One of NCCAM’s challenges appears to be: While resisting enmeshment with unfamiliar and scientifically questionable mode of knowing, how to evaluate or substantiate desired benefits attending established though non-conventional modalities? My intention here is to argue against acceptance of solely quantifiable data and rejection of soundly derived intuitive knowledge.

But how is the validity of long-established but non-conventional means of knowing best established? The answer: by means of our introducing the appropriate conceptual framework and rationale.

Within the Western intellectual tradition a sturdy framework happens to exist. It is a conceptual bridge by means of which the gleaming techno-city of biomedical science and its cross-river neighbor, the old-world city of non-conventional medicine may be linked. Our methodology not only shields the scientific enterprise from undisciplined applications of the intuitive method such as found in poorly formulated versions of the Doctrine of Signatures, but assists Integrative Medicine in coming to terms with problematic, holistic means of knowing.

Acupuncture is better known now in 2009 than when first introduced to the American public in 1972. At that time NY Times writer James Reston reported that acupuncture treatments he received in China relieved pain he was experiencing following abdominal surgery. Traditional Chinese Medicine’s mode of diagnosis, relying on the appearance of the tongue, palpated qualities of the pulse, and use of unfamiliar concepts such as stagnant qi, hyperactive Yang and deficient Yin served to alienate acupuncture from western medicine. Conventional medicine authorities thus viewing acupuncture as non-scientific distanced themselves from its mode of knowing.

Though endemic to American medicine, homeopathy has received much the same treatment. This has to do with homeopathic medicine’s non-scientific sounding insistence that symptoms represent the expression of an energetic entity known as the vital force.  As we shall see, the fact that qi and vital force are essentially qualitative as opposed to quantitative entities continues to pose a problem for conventional biomedicine.

This desire for distance is expressed in the terms  “alternative” and “complementary” that are attached to “Alternative Medicine,” and then more recently, “Complementary and Alternative Medicine” (CAM). A fly in the ointment is the fact that acupuncturists and homeopaths credit these very same questionable-appearing modes of knowing with their achieving what are more often than not, remarkable treatment outcomes.

Phenomenology Defined:

Phenomenology concerns theoretical approaches toward understanding how people experience the world they live in and create. It has also been defined as an analysis of human existence without prior assumptions by the term’s originator, the early 20th century philosopher, Edmund Husserl. Phenomenology helps us with the question: can we possibly analyze human existence without presuppositions? Its literature reflects the study of human experience and consciousness in everyday life, as well as the idea of ‘”being,” rooted in physical and social space.

Advantageous Features:

Phenomenology can be thought of as intuition subjected to rigorous discipline. In practical terms its application utilizes inductive reasoning, or the building of an overwhelming case of circumstantial evidence. The following features characteristic of phenomenological investigation serve to provide a legitimizing context for culture-specific, and dialectically oriented schools of medicine.

Bracketing off of prior assumptions

Phenomenology is perhaps the first formal, academic discipline not only to make a point of sequestering or bracketing off the investigator’s own ideological, cultural, and even, “investigator-related” bias, but to study of the difficulties attached to doing so. The methodology has proven foundational within the social sciences and especially within homeopathy and psychotherapy, wherein failure to recognize the impact of one’s own role, as in transference reactions, or self-investment in a particular outcome undermines a clinician’s effectiveness.

Envisioning a phenomenon in its unity before its components

In 1988 a Royal Society of Medicine study in regard to an acupuncture point, Pericardium 6 detailed the latter’s effectiveness in treating a specific symptom, emesis of pregnancy. In 1998, many eyebrows were raised when studies indicated that moxibustion (heat) stimulation to the acupuncture point Urinary Bladder 67 was effective in provoking a fetus in the breach position to alter its fetal position in the womb. Whereas medical journal publication of these CAM outcomes was hailed as a triumph of evidence-based methodology, what also came to light is a glaring deficiency within the prevailing paradigm:

Despite thousands of years of supportive clinical research in China, the greater acupuncture meridian system to which the acu-points P6 and UB 67 belong has yet to be entirel validated in the west. Within the currently standard investigative model, a potential 367 years’ years of documentation concerning individual acu-points would still fail to reveal what the Chinese have long ceased to question, that the meridian system of qi circulation is real.

An antidote to Common Sense Realism

As opposed to Common Sense Realism (CSR) a view unequivocally accepting of direct observation, phenomenology provides us with a more reasonable perspective on what we think of as evidence. It offers a safe haven to rational doubt, as in questioning whether adoption of an external perspective in regard to our humaneness is at all possible. This matters when: we seek to enter the perceptual world of another species of life, or, when accepting data merely because it is quantitative, we fail to examine prior assumptions at play in a dataset’s creation, or the fact that data-gathering instruments merely extend the reach of our own faulty sense receptors.

