Reflecting on Health -
“Western medical science has viewed man as a separate unit – apart from nature. That is one of the biggest faults that has been committed. Man is part of nature.
Western medicine takes a mechanical view of man, so wherever mechanics can be successful, it is successful. But man is not a machine; man is an organic unity, and man needs not only the treatment of the part that is sick. The sick part is only a symptom that the whole organism is going through difficulties. The sick part is only showing because it is the weakest.
I will give you a few examples which can make it clear to you. Acupuncture was developed in China near about 7,000 years ago by accident. A hunter was trying to kill a deer, but as his arrow was moving towards the deer, a man not knowing what was happening came in between and the arrow hit the man's leg. The man had been suffering from migraine his whole life; the moment the arrow hit his leg, the migraine disappeared…
Out of that accident the whole of acupuncture developed, and developed to a full science. So if you go to an acupuncturist and you say, “Something is wrong with my eyes, or something is wrong with my head, or something is wrong with my liver,” he nay not bother about your liver, your head or your eyes. He will think of the whole organism; he will try to heal you – not just the part that is sick…
Acupuncture is more holistic. The difference has to be understood. When you take man as a machine you take a partial view of him. If his hand is sick, you just treat the hand; you don't bother about his whole body of which the hand is only a part. The mechanical outlook is partial. It succeeds, but its success is not real success because the same disease which has been repressed in the hand by the medicine, surgery and other things, starts expressing somewhere else in a worse form.
So medicine has developed tremendously; surgery has become a great science – but man is suffering from more diseases, sicknesses, than ever.
This dilemma can be understood. Man should be taken as a whole, treated as an organic unity. But the problem with modern medicine, Western medicine is that it does not think you have any soul, that you have anything more than a body-mind structure…
Why was a developed science abandoned? Because it was found that surgery takes man as a mechanism – and man is not a mechanism; so rather than destroying man they abandoned surgery. All the finest instruments that surgery uses are described by Sushrut in his scripture. All the operations – even the brain operations – are described in full detail as if it is a modern textbook on surgery. But it is 7,000 … or at least 5,000 years old. They developed it to the same point where we are, and they must have faced the same problem that we are facing. They must have found that something is basically wrong.
We go on working so much… and the sickness and the disease go on increasing. Even if we make a person without sickness, that does not mean that he is healthy. Absence of sickness is not health; that is a very negative definition. Health should have something more positive, because health is the positive thing and sickness is the negative thing. Now the negative is defining the positive…
India abandoned the whole science and developed a totally different approach, ayurveda, which means science of life. It is significant. In the West we call it medicine, and medicine simply indicates towards sickness. Health has nothing to do with medicine. Medicine means that the whole science is devoted to curing you from sickness.
Ayurveda has a different approach. It is the science of life; it helps you, not to cure sicknesses but prevent sicknesses from happening – to keep you so healthy that the sickness becomes impossible. The ways of the East and the West are different on this point, whether man is a machine or a spiritual entity with a wholeness.”
Osho, The Messiah , volume 2 pp16
