And this is different for each of us, depending on personal disposition, experience, and socioeconomic circumstances.
The A-OK sign is a well known mudra that brings the tips of the index finger and thumb together. It signifies the balancing of order with letting go. Think of the index finger as your order maker, delegating away, and your thumb as your hitchhiking digit, a rudderless sail following the wind wherever it goes. Balancing when to hold on and when to let go is something we all do, all the time.
The drive to control is amplified when the puzzle is deadly. I think most of us want COVID-19 under control. But do we want it enough to open our imaginations to what we don’t know? I’ve been thinking about the balance of imagination (letting go) and analysis (order). Especially with respect to problem solving, and particularly with respect to solving THIS problem. Can control get in the way of finding the fastest, most effective solution if it ends up limiting imagination, imagination that includes an openness to other ideas?
In his 2008 TED talk, The Puzzle of Motivation[1], Dan Pink lays out the science behind productivity, specifically the science of creative problem solving. He describes Federal Reserve Bank funded research by economists from M.I.T., Carnegie-Mellon, the London School of Economics – the list does go on – research showing that a highly controlled work atmosphere leads to lower productivity when it comes to problem solving. Add money as an incentive and overall productivity sinks even further. How does this figure into the push for a solution, or even the considering of other solutions, beyond a vaccine or immunotherapy?
Problem solving relies on peripheral vision, on being able to soften one’s focus away from a fixed point. Einstein, Descartes and other saints of science [2] made major breakthroughs in their dreams. It doesn’t get anymore peripheral than this. Descartes went so far as to describe his dream as a divine spirit revealing a new philosophy to him, one that would become the Scientific Method, a method that currently dismisses the validity of its own discovery.[3]
Descartes’ emphasis on linear method, and linear thinking by extension, combined with Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery of the Laws of Motion, define the lens of our modern reality. And while I drive my car with this reality in mind, and I want the pilot of my airplane to be working from this same analytical state of mind, when it comes to solving problems on the edge of what we know, imagination might provide a way out of no way. We easily forget that our modern reductionist world view came to us via problem solving derived from unbounded peripheral vision.
When problem solving hits an impasse, the invitation is to look around at other ideas, to look beyond one’s familiar horizon. To even look at other kinds of medicine.
During the coronavirus outbreak in 2003 (SARS), the late Dr. Deng Tietao (1916-2019) treated over a hundred infected patients back to health, seventy-six of whom were very ill. Using Chinese medicine, an 87 year old doctor achieved what are referred to as the three zeros:
· No fatalities.
· No patient’s transferred to more intensive care.
· No staff members fell ill.
In March of 2020, a team of Chinese medicine doctors, led by Dr. Liu Lihong, negotiated their way on to the front line in Wuhan to follow the late Dr. Deng’s success. Negotiated, because Chinese medicine is not the mainstream medicine in China; since the democratic movement of the early 20th Century, followed by the dialectic materialism of Marxist-Leninist communism, Western medicine has been the mainstream lens of China. It dovetails well with a doctrine that has tried to divorce itself from its “old fashioned”, “feudalistic”, “folkloristic” roots. Fortunately, Chinese medicine is part and parcel to a complex science in its own right. Only with the advent of a disease that is befuddling modern medicine experts, is China reconsidering its own medicine en masse.
In his presentation to a Western and Chinese Medicine audience, The Role of Chinese Medicine in the COVID-19 Epidemic, Dr. Liu describes his ambitious patient selection process:
… prospective patients had to exhibit both obvious signs of discomfort and a certain degree of severity. We were hoping to have a chance to work with those patients rather than those who only exhibited mild symptoms or no symptoms at all.[4]
All of his patients survived, and following in Dr. Deng’s success from 2003, none of the providers fell ill. The caretakers were taking a combination of herbal formulas for prevention, while the patients were also receiving acupuncture. A renowned herbalist who has more recently come to acupuncture, Dr. Liu also observed:
Most of the patients we have seen so far, actually, were put on oxygen at one time or another. As for the sensation of chest fullness, most patients had already become used to this symptom and did not in all cases report it to us. It was only after we started to administer acupuncture that they noticed an immediate difference: stuffy before, and wide open afterwards. [5]
Our world views determine what seems practical, or even realistic. There’s a certain comfort in dogma that says “this way is the only way.” I’m thinking of dogmatic religion people vs. dogmatic science people, a favorite dichotomy of our time. You know, the fish bumper stickers symbolizing Christ vs. the walking fish depicting evolution. Why separate the two?
Chinese medicine, born of Chinese philosophy, is an ongoing multi-millennial dialog of observations that explore the intricacies of evolution, with a core of mystery as its source. They just happen to have a few more words to share about the mystery of our origins beyond, “there was a Big Bang” that gave birth to our universe(s), and eventually our consciousness
The Big Bang still sounds miraculous to me. Our existence, including the challenge of self-awareness, born of a chance explosion. Time didn’t exist before it happened, according the late Steven Hawking. What would that feel like? I pretty much accepted it prima facie. I was a day dreaming 3rd grader taking in what I thought was a Greek myth. Out of nothing, everything. That’s how it still sounds to me.
