Introduction

Salt Lake City
University of Utah
A. What of holistic approaches to the body?
	David:	There are many practices, involving the body, both the remedial - including reflexologists, osteopaths, chiropractors, Chinese herbalists and acupuncturists, and so on - and the enhancing - including the many and varied martial arts from the far east, yogic techniques, and so on - which share a common understanding of the human body as an integrated and holistic whole. What's your angle on that side of things, how do you?
	Prof Norman:	Well I suspect that my take on that is the take of every body's which is that through practice - 'practice makes perfect', and all of our skills can be honed by practice and this holistic approach - martial arts - is true, you do enhance, your reflexes can be increased a little bit, you can do things you couldn't do before through repetitive behaviour and things like that, so I'm completely supportive of that. Using our kind of technologies, neuro-prosthetic technologies - maybe this is a question you have later on - but trying to use neuro-prosthetics not as a rehab technology but as a performance augmentating technology I think is naïve and silly. There was a guy at the NIH - Terry Hambrecht - who was in charge of the neuro-prosthesis program there, and Terry actually believed that we could do better than we do, by implanting systems into the nervous system. I don't believe that. I think that the best that we're going to be able to do is to take people who can't do anything and make them perform at a very low level - but better than they could do before. And the sort of 6million dollar Man sort of fantasy is what er Terry Hambrecht had in his head - and he's a bright guy, I'm not denigrating his intellect, but I just can't quite see that.

	David:	Ok. So getting into the, perhaps, philosophical question of it, erm, one of the things that intrigues me about the medical model is, obviously, enhancement through yogic techniques doesn't add to or replace internal organs with technological devices. And looked at from the holistic perspective you get this notion of 'Chi'
	Prof Norman:	If there is such a thing -
	David:	If there is such a thing - what is your take on that, how would you
	Prof Norman:	Well I'm not strong believer -I'm not an advocate at all of 'Chi'. I believe that we're deterministic, and er, we just don't know what the plan is, but we are deterministic. I don't believe that we have a soul. Now we're getting into religious issues here, but, yeah, and because we're deterministic I think this notion of Chi is just another euphemism for the interaction of things that make up your life force of sorts. But I believe it's a physiological issue. The brain and the neuro-chemistry associated with mood, influence things dramatically, but I don't think there's anything particularly magical about the body.
	David:	OK so here's the punch line.
	Prof Norman:	(laughter)
	David:	Now, I actually share with you the medical model with regard to the body, but I've got this intriguing problem here with taking this holistic thing at different scales. At the scale of individual bodies, in our hospitals and universities and so on, the medical model holds sway, and I think that's right. At larger scales, however, incorporating whole environments, the holistic model of ecosystems is held to be an accurate picture, with Mandelbrot patterns reproduced at all levels of the integrated animal-vegetable-mineral-atmospheric Gaian whole. So this picture holds enough scientific weight to have caused major policy changes in the industrialised nations to protect the health of this holistic planetary ecosystem - much to the chagrin of some corporations for whom the compartmentalised, modular model of the environment allows easier and cheaper disposal of waste, for example. So we've got a disjunction here, between our conceptualisation at different scales. Now is that just an example of post-modern pragmatism, fitting the right model to the right thing, or is there potentially perhaps in your opinion some future problem that might arise from this disjunction?
	Prof Norman:	Well I think that - I don't know, I don't think about these things too much - and I don't think that the term you're thinking of - I don't think of our view of trying to help our global picture (- and we're not helping it very effectively -) but our attempts at that, as being a holistic approach. I wouldn't call it a holistic approach. I'd call it a sort of a 'stumble fumble' sort of approach; we're kind of trying to fix up wherever we discover there are problems. We're trying to stop rainforest deforestation, things like that. Trying to feed the masses - not necessarily the right thing to do - but trying to do those sorts of things. I don't see those as being holistic approaches. Those are approaches where we recognise a problem - we've identified a problem and we're trying to solve the problem. That's not a holistic approach, I don't think.
	David:	No, it's not so much the approach as the reasoning behind it. Lovelock's…
	Prof Norman:	Well I'm not sure that society embraces that holistic view of the world, or science embraces that holistic view of the world. Perhaps you embrace it, but I'm not sure if science embraces it, and I'm not an expert to talk on that subject I don't know anything about it this is only personal opinion. So I don't know and I'm not informed in this area at all. It's clear that we do view the world as an integrated whole, and that fiddling with this thing has consequences over here, you know we understand the interaction much greater and much better than we understood it before, but we still don't understand it hardly at all. Have you ever seen any of the input/outputs maps of the United States economy?
