Integral Medicine for Wellness Cities

Abstract

Science has taken strange paths throughout history. Sometimes the horizons of meaning are lost with absurd effects on those very needs that inspired it in the first place. They are not scientific revolutions, generated by new evidence that requires the adoption of a new rationality. They are not even an improvement on the tools and strategies that should ensure progress towards a more effective form of interpretation and reality checks. It is a question of the affirmation of a different epistemological order which, in the absence of a priori evidence that proves its effectiveness, can only be justified by the creation of a sphere of functional power with contingent interests, whether they be corporate, social or economic.

This is what has happened to medicine. Re-examining the history of our medical knowledge we can observe that, during the nineteenth century, the focus was distracted from the articulated and dynamic social dimension to the finite dimension of the body. This reductive process has had the effect of keeping observation within an isolated and simplified clinical area, which excludes the more complex nature of the other involved phenomena. This paradigm, intended as a technique of observation and manipulation of the finished product, has now reached the limit of ethical, epidemiological and social sustainability. It marks a step but no longer seems able to guarantee its original promises.

Now, we need an integral medicine that considers physical and mental health as the result of the interaction between individual, social, economic and environmental factors. In integral medicine health is only now, considered as a complex system, the understanding of which is only possible by identifying the relationships between the different composite factors and their relationship with the whole.