"You see? It’s as if the organs were talking to each other. It’s an uninterrupted connection among them. When this interconnection is corrupted – and there can be many reasons for that – ailments occur, including cancer. One’s body is a unified chain of organs. One link drops out, and everything is corrupted, just as with your mama."
I realized that I was moving my lips, trying not to miss a single word. Everything was clear, simple. Why didn’t they explain it to me in New York, at the hospital?
"This time, I‘ve given your mama a combination of herbs, which will strengthen her liver. They'll help to improve the connection between her liver and spleen. Then we’ll try to add her uterus to them. After that, we’ll need to improve the activity of the cortex. And we’ll proceed the same way. If we manage to restore the normal interconnection among all the organs, we’ll stop the disease."
That’s how my basic education began. It still continues, for I know extremely little compared with what I would like to know. But the fog has definitely begun to disperse. And now I will try, certainly briefly, and in the most general terms, to explain what I have learned and understood.
Chapter 12. Avicenna
Yes, I will definitely start with him. Just like everyone else, I had been familiar with his name since childhood. Avicenna – that’s how the Europeans pronounce it, but it actually sounds different – Ibn Sina. I must admit that I only remembered him vaguely. He was famous for something in the old days. It seemed he had been a physician, and I think a poet, as well, but I wasn’t terribly interested. However, Doctor Umarov once told me, “If you want to learn the principles, read Ibn Sina. You should also read about him to understand what a great physician he was.”
I began to read, and I haven't been able to stop reading.
Most of all I was struck by Ibn Sina’s personality, his outstanding talents, broad knowledge and industriousness. That amazing person was, I can say, my countryman – he was born in 980 not far from Bukhara. As a young man, he mastered almost all the sciences known in his time. He was a philosopher, a poet, a musician, a teacher, a physicist, a mineralogist… and this list is incomplete! But after much study, he dedicated himself primarily to developing medicine. In that field, Ibn Sina was a follower of the physicians of antiquity, and first among them, Galen, a famous Roman doctor. To be precise, he used Galen’s papers for his studies and he shared his views. Many believed that the multi-volume work “The Canon of Medicine” by Ibn Sina was a very detailed interpretation of the theory and practice of Galen. In fact, “The Canon,” encompassed the best of Galen’s teachings, but also expanded them and dug deeper into the subject. His work was so profound that “The Canon” remained the principal guidebook and the foundation for medical teaching by European physicians at all European universities for six centuries.
Another few centuries passed, and the natural sciences made great advances (aided, of course, by Ibn Sina’s work). Medical researchers, equipped with ingenious devices, seemed to have learned everything possible about the human organism, about the processes that maintained life and health. New theories based on objective data arrived to supplant Ibn Sina’s ideas, which hadn’t been supported by biology, chemistry, or electronics, but he had achieved icon-like status. He was a radiant image, although rarely do European physicians open his books today.
However, Eastern and Tibetan medicine treats the heritage of this great teacher quite differently. Its practitioners still adhere to Ibn Sina’s views and widely use his system of treatment, practical advice, and diagnostic methods. Eastern physicians became convinced over time of what a wonderful clinician he had been, how profound and distinctive his thinking was, how he adjusted his theoretical assumptions with practice. And some of his ideas even outperformed the teachings of the twentieth century.
Ibn Sina approached the most important scientific theories particularly closely in his teaching about mizaj.
At first, I couldn't understand what mizaj was. It seemed either awfully primitive or incredibly complicated. I read and reread, going back to the same pages and lines over and over… and it finally began to make sense.
The Arabic word mizaj literally means a proportionate blend. But, as a notion, it’s much broader. It encompasses the natural, most important qualities of an organism. In that sense, the idea of mizaj can be applied to any object in the real world.
Hippocrates and Galen considered the correct blend of the four primary elements and four humors, which they believed made up the human organism and every living thing. Hot, cold, moist, and dry are the qualities that make up mizaj.
Ibn Sina recognized that theory, but, as it turned out, he had reached extraordinary profundity in its interpretation. Mizaj is the temperament that emerges as the result of interaction between opposing qualities “when they stop at a certain limit," he wrote. But since the variety of quantitative ratios of elements, which blend in a body is essentially unlimited, the mizaj of each person is uniquely individual.
Unbelievable as it is, it was precisely in his teaching about mizaj that Ibn Sina anticipated one of the principal notions of the theory of complex systems, in other words, the basis for cybernetics, the science that created the powerful computer civilization of our times.
Scientists call this basic notion "homeostasis," which literally means balance – not the static balance of rest, but rather a dynamic one. In other words, if a system is in a state of balance, or homeostasis, its constituent parts can move actively, radiate and absorb energy, and exchange information with each other and with the surrounding world. At the same time, the system doesn’t “swing back and forth.” It is in a state of balance and is protected from any extremely rapid change. Its life can be endless, of course, as long as nothing throws it out of balance, out of homeostasis.
So mizaj and homeostasis, in Ibn Sina’s interpretation, are essentially the same. We must also remember that he meant that the active, quick, dynamic system was in balance (“interaction of opposite qualities as they stop at some limit”). Naturally, Ibn Sina's reasoning was based on different concepts. He couldn’t create the mathematical system used in this modern-day theory or describe homeostasis in modern terms. But on the whole, his theory was very similar to the theory of homeostasis. There is a scientific term used to define the similarity found in comparisons between modern and ancient scientific theories.
The term is isomorphism.
It refers to the way one and the same theory is formulated with reference to different subjects. For instance, every high school student knows that numbers and dots on a straight line are more or less the same. Even though arithmetic and geometry are different subjects, any arithmetical result can be “drawn” geometrically, and any geometric drawing can be written down arithmetically. A mathematician would express it this way: the theory of actual numbers and the theory of dots on a straight line are isomorphic. So, the principles of mizaj formulated by Ibn Sina explaining the balance among principal qualities and the theory of homeostasis are isomorphic.
And the great scholar knew nothing about integral elements of the complex system! Such notions as information, information channels, and entropy didn’t exist in his time. However, the intellect, sagacity and intuition of this genius opened up the truth to him. All that was multiplied by his colossal experience. Eastern physicians maintain that not everything has been learned from that experience, and many things are either not sufficiently used or simply forgotten.