	David:	No
	Prof Norman:	It's a huge, gigantic map - looks like a billboard, and it tries to sort of relate interactions between different segments of the economy. I guess some economists did this 25 or 30 years ago or something. And if the railroad system does something screwy over here it influences cosmetics over here somehow because of some very complicated system. And this is just the economy in one country - you talk about the world economy and the world population dynamics, you talk about the ecology as a whole, it becomes a very intractable problem.
	David:	And yet economics still claims to be a very exact science…
	Prof Norman:(laughter)	Well I don't share that view either! So nobody would I think argue about the interaction of these different parts of the world population, the world system, but to describe it as a holistic - may be it's just my problem with the holistic definition of all this - the holistic view, I mean it sounded as those your proposing that everybody's embracing this as a holistic sort of thing and trying to approach it as a sort of alternative, trying to relate it to the kind of alternative way of approaching the body..
	David:	I'm not suggesting anything really - it's a kind of intellectual conceit to play with, in a sense. Because it intrigues me that there may be - maybe not in exact terms - but some kind of disjunction here we may come up against in the future. I just wanted to gauge your opinion on it.
	Prof Norman:(laughter)	Well, let's talk about the body first, before we go to the whole world. It's amazing - I've known some strong advocates of the whole holistic approach, an alternative medicine approach to the body. To be perfectly candid these people have had an - the one's I've interacted with - have had a phenomenally ignorant view of the human body, and this whole concept of cause and effect, has - and these are scientists, people with PhDs, trained people - that's been sort of thrown out the window, and they've substituted sort of classical cause and effect for sort of FouFou cause and effect. I do believe that chiropracty has value - I've seen, I've personally not had a problem with my back, but my father has, and my brother has, and so I've seen these people go to chiropractors, and get adjusted, and whether the chiropractor is - what he's doing is not clear to me, I've never been to a chiropractor, but it clearly has been very effective in their cases. So that seems to help. Acupuncture? There's evidence that it does seem to help, but the evidence there perhaps is more subjective than objective. Well it's more subjective - in fact how much it really involves endorphins, naturally induced endorphins because of the psychological states that you get into when you're going in to see the acupuncturist, and I don't know. It could be self-medication due to endorphin release and things like that. So the advantage of classical medical therapies is that they are based more soundly on cause and effect.

		You can actually observe - and that's what we try to do in medicine today, we try to do Rational Medicine. Specifically - this is a very expensive (in terms of human health care) process - but they're gonna decide that this is the best way to do a particular procedure. And they'll design a protocol which they're going to test, and then they will use this protocol for six months, and they'll look at the outcomes - it's an outcome analysis. What are the consequences of this particular protocol? And then they will - once they have the outcomes established, and all the surgeons who are in this trial use this protocol, then they go and they decide what is probably the most beneficial change that we could make - so rather than each physician independently deciding himself, autonomously, 'Gad it seems to me I should try this thing rather than this thing', here they talk it over they decide things rationally, they change the protocol, they do another six months with the new protocol, and look at the outcomes of that. And even if it looks worse, they still go through that protocol, to determine that in fact, that was not a good way to go. So you could argue, on individuals that are being treated with these different sort of protocols, some of them could get poor health care. It's a placebo sort of thing. They're treating the whole healthcare delivery process as a placebo kind of situation and trying to optimise the process, and the results of this have been very encouraging - they've made real progress in delivering more rational health care than they've been able to do in the past. So this approach can be studied. That's the difference between this approach and holistic approach. Are you familiar with the concept of X-ing? No. This is also an oriental technique, and it has to do with Chi as well. I'm not a proponent of X-ing. This is a guy over in Physiology department, a professor in Physiology who experienced this personally, and became a very strong advocate of this thing called X-ing. And he was a real strong believer, and because he was such a strong believer he tried to apply the scientific technique to study the process, and whenever he tried to apply scientific tools to the measurement of this thing, the thing evaporated, there was nothing there. And so - you have two conclusions - one conclusion is that this whole thing is FouFou, or the other conclusion is that the thing is real but the process of measurement makes it disappear, scares it away and it doesn't exist anymore. And interestingly, even though this guy was trained and is a scientist and has been one for decades, his belief - he's such a strong believer in this - he's experienced this thing himself. He basically believes that it's real - you try to measure it and it's the Uncertainty Principle, and it goes away. That's freaky. And so that's the problem with the holistic approach I think, it's that it doesn't lend itself to the scientific method, and traditional approaches do. Now I'm not embracing completely all the traditional approaches. But if I had a problem I tried to understand what the physician has in mind, in terms of diagnosing my problem, I'd try to understand this is probably a rational way to go, and I'd probably adopt his therapeutic approach, as opposed to going to a holistic person where the whole thing is based on sort of more psychological issues, rather than physical issues, and where I can't really get my hands on Chi, and energy fields. So that's my philosophy there. So not a strong advocate of the holistic approach. OK so now we go to the whole planetary system. The problem of trying to do things. Erm maybe it's the best way to proceed would be for you to give me an example of a holistic position as opposed to a more classical, mainstream science position, with respect to the whole ecosystem.