A disturbing example of CSR is found in the writings of the renowned Daniel Dennett, a neurological investigator unable to recognize, much less question his own bias in favor of a heavily culture-bound notion: that the brain is a computer. In consequence, for Dennett, the world of human consciousness is a trivial matter, the mere hum of machine!

Other CSR biases:

–Biomedical research’s rejection of the reality of qi within TCM or of Vital Force within homeopathy. This is due to a paradigm-specific belief that force fields must be both quantifiable and NOT subjectively experienced. Thus, despite detectable electrical potential levels measurable at the surface of the skin that offer quantifiable evidence of its activity, qi’s characteristic feature, that it is subjectively experienced effectively disqualifies this mode of energy from scientific investigation. The same is true of homeopathy’s vital force, which expresses itself via subjectively experienced symptoms.

–The distinction between “anecdotal evidence,” on the basis of which a report to the effect that an acupuncture treatment effectively reduces pain or enhances function is pejorative; while  “evidence-based,” a term for exactly the same idea bathes a physician’s perception of an unusual therapy’s effectiveness in the warm glow of acceptance.

Though we must admit that one of our most highly esteemed sciences, physics is rooted in common sense realism its founder, Isaac Newton was himself a product of a world in which a more phenomenological approach, Natural Philosophy, ruled the sciences. Newton’s introduction of mass, force and gravity was initially resisted as these novel concepts at that time suggested unnatural, magical entities. Nor, since the meaning of his equations had first to be interpreted, were any of Newton’s precise calculations alone, sufficient to cement the case for gravity. At a time when philosophical questions suggested by scientific investigations were still viewed as honorable, Newton once having succeeded in his quest for truth remained thereafter committed to alchemy and spiritual pursuits.

Curiously enough, with the modern advent of String and Superstring theory whose core assumptions persist in defying empirical verification, the physical sciences have themselves, come full circle with Natural Philosophy: In the absence of confirmatory data, we are left with no choice but to compare the aesthetic merits of interpretative models of subatomic activity.

Conceding biomedicine’s deliberate obtuseness with regard to natural philosophy (resistance to accepting the benefit of breast feeding a child, or the desirability of good nutrition, both examples of common sense wisdom that no Randomized Double Blind Study has yet managed to validate) we might infer that the demise of Natural Philosophy has hurt as well as advanced biomedicine.

Recognize emergent natural phenomena

Emergent phenomena because they express creativity, exceed rather than equal the sum of their parts. Thus, the relation that creative phenomena hold in to their constituent (or more accurately, antecedent) elements is almost impossible to explain.

The physicist, Werner Heisenberg’s famous “Indeterminacy Principle,” gave a theoretical limit to the precision with which a particle’s momentum and position could be simultaneously measured. This struck a blow against the belief that the more we reduce phenomena to their smallest components, the more accurately we predict the movement of atomic and sub-atomic particles.  Deprived of this certitude we are left with only the jumbled and unpredictable “phenomena” themselves to discuss.

Likewise, the Scottish philosopher David Hume discovered a dirty truth about cause and effect explanation: We are never able to satisfactorily demonstrate that one phenomenon is actually the cause of another. When speaking in cause and effect terms, Hume found, we are instead postulating an association between two unrelated phenomena. Since cause and effect do not exist, the best we can manage to do is model relationships between phenomena. Models sound flimsier than fundamental laws but they are more reliable and durable when it comes to explaining what takes place in the universe.

Whether we like it or not, we know scarcely the first thing about the greatest “whole” of all, organic life, at least not with regard to the mysterious and sublime events at work during embryological development. For all our talk about incremental evolution and an organism’s seeking of evolutionary advantage, little that is meaningful can be said concerning the engine in charge of life, consciousness; why living things even bother to seek evolutionary advantage; or the fact that organic life is explosively and spontaneously creative.

Excavate levels of meaning in language

How is it that some of our most powerful myths such as those of Greek antiquity perfectly describe subconsciously experienced illness processes? Why do we say, “he went blind with rage,” as opposed to ‘deaf with rage,” or “lost his sense of smell with rage”? Why is the expression, “Go with the flow….” associated with the 1960s? What is the reason that in moments of illumination we report hearing the voice of God as opposed to seeing God?

Myths do not endure in culture, nor do metaphors entrench themselves within language unless they embody an enduring truth. This holds true especially in homeopathy where a patient’s pet expressions reveal much about the nature of his or her inner reality. Homeopathy in fact, can be viewed as the land where metaphorical expression is literal.

A chief proponent of phenomenological language excavation was Martin Heidegger, the philosopher responsible for characterizing language as the house of Being. While shaping phenomenology to my own purposes, my forthcoming book, Interpreting Chronic Illness, the Convergence of Acupuncture, Homeopathy and Biomedicine (to be published by the American Association of Integrative Medicine) provides answers to the questions I have posed, above, as well as a general method for interpreting the inner meaning of symptoms experienced by individuals afflicted by chronic illness.