Iatrogenesis and Collapse: some thoughts about deep adaptation

Iatrogenesis seems like a very important word to me. It means that the treatment caused the problem. If modern science has critically sickened the earth then why not also question how medicine affects our bodies and health?

We all have a basic fear that by trying to help we might make things worse but let’s think specifically about medicine and psychiatry. Doctors rely on expensive imaging technology, surgery and pharmaceuticals as the main focus of their diagnosis. But how many common health problems really need any of these things for their solution? Heart disease, obesity, depression, arthritis, diabetes, and cancer. These are all noncommunicable, lifestyle diseases. Are the medical and psychiatric industries really helping cure us with their diagnoses?
Is it possible that the global pandemic of lifestyle or non-communicable diseases are enabled and exacerbated by the symptomatic approach of modern medicine? This may seem obvious to you, or maybe not, but I will remind you that living through it is hell, even at a distance.
It is helpful if we think of the many different medical crises that accompany collapse as a maladaptive physiological response to pervasive, global, environmental mismatch, what Paul Ehrlich calls The Great Mismatch (2018). The environment in question is not the natural environment. It is artificial, industrial and urban: a product of human society. We are digging our own graves after all.
The challenge of deep adaptation it seems to me is to go beyond a symptomatic diagnosis of planetary and human health. This is very simply speaking what deep (as opposed to superficial) adaptation means. Right? I hope I am not mistaken.
Deep adaptation understands that it is not just the earth that we need to look at. We need to look within—at our own bodies as well. Again, I hope I am not mistaken…
My own work is motivated by this kind of thinking and my original contribution is the simple suggestion that when we look within ourselves to find answers and adaptive resources, that we focus anatomically on our axial line. This is our earliest defining feature phylogenetically, and is the first stage of development in the embryo. Our basic tubular structure is built around a stiff but flexible rod, at this early developmental stage called the notocord, and a hollow dorsal neural tube. Our axial core is what we share with the entire chordate phylum—all vertebrates, and is known as the chordate body plan. This part of our body is the most neurologically rich and includes the central nervous system.

In our skeletal structure, the axial line it is the deep core myofascial synergy, our postural system, which holds us together from the inside out. This synergistic continuity is a structure that has only recently been discovered and the synergistic anatomical perspective that it is a part of is also very new. 

This system is our postural system, which we have long understood functions automatically. The postural system is self-directed, self-balancing, and even self-aware. This is one of its main characteristics and is what distinguishes it from the more familiar, explicitly volitional, and superficial dynamic muscular system. It is profound new territory.

This system has a mind of its own. Having studied it for many years I can assure you that it is not a difficult system to grasp and in fact is clearly designed with exactly that purpose in mind. It is literally and metaphorically how we get a grip.
This very practical somatic adaptive resource may be a useful skill when we attempt to think about something as traumatic and complex as collapse. The ability to easily “get a grip” within myself in this powerful body-wide structure is something that has profoundly changed the way I respond to the challenges I face. Not all of them of course. It isn’t a panacea. But it is a game changer. Additionally, the deep core is a system of systems. Each of its major parts is distinct and highly self organizing, self-aware whole—a functional holon. Our awareness of this complex system of systems is intimate and familiar; we speculate that it is like a pattern recognition engine that helps us to deal with the level of complexity needed for deep adaptation.