Gabor Maté
At the outset, let’s just say that I am a believer when it comes to Gabor Maté’s philosophy. That’s because I first had the lived experience, then started connecting the dots, and finally came across ‘When the Body Says No’ which gave the whole thing a logical framing and rationale. I’ve had stress sequentially give me migraines, a heart attack, back pain, IBS and I suspect, even a (yet to be connected) BPPV. Most doctors I went to tried to cure the symptoms, only a couple of them pointed to stress. After I systematically began reading more (Robert Sapolsky, Lisa Feldman Barrett etc) and knocking off stress points, I reached a place where stress was my only stress! And I wondered why I have that stress in the first place. Enter Maté, with a systems thinking approach that I wish doctors would really look at! It is strange that they don’t because even a Roman physician in the second century, Galen, had pointed out that “any part of the body can affect any other part through neural connections.“
(more…)“No disease has a single cause. Even where significant risks can be identified such as biological heredity in some autoimmune diseases or smoking in lung cancer-these vulnerabilities do not exist in isolation. Personality also does not by itself cause disease: one does not get cancer simply from repressing anger or ALS just from being too nice. A systems model recognizes that many processes and factors work together in the formation of disease or in the creation of health. We have demonstrated in this book a biopsychosocial model of medicine. According to the biopsychosocial view, individual biology reflects the history of a human organism in lifelong interaction with an environment, a perpetual inter-change of energy in which psychological and social factors are as vital as physical ones.”