Abstract
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There is no known biological reason why every population should not be as healthy as the best. 4
To his profound credit, Dr. Mansfield successfully tested a simple and highly innovative approach in his medical practice. He wanted to create and demonstrate a new model for health by working in an economically deprived area with ordinary patients of ordinary means. For some 15 years, beginning about 1980, he put his novel concepts into operation in his general practice in East London and then Lincolnshire in the United Kingdom, showing that a service for health is very different from a practice focused against disease. His approach enabled families to nurture their health and happiness rather than waiting until they become ill to see the doctor. He demonstrated that proper health enhancement through nutrition, education, medication, and environmental management can dramatically reduce the demand for medical services and thereby radically reduce costs. At its peak, the service had some 4500 families in membership, although many of these had joined for single vaccinations. After Dr. Mansfield's retirement, the Saville Turner Trust continued to support a health cultivation project based at a nearby community care farm centered in South Lincolnshire. 5 The Trust also supports historical research documenting why health enhancement has been so slow to catch on in Great Britain.
Given the widely acknowledged and urgent need for creative solutions to health care cost problems around the world, one would expect a scheme like this would get widespread attention. Apparently not! Sooner or later, though, someone, somewhere, will begin to embrace creative solutions to the health crisis, and Dr. Mansfield's essay will enable them to begin without having to reinvent the wheel.
Dr. Mansfield's general practice used a membership approach that enabled most patients to regain full health and independence within about 2 years. After patients adopted a healthier and more nourishing lifestyle; detoxed; and connected with homeopaths, acupuncturists, osteopaths, and other alternative providers when appropriate, they were rewarded with substantial price reductions for continuing membership. The result: a sensible, sustainable, and economical way to encourage self-care and avoid preventable illness. A health service that keeps you well is an incredibly refreshing concept that many patients valued. The project was financed by providing appropriate supplements and other services with only modest profits. The service was a commercial success, employing trained nurses, social services advisers, and teachers. Dr. Mansfield consulted but did not profit from it, living off his National Health Service pension.
This editorial summary of Dr. Mansfield's practice was gleaned from the Good Healthkeeping web page cited at the end of the article and from an independent article about his approach. 6 But there is much more to be learned from his essay. Dr. Mansfield has a sophisticated understanding of key unresolved issues in biomedicine, an understanding that undoubtedly contributed to the success of his program.
First, the intellectual chasm between physics and physicians prevents doctors and medical researchers from understanding the basics of energetics, such as waves and fields. This chasm is very costly in terms of medical innovation and the quality and expenditures for health care. For example, many valuable complementary and alternative and integrative approaches use energies such as sound, light, electricity, movement, and gravity in various ways that are incomprehensible without a little knowledge of physics. This incomprehensibility means that the acute care physicians, who decide which modalities will be available in hospitals, are unable to support well-documented and cost-effective approaches simply because they do not understand them. Tragically, physics and nutrition are extremely important subjects but are not an important part of medical education, while biochemistry and pharmacology dominate. Therapists who touch the body, as opposed to regarding the body as a bag of bones and chemicals, notice profoundly important dynamic and systemic healing phenomena that are rarely considered in conventional medical practices, hospitals, and biomedical research.
Dr. Mansfield affirms the importance of epigenetics as opposed to the dominant textbook idea that DNA accounts for the form and functions of organisms. The standard dogma is that “DNA is a molecule that carries most of the genetic instructions used in the development, functioning and reproduction of all known living organisms and many viruses.” 7 This concept continues to be taught, even though it has long been refuted. The way an organism develops from a single egg cell actually continues to be a central mystery in biology. Volumes of embryologic and developmental biology research describe the process in great detail but have little to say about how the process is orchestrated.
