The Road to Wholeness in Medicine and Public Health

Abstract

Doctors make mistakes. Mistakes kill people. We have developed methods to catch and reduce individual, momentary and idiosyncratic errors. But none of it helps to correct the shared biases of whole communities of scientists or practitioners. This article is concerned with these errors, conceptual errors that afflict a whole science or discipline. The big errors that have affected both science and policy fall into several kinds: errors of fragmentation, treating the study of a part as if sufficient for understanding the whole and confining the study within a single discipline; errors of static thought, ignoring history both of the object of study and of our thinking about it; errors of level, imagining that the small is more fundamental than the large; errors of homogeneity, the failure to recognize that all things are internally heterogeneous and that that is the source of process. There is a growing recognition of the need for complex understanding and the need to assimilate the universality of change. But this is held back by the commodification of knowledge, institutional isolation of disciplines, and reductionist philosophy. The study of complexity requires the revival of dialectical thought among scientists and policy-makers.

Keywords:

• scientific study of error
• complexity
• dialectics
• change

Notes on Contributor

Richard Levins was a farmer and medical laboratory technician in Puerto Rico, where he also was active in the independence movement before getting a PhD in zoology. He has been an ecologist, mathematical biologist, and philosopher of science and now teaches ecology at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is adjunct researcher with the Cuban Institute of Ecology and Systematics. He is author of Evolution in Changing Environments and co-author of The Dialectical Biologist and Biology under the Influence with Richard C. Lewontin. His work has emphasized qualitative mathematics for the study of complexity in nature and society. (For more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Levins.)