	David:	It's difficult because it's a mainstream science example that I would use, though, well I'm not sure how mainstream it is -
	Prof Norman:(laughter)	How 'bout the ozone hole
	David:	- yeah the Chaos theory thing
	Prof Norman:(laughter)	Well how 'bout - let's talk about the Ozone hole. People have been sort of suggesting for long time that there's a - and - holistic people - before there was any real evidence - just believed that what we're doing has to be fucking things up. That's the premise, that we can't be doing good things, that whatever we're doing, because we're not thinking about it, we don't understand it well enough, we're fucking things up. And so, if you have a negative take on what we're doing to the environment, you look at something like the ozone hole, and if there's a hint that there's something there, you will embrace it and say well here's evidence of how we're trashing things. Now you put the scientific method on that, and try to measure the ozone hole try to figure out what's going on in the ozone hole you can't really measure it. I mean, it looks like - I mean - I believe in the ozone hole and I believe it's caused by our production of excess CO2 and things like that, hydrocarbons, I believe that. But rather than just embracing it - because we have to be doing bad things to our society, I'd rather try to measure things and try to understand what's going on from a more rational point of view. Now the downside of that is it takes longer to have that understanding, so if your initial knee-jerk response - the holistic response - is that whatever we're doing we're doing it wrong, and we've gotta change things, you can reset things faster, if that's your model, than the scientific method, where it takes you 20years or 30years to come to the conclusion that the knee-jerk guy came to originally. In which case you've done 20 or 30 years worth more damage. So there are consequences to the scientific method - it takes time - when you're trying to monitor things at such a global scale, it takes decades, you can't do it in days weeks, or months, it takes a long time.
	David:	OK, so let's leave all that holistic stuff behind, that's very interesting. What's particularly interesting from this is this Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle idea - that it just chases it away when you look at it, with the scientific method.
	Prof Norman:(laughter)	As you don't know anything about X-ing let me just quickly tell you about X-ing. This fella came back from the Orient, where he experienced this. The way it works - I can't do it or explain it right because I don't know much about it - but basically the way it works is it interferes with energy fields, Chi-fields, and the way you do it is you literally do this to a person [draws an X across my torso, at a distance of about 9inches, with one hand, fingers outstretched, palm flat.] And this is the X that is done, and somehow that destroys your Chi, and we can demonstrate this with some simple sort of tests. One of the tests that used is you would have your hands out like this [palms pressed together pointing outwards in front of oneself] and I put my hands in here [between the forearms] and normally I can't push your hands away. And then I X you and then I can just push your hands away with no problem at all. So, supposedly it's that dramatic. And, this person had experienced this from this point of view, and he felt that he was as strong as he was before but it was clear that he just lost strength. Now it's quite possible that the process of doing this [the X] has pumped up the person who's pushing the arms away and you know he's playing the game as well too. Anyway so this person tried to measure the amount of force that can produce before X-ing and after X-ing and all this kind of stuff, using force transducers and as much instrumentation as he could do, and of course he couldn't measure anything.
	David:	It's probably largely psychological.
	Prof Norman:	Well that's the whole point, it's psychological in two parts. If you believe in X-ing, and I believe in X-ing and I X you, then I've increased my power, and you, in your part, because you believe in X-ing, will feel that your power has been decreased. And sure enough it seems to hold sway.
	David:	So it's actually, from a sociological point of view, it's a social reality rather than a physical reality.
	Prof Norman:	Yeah, that's right, yeah. Right - but you could argue it's a reality none-the-less.
	David:	Absolutely.

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