ETIOLOGY RECAPITULATES ONTOLOGY: Reflections on Restoring the Spiritual Dimension to Models of the Determinants ofHealth

Abstract

This paper addresses theoretical issues related to the restoration of spirituality to models of the determinants of health and illness. It is asserted that models of etiology and disease causation necessarily reflect prevailing understandings of the nature of human life. Allopathic biomedicine, for example, is an inevitable product of materialistic and mechanistic views of what it means to be human; likewise, psychosomatic medicine emerged only among scientists and healers who accepted the mind as real. For a true body-mind-spirit perspective to prevail in medicine will require evidence of the reality and salutogenic salience of expressions or manifestations of a human spiritual dimension. As this paper describes, such evidence already exists in the form of empirical research findings from epidemiology, psychophysiology, and clinical medicine. Due to the rise of normal science within this emerging area of research, however, proponents of a body-mind-spirit paradigm are meeting with considerable resistance, ironically, from many of the putative leaders of the religion, spirituality, and health field. The shift to a new paradigm will only come once scientists and practitioners succeed in breaking free of the control of established medical and scientific institutions.