Four partial readings

Four common readings of medicine. Each gets something right. Each falls short.

There are four common ways of reading what medicine is. Each gets something right. Each falls short on something the axiom does require.

The body as a machine

Disease is a broken part. Medicine fixes the parts.

That is right, as far as it goes. The body is a structure. It can be analysed. Sometimes fixing the part is exactly what is needed. A broken bone is set. A blocked artery is cleared. A tumour is cut out. These are mechanical acts, and they save lives.

Where it falls short: it reduces the body to its parts. The body is not a pile of components. It is a living web in which every part is a record, written and held, that keeps itself and the others going by renewing all the time. The machine reading works at the level of the parts and misses the corridor.

Treat the body only as a machine, and you will find the machine repaired and the patient not recovered.

The body as a balance

Disease is imbalance. Medicine restores balance.

Right again, as far as it goes. The body is one integrated whole. Touch it in one place and the effect runs everywhere else it is connected.

Where it falls short: balance stays a word. Wholeness. Harmony. Energy. These words may point at something real. But none of them says what the corridor is, where its walls are, or what a given treatment does at a given place. Holism sees the whole and never says what the whole is made of.

The four principles

Medicine is the weighing of autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence and justice. The principles are real. A doctor who weighs them is doing real work.

Where it falls short: the principles stand on nothing. Why these four? Why not three, or seven? Why these weights? They are stipulated. A stipulation brings in a moral premise from outside, and the structure does not need one.

The structure gives all four a ground.

Autonomy comes from the operator. Wherever more than one path is open to you, you can override: you can commit to a path your raw impulses would not have chosen. That is what makes your choice real. Your authority over your own body, and over what happens to it, comes from there.

Not harming and helping come from the one interior and from what the book calls parasitic contraction. Every person moves in a shared room: the set of paths everyone can still take. The book calls it the joint viable set. To shrink another person’s room when nothing required it is parasitic. The duty not to do that, and the duty to help, follow from it.

Justice comes from how resources are shared on finite ground, which Chapter Twelve sets out: how the shared room is held when there is only so much to go around.

The four principles are not refuted. They are relocated. They stop being rules someone chose. They become what the axiom produces when it runs.

Medicine as lifestyle

Medicine is getting your sleep, food, movement and stress right, one person at a time.

This reading sees something the structure needs. The lowest level of care carries the load. A civilisation that builds its medicine around the higher levels and ignores the lowest pays the most and gets the least health.

Where it falls short: it puts the responsibility on the person. It speaks to the patient as if all their conditions were theirs to choose.

Most are not. Sleep, food, movement, stress, the people around you, the air you breathe and what you are exposed to: these are mostly supplied by the larger structure. A civilisation that withholds them, and then tells the patient to optimise inside their absence, has made a category mistake.

Wellness reads the bottom of the corridor at the wrong scale. The structure reads the same level, and puts the duty to supply it where that duty actually lives.

Four readings. Each catches something real. Each misses something. This chapter keeps what each gets right, and places it in the four conditions that produce the body: Symmetry, Break, Record and Constraint.

Source. Ø Applications, Chapter 5 — Medicine and the Viability Corridor. The book in full: the420code.org/Applications.pdf. The short edition: the420code.org/models/applications/05-medicine-and-the-viability-corridor/. The film, Level one was never attempted: the420code.org/films/applications/. Its kill switches: APP-5.1 to APP-5.5.