The healing of an injury must reference the original blueprint of an organism—the plan that enabled the body to grow into its adult form. This simple fact should bring embryology, developmental biology, wound healing, and cancer research together at the forefront of medical theory, practice, and research. The “DNA is the blueprint” dogma has hindered progress in this direction. The effectiveness of any science-based medical system is vitally dependent on detailed and accurate understandings of morphogenesis. At this point all we know is what the blueprint is not: • DNA is not the blueprint of the organism. • Without extragenetic information, differentiation would not begin. • Ontogeny does not recapitulate phylogeny. • The growth of an organism is not brought about by a set of linear cause-and-effect events like the construction of an automobile on an assembly line. • Differentiation is not a one-way street: The old idea was that once a cell has become “committed” to become, say, an intestinal cell, it cannot revert to the undifferentiated state. This is no longer valid. • The organism does not, in fact, develop in the usual way we have thought of it.
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The limits of the genetic and molecular paradigms and the human genome project have been stressed repeatedly. 11,12 Dr. Mansfield sensibly supports the hugely important but neglected and even ridiculed ideas of Rupert Sheldrake on the origins of form. 13 Dr. Mansfield affirms that scalar fields underpin Sheldrake's morphogenetic field, as has been proposed earlier. 14,15 We do not know how much progress in tissue and organ regeneration has been thwarted by unfounded rejection of Sheldrake's concepts. His first book was infamously declared “the best candidate for burning there has been for many years” in an editorial in Nature. 16 On the topic of morphic resonance, Dr. Mansfield states, “Progress only requires that good minds take these possibilities seriously.”
Dr. Mansfield affirms the important recognition that Darwinian evolution by natural selection of mutations is a flawed concept and that the evolution of morphogenetic fields makes much more sense. A concise support for this perspective is in a classic article by Nobel laureate Albert Szent-György: 17
The problem is this: most biological reactions are chain reactions. To interact in a chain, these precisely built molecules must fit together most precisely, as the cog-wheels of a Swiss watch do. But if this is so, then how can such a system develop at all? For if any one of the very specific cogwheels in these chains is changed, then the whole system must simply become inoperative. Saying that it can be improved by random mutation of one link sounds to me like saying that you could improve a Swiss watch by dropping it and thus bending one of its wheels or axles. To get a better watch all the wheels must be changed simultaneously to make a good fit again.
To Dr. Mansfield, “The most obvious means for natural selection—capable of intelligence, speed, elegance and economy—is by evolution of formative fields.”
Dr. Mansfield also raises the vital but hugely neglected concept of quality and introduces some possible axioms. This is a profound part of his essay.
Like other pioneers, Dr. Mansfield has encountered resistance from the “authorities.” Medical progress is everywhere thwarted because of rigid adherence to “standards of practice” that make any practitioner attempting to introduce or even test new approaches vulnerable to administrative torture.
Finally, a section on "implications" artfully weaves together new and vital concepts related to quality, health, pathology, and therapy. Dr. Mansfield writes eloquently and sincerely about matters vital to all of us. All parts of his thoughtful essay deserve repeated study, contemplation, and inquiry. His grasp of physics, biology, community, and the real meaning of “health” is extraordinary. His vision is to “harness low-cost resources at the community level, encouraging and enabling individuals and families to explore their own lives competently and confidently,” thereby “enabling medical services to do what they are designed for.” Again, “Progress only requires that good minds take these possibilities seriously.”
After creating and successfully operating an economic and effective service for health, as distinguished from a practice focused against disease, Dr. Mansfield took his concepts to the highest levels of medicine and biological sciences he could access. His ideas were instantly dismissed with terms such as “insufficient impact on the practice of medicine,” “incomprehensible language,” and “unpublishable in any scientific journal.” This is another example of the simple fact that while science and medicine and health care systems absolutely depend on finding new solutions, scientists and physicians have a colossal distaste for new ideas. Hence the story closes with yet another squandered opportunity to resolve the widely recognized disastrous global state of medicine described in the first paragraph of this editorial.
Footnotes
Author Disclosure Statement
No competing financial interests exist.