[Buddha-l] Re: Medicine, Efficient Cause and Philosophy

[Katherine Masis]

Dan Lusthaus wrote:

"Since for a Buddhist the criterion of what makes
something real is that it have or be an efficient
cause (with material cause sometimes accepted as a
subspecies of efficient cause), it doesn't sound like
Coulter would be a reliable guide. Medicine without
efficient causes would be unreal.  Demonstrating
efficient causality need not reductionistically be
restricted to 'mechanisms.'

One needn't know the chemical and biological processes
at work when one takes an aspirin to know that it
helps with headaches, etc. That has been
empirically verified many times over (aspirin is
basically a derivative of willow bark). But one
shouldn't be eager to take a pill for a headache just
because it looks like an aspirin. One of the reasons
the Caraka-samhita puts great stock in aapta
(tradition), is the recognition that medical knowledge
accumulates over time by a great deal of trial and
error."

----------

Certainly, as a patient, one need not know why drugs
work, only that they work.  That is Coulter’s argument
in his third volume, where he maintains that
homeopathy’s empirical clinical success should speak
for itself, and mainstream medicine should listen. 
The problem is, empirical clinical success hasn’t
spoken for itself, and mainstream medicine hasn’t
listened very well.

Western medicine and pharmacy admit to *not* knowing
*why* certain drugs work.  It is also true that they
are marketed and consumed anyway, with no resistance
from the medical establishment.  That, however, is a
privilege of mainstream medicine and pharmacy
exclusively.  Homeopathy is not mainstream, so it has
had to "prove" itself over and over again.  Successful
double-blind clinical studies, which have been carried
out in fair quantities for the last two decades, have
only made a tiny dent in mainstream western medical
circles.  Mainstream medicine’s ears are mostly deaf
to homeopathy’s empirical clinical success, precisely
because homeopathy has not been able to provide a
reductionist, mechanistic, causal explanation for its
therapeutic action.   How can a substance that has no
original molecular trace of the original medicinal
substance produce a therapeutic effect?  That is a
mammoth question to answer.

Mechanism, Henri Bergson once said, is very seductive
and therefore we should be very cautious of it.  But,
as philosophers of science Richard Westfall (*The
Construction of Modern Science*) and William Wallace
(*Causality and Scientific Explanation*) have pointed
out, reductionist mechanism is the legacy of the
Scientific Revolution in the west.  Current subtlety
and sophistication in scientific models aside,
Pythagorean numbers plus Leucippus' and Deomcritus'
atomism ultimately won the day.  Today, scientific
explanation is mostly explanation by efficient cause. 
In the past 200 years, homeopathy has "saved the
phenomena" in any number of vitalist ways. 
Unfortunately, this has not worked for the purpose of
mainstreaming it.  On the contrary, it has only
elicited snears from mainstream medicine.

Coulter’s contribution is to have detected the two
lines of thought I mentioned in my first post on this
topic, as far back as the *Corpus Hippocraticum*:  an
"earthy" empirical line, and an "airy"
rationalist-causalist line.  He supports the "earthy"
line; some renowned homeopaths support the "airy" line
as a necessary complement to the "earthy" line.

Katherine Masis


       
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