With Philippe Bobola
Traditional Chinese Medicine or TCM seems more and more to be an interesting alternative to Western medicine working by drugs, antibiotics and other interventions often aggressive for the body. All the more so, today, with the arrival of viruses that confuse European experts and for which vaccines seem ineffective. But for our Western knowledge, what is the scientific legitimacy of this 2000-year-old Chinese medicine? What is the recognition here for preventative treatments promising support for our health and natural immunity?
LHCH interviewed Philippe Bobola, a French professor, a scientist by training, brilliant and original, even sometimes controversial, accumulating doctorates in physics, biology and anthropology and defending an opening of our scientific knowledge to the practices of traditional wisdoms. He has created his own “Unity of Knowledge” school for this purpose.
PART 1: OUR EUROPEAN MEDICINE AND DEATH
LHCH: Our Western medicine does not readily accept that there are alternatives to its treatments. Why ?
Philippe Bobola: Our medicine is based on our modern European science born in the 17th century. This science is based on the analytical mind which wants us to divide everything into small material units, to separate things in order to understand them better. The problem is, if you take a clock apart into its smaller units, are you sure you can wind it up, when you don’t know the general plan well? Our science still thinks of material bodies maintaining mechanical relationships of cause and effect. She is materialistic. In medicine, therefore, the body is divided into small parts. We treat one organ at a time. We don’t deal with our relationship with other organs like Traditional Chinese Medicine (editor’s note: TCM, henceforth) does, which works on the energy channels in the body and the essential relationships between its parts.
LHCH: You could even say: a specific drug for one specific organ. Is it the division into small parts?
P.B: Yes indeed. There is a whole story behind this idea of a drug which concentrates only one active ingredient of a plant. I simplify. In TCM, we treat with the whole plant! It started in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century when the very wealthy Carnegie family decided to diversify their investments; they understood then the interest of the field of health… In 1910, Andrew Carnegie thus asked a former teacher Abraham Flexner to write a report on the teaching of medicine and the way of making this teaching more rational or ” scientist “. So we eliminated everything that seemed irrational: osteopathy, magnetism, obviously homeopathy, etc. And they turned the body into territories with distinct borders, organs separate from each other, each having a specialist to treat it! A total reorientation of medicine losing all sense of the whole body. The analytical mind! We isolated a molecule from a plant. We patented it… The better to re-produce and sell it. Hospitals were also divided into separate sections, each dedicated to a part of the body, etc.
LHCH: Treat quickly but without any idea of health maintenance or prevention as in TCM? But, at the same time, an aspirin is a concentrate of the active ingredient and it is effective.
P.B: Prevention was (and still is) not profitable for business, unfortunately. Aspirin, sure, but our medicine only treats the symptoms. The headache passes … But we don’t get to the root of the disease. Our medicine has become a way of keeping people dependent, just treating the symptoms, even if others appear afterwards, to treat more …
LHCH: Yet medicine should promote healthy living?
P.B: I have thought about this a lot. As I am interested in Chinese medicine, but also traditional medicines from other cultures, I understood by contrast what our medicine was. It is linked to the idea of death in three ways.Western medicine has cut the connection between things. She locked the organs in areas of the body cut off from other organs. She cut in the movement of life.2. During the Renaissance, in the 16th century, our medicine scientifically discovered the organs and tissues of our body from dissections of corpses … We tried to understand life from dead material.3. Western medicine has difficulty interacting with other ways of healing such as naturopathy or TCM. She cut herself off from a world rich in meaning and practice.3 reasons to consider it as a medicine unfortunately… “dead”.
LHCH: Without creating a controversy, could we say that old Chinese medicine is more linked to Life?P.B: It is the opposite of dividing the body into small parts … TCM sees the body as a whole, in its entirety. It is “holistic”. There is Qi energy flowing through Xue points, along Jing meridians. Each point corresponds to an organ or an area of the body. But there would be 2000 in all! The TCM also thinks of the body’s relationship with nature, with the universe, through its theory of Yin and Yang forces and, above all, through their interaction. It is energy medicine and not materialistic like ours. For example, she makes connections between emotions and organs. If you have liver problems, you are often angry, for example. Everything is connected. It is qualitative thinking, not purely analytical and quantitative.
LHCH: To be concrete, let’s take an example. The COVID virus is said to be a challenge for Western medicine. The experts seem lost …
P.B: Yes, this virus marks the limits of a Western thought that isolates things. COVID is linked to a set of factors unique to our globalized world — adjustment. COVID is also linked to the ecological disaster which also challenges Western science or rather, it forces all its disciplines, geology, chemistry, biology, etc., normally separate, to communicate with each other to solve the problems of the Earth. Because all ecosystems are intertwined with each other. But this attempt at real multidisciplinarity is rare. Often aborted.It is time to take stock of this vision which always divides things. In my opinion, Western thought must be nourished and even re-fertilized by traditional thought which, in turn, should be inspired by our analytical thinking, of course. There is already an “integrative medicine” of the two types of knowledge, widely used in Switzerland, in particular. Our ability to diagnose from medical imaging is extremely sophisticated today. It could be followed by a comprehensive treatment for MCT. But you should know that our medical imaging such as MRI are linked to quantum physics, a science that has affinities with the Chinese philosophy of the Tao!
LHCH: Thank you very much doctor. We will see the relationship between TCM and scientific research in part 2 of the posted interview.
Mini-bio: Philippe Bobola was a teacher between 1990 and 2005 at the Universities of Paris VI, Paris VII, Cergy-Pontoise and Créteil. He is a member of the European Academy of Arts and Letters Sciences; AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science); of the American Chemical Society and member of the Lausanne Academy of Sciences. He is the author of numerous physics and biophysics publications in peer-reviewed journals.https://www.unitedusavoir.com
The opinions of the interviewee do not necessarily reflect those of our media.
