Preface
In a world where many people pursue narrow, self-serving goals with no regard for the needs of others, it is the duty of civilized people to restrain their less-than-reasonable tendencies and conduct themselves in a sensible, cooperative manner.
In science and in everyday life, most thinking people recognize the need patiently to investigate both the accepted wisdom and those phenomena that this wisdom regards as beyond the pale. When to be critical, and when to listen with open, attentive mind? How to restrain a propensity to judge and to dismiss before we have undertaken a thorough inquiry? These are major challenges for scientists and laypersons alike.
In this book we will be prospecting in little-known creeks high in the sierra of the life sciences and medicine. While much of what we sift through will be more-or-less standard scientific material, our panning will turn up a number of unusual and even sensational findings, theories, claims, and insights, like so many nuggets of gold. Some people are tempted to toss out the new, especially if it comes in unaccustomed shapes, colors, and sizes, which it is wont to do. Yet people also have a capacity to adjust to practically anything, given enough time. So, if you find yourself rejecting anything in this book, consider inserting the offending nugget into a mental sack for a few months, then extracting it and taking another look at it, perhaps through a new magnifying glass.
Close-to-Nature Medicine, as we use the term here, refers to the effort to devise novel medical interventions that are closer to Nature and thus more effective and with fewer side effects than those of standard medicine. It is a form of Appropriate Technology. CTNM differs from Alternative Medicine in its insistence on scientific explanation and clinical testing. It differs from standard medicine in its low-tech, low-cost, natural approach, generally based on scientific detective work that views the body as a multilayered architectural dig left over from evolution. CTNM typically includes fair dollops of conceptual thinking and scrummaging through the trash bin of history.
A key premise of this book is that certain problems in science yield best to a conceptual and contextual approach that resembles the kind of net assessment used in intelligence analysis. An appreciation of history, social psychology, and languages/linguistics/logic can add balance to the evaluation of scientific findings and provide clues to their deeper significance.
It should not surprise us, of course, that the solutions proposed by Close-to-Nature Medicine are not always accepted with consummate grace by the proponents of either Standard or Alternative Medicine! Be that as it may, let me mention some of the themes and highlights of the book. We will
For further information and analysis, see Close-to-Nature Medicine and Intriguing Anomalies: An Introduction to Scientific Detective Work .