Lama Jigme Gyatso
May 21, 20203 min
Let us consider Medical Superstition,
this is Lama Jigme Gyatso
of the Buddha Joy Meditation School;
welcome to Meditate Like a Jedi!
I still remember the day
all those thirty-four years ago
when my pal Aubrey and myself
went to see Star Trek: the Voyage Home.
SPOILER ALERT – I am going to give some stuff away
but in all fairness it has been more than three decades
since the film’s release.
The movie had some good gags
but the best laughs were had
watching Doctor McCoy’s hysterics
as he scurried about a twentieth century hospital
raging at the barbarism and superstition at play.
He wasn’t far off.
For when we look back
a hand full of centuries into the past
we are aghast
at the practice of attributing plague
to the misdeeds of non-corporeal entities
invisible and malevolent.
But are we much better?
For the last hundred years
both physician and lay person alike
have set aside the scientific method
and blamed puzzling maladies
and a new host of invisible culprits
only these were given names
psychiatric and psychological in nature
such as hysteria, or conversion disorder,
or psychosomatism, or secondary gains.
For more that twenty three centuries
very deep thinkers
of recognized the destructive presence
of logical fallacies and cognitive biases.
Consider, if you will,
the appeal to an absence of information
logical fallacy.
I fun example could be:
"I, who have NO formal training in engineering
can NOT conceive of how the great pyramid of Giza was built
therefore it MUST have been aliens!"
Oh sure, its funny
when some guy on the History Channel
who looks baked out of his mind
strenuously jumps to illogical conclusions.
BUT it is NOT nearly so funny
when so-called medical professionals
do the same thing.
How often have lazy-minded physicians
attack their patients’ characters
by insisting their symptoms
were all in their heads?
How often have they concluded
“We do NOT know what it is,
therefore is MUST be psychological!”
That is a text-book example
of an appeal to an absence of evidence
logical fallacy.
It is cruel,
and it is destructive.
Did you know that in the early days
of the AIDS epidemic
many victims were told
that it was all in their heads?
In Doctor Michael Greger MD’s book
“How NOT to Die”
studies were sited
wherein the symptoms of clinical depression were reversed
NOT through psychotherapy,
NOT through psychopharmacology
BUT merely by treating systemic inflammation
by switching the patients to a whole-food, vegan diet.
The book sites other interventional studies
again where psychological symptoms were alleviated
by addressing physiological causes
such as gut microbiomes that had been mismanaged
due to the habitual consumption of foods
that our species simply has NOT evolved to thrive upon.
Folks did NOT have to rewrite their childhoods
to overcome disabling psychological symptoms
BUT only to revise their menus.
In the book “Cupid’s Poisoned Arrow”
Marnia Robinson explored human sexuality
through the lenses of anthropology
and neuroscience
to show how most marital conflicts
could be reversed,
NOT with better counseling
BUT by making subtle changes in our sexual behavior.
Subtle changes such as refraining from pornography,
and erotica, and masturbation, as well as orgasm
and replacing them with
the simple, and subtle,
and surprisingly fulfilling practices
of Karezza style Tantra
while facilitating orgasmic sublimation
with the methods of circulating one’s subtle sexual energies
using methods Taoist, or Hindu, or Buddhist
in origin.
And as such she anecdotally demonstrated
huge changes in the participants’
physiological, and psychological, and behavioral
and social and even vocational experiences.
We are fortunate to live in a time
when courageous thinkers
have thought outside the box.
We live in a time
when we can profit
from their insights
as well as their examples.
But will we follow in their footsteps?
Will we exercise the courage
to follow where the data leads us?
Will we choose to transcend
logical fallacy, cognitive bias
superstition and lazy mindedness?
In an age where greed seems to trump
both climate science and virology
no less compassion and wisdom
our intellectual integrity matters now
more than ever.
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