Many phenomenon, through the lens of quantum physics, likewise show matter breaking the bounds of its normal behavior. Even time becomes relative. Steven Hawking’s final book, Brief Answers to the Big Questions, describes how onboard satellite clocks slow down and speed up relative to their proximity to large celestial bodies like the Earth. This very phenomenon, described by Einstein’s theory of special relativity, is used to calculate time shifts in GPS satellites for the sake of accurate mapping calculations, like the ones working in our cell phones.
Medicine is the pragmatic expression of a world view. It follows that the efficacy of any medicine is greatly enhanced by one’s belief in it. Sure, there are pills or herbs that will flat out kill you regardless of your beliefs. But, the placebo effect is at play in all medicine, including FDA approved pharmaceuticals with great track records.
Ted Kaptchuk, a faculty member of Harvard Medical School and director of the Harvard Program in Placebo Studies, is known to many students of Chinese medicine for his bridging exploration of the differences between Western and Eastern medicine in The Web That Has No Weaver.
Kaptchuk’s research is focussed on the “placebo effect”, which he describes as, not just a sugar pill, but the relationship and ritual with which medicine is administered. His has the goal in mind of transforming the art of medicine into “the science of clinical care.” He wants doctors and other physicians to spend more, not less, time with their patients. Because it makes for more effective medicine. The research results are clearly encouraging a revival of the human dimension of healthcare for the vital role it plays in healing. The science of clinical care can treat symptoms, and even the change the course of an illness, without pharmaceuticals.
One of the trials uses placebos alongside Maxalt, a highly regarded migraine medicine, concluded:
The effect was monotonic for placebo and nearly monotonic for Maxalt. Two other findings were that (a) placebo treatment mislabeled as 10mg Maxalt reduced headache severity as effectively as Maxalt mislabeled as placebo, and (b) open-label placebo treatment was superior to no treatment[7].
When mislabeled the statistical effectiveness of pain treatment for migraines was almost the same, between a placebo and Maxalt. Maxalt was effective only in the instances where it was correctly labelled “Maxalt.” When it was labelled “placebo” it was very slightly more effective than a placebo labelled “Maxalt.” So little that the statistical difference is considered null.
In this same TEDMED talk[8] Kaptchuk shares research that followed the progress of 262 patients suffering from acute IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome). The were divided into three different groups.
· Group 1 members filled in a basic intake form and received no placebo.
· Group 2 members filled in the basic intake form, were given a placebo and had their vitals checked (no engaged care).
· Group 3 members filled in the basic intake form, were given a placebo along with a 45 minute, engaged care, interview
(engaged care = active listening, questions, and laying on of hands).
Here are the results, with the number in each case indicating percentage of people experience adequate relief in each of the three groups:
Kaptchuk is also a proponent of open placebos, whereby the participants are informed that the pills they’re taking are sugar pills that contain no active medication. In a study, reported in the Harvard Gazette[9], consisting of 80 IBS sufferers divided into two groups, with one group taking nothing and the second group taking an unmasked placebo that read ‘placebo’ on the label, the later group experienced twice the rate of improvement. Which is roughly equal to the rate of improvement that patients taking powerful IBS medications experience.
Kaptchuk’s main point is not that effective pharmaceutical drugs don’t work, but that they are far more effective when we believe in them and those who are prescribing them. We have a built-in anticipatory mechanism that preps our brains to perceive reality according to environment. Walk into a forest known to be full of snakes, and sticks will start to slither at the corners of your eyes.
Kaptchuk explains:
“When a person feels sick and you go into an environment that’s designed to help you, where everyone wants to provide you relief, the brain’s processing of sensations, self awareness and symptoms changes sometimes in a very positive way.”[6]
His findings show that the placebo effect, in my words, is actually a healing phenomenon inherent in all medicine. Do you trust your doctor? Are you open to your doctor’s assumptions around healing? Do you know everything that’s going on in your medical situation, at a biochemical level, or are you going forward with a faith, and the belief borne of this faith, that your doctors credentials, assumptions, and instincts will help you?
My point is that the efficacy of a particular kind of medicine is based on one’s belief system. And that this bias can blindside us from the available options, including one’s that work effectively, as is the case with Chinese medicine and COVID in the here and now.
If an 87 year old doctor was able to cure over a hundred patients using only acupuncture and herbal medicine during the SARS epidemic in 2003, over 70 of whom were very ill, is it worth investigating further?
Furthermore, if none of his staff fell ill, was that shear luck? Or the fact that they too were taking herbal formulas, ones designed to prevent infection? While 20% of the total number of 8,439 cases of SARS were infected medical staff, Dr. Deng’s entire staff remained healthy.
If you think there’s only one lens through which to approach this disease, then you probably aren’t going to be very open to what you would consider to be outside of your belief system. Even if the solution is at, or just beyond, the periphery of your vision. Why don’t we do what our great scientists have done to get us to this point, and open our fields of vision to what we don’t know?
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_the_puzzle_of_motivation#t-1100357
[2] 7 Great Examples of Scientific Discoveries Made in Dreams
[4] The Role of Chinese Medicine in the COVID-19 Epidemic
[5] ibid
[7] Labeling of Medication and Placebo Alters the Outcome of Episodic Migraine Attacks, National Institute of Health’s website.
[9] Harvard Gazette, December 22, 2010, Placebos Work – Even Without Deception