'Sacred Cow' and its doubts

Mind Moves: The poem, The Midnight Court (or Cúirt an Mheán Oíche), confronts elements of life experience that perplexed the writer Brian Merriman in the late 18th century: sex, marriage, hard lives, human rights abuses and women's issues

The annual Merriman Summer School in Clare explores, in a similar spirit of seriousness and good humour, the mind and mood of Ireland today, as it attempts to come to terms with itself in a post-modern, post-Celtic Tiger ethos.

Eminent speakers cast a critical eye on our conundrums from their particular vantage point, be that academia, health, spirituality, sport, social reform or politics. Often penetrating in their analysis of our obsession with figuring out who we are as a people, but always delivered with a lightness of touch, these different perspectives weave a fascinating tapestry. Thankfully, this snapshot of the current zeitgeist has been made accessible to all of us by Jim Malone in his anthology of the 2004 Merriman Summer School, entitled The New Ireland and its Sacred Cows (Liffey Press, 2005).

Each of the 11 contributors was asked to focus their presentation around "orthodoxies and heresies". Whilst we typically associate these terms with historical debates in respect to religious practice, the summer school looked very broadly at aspects of our day-to-day lives where people harbour dogmatic beliefs: healthcare, human rights, culture, immigration and, of course, new spiritual orthodoxies which have emerged in the wake of our rejection of traditional religious dogmas. I would like to pick up some of these core themes in the coming weeks. Today, I want to mark the publication of this book by mentioning some issues it raises in respect to healthcare, particularly the emergence of complementary medicine.

Complementary medicine, sometimes referred to as the mind-body-spirit movement, has been growing alongside, but more often at variance with, the impressive developments in biomedical technology and exciting "breakthroughs" in healthcare. Interest in this newer field is evident if you browse through any bookstore, look at the best-seller list or note the dominance of articles devoted to complementary medicine in this supplement. Jim Malone in his Merriman contribution notes how this development is proceeding despite disapproval from the "the high priests of healthcare", who view it either as heresy or harmless nonsense. Paternalistic rhetoric is often deployed in the name of protecting the public from itself, but is seldom heeded, as over 50 per cent of the population say they use complementary approaches. Efforts to curb this enthusiasm have led to attempts to discredit or control this sector. The herbal remedy, St John's Wort, for example, was recently designated as a prescription drug in Ireland, even though, as Camillus Power notes in a later chapter, the doctors entrusted with prescribing it receive no education on medicinal herbs.

Power acknowledges the need to protect patients from their own gullibility as they seek to find magical solutions to complex and sometimes incurable ailments. But he argues that, living as we do in a multi-ethnic multicultural society, we need to respect the long-established wisdom of many cultural practices that could broaden our dogmatic concepts of healthcare. He points out how easily eastern orthodoxies become western heresies, depending on where you happen to be living.

There are good reasons why people pursue complementary medical approaches. For example, Power notes "attention of the homeopath to the symptoms of the patient is almost beyond belief but allows the patient to be heard completely". An opportunity for "psychological detoxification" occurs as patients are quizzed in great detail about their full range of physical and mental symptoms in respect to any given condition. Detailed investigation of life experiences that have been historically associated with the onset and development of the condition is also a feature of these approaches. Before ever the diagnostic process begins, the practitioner is already halfway home.

Complementary approaches help patients relax their minds and bodies. Acupuncture achieves a physical stillness, which in turn allows the mind to settle. Meditation provides a practical methodology for helping people to calm their minds and allows their body to heal. Perhaps the principal benefit of such complementary methods lies in their ability to challenge and undo a current orthodoxy in mainstream healthcare - the insistence on separating body, mind and spirit.

Power wonders if modern medicine, in its dogmatic allegiance to a scientific approach, has lost something of the art of medicine. An art that appreciates the delicate inter-dependence between how we think and how we feel, between our spiritual lives and our physical well-being.

"The 'sacred cow' of modern medicine may be the assumption that the body with its biological brain is purely physical and like any good machine can be fixed if you have the right know-how." While the high priests of medicine may scoff at the limited evidence base for many of these newer complementary approaches, Power's analysis of current biases in research funding leaves us in no doubt that the playing pitch is not a level one when it comes to actually seeking to remedy this.

Tony Bates is principal psychologist at St James's Hospital, Dublin.