Breaking up is hard to do!

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A recent study published in  TIME put the spotlight on the kind of pain felt by people on the business end of a breakup.

The study notes, with classic academic rigor, that the spurned students had engaged in activities such as "inappropriate phoning, writing or e-mailing, pleading for reconciliation, sobbing for hours, drinking too much and/or making dramatic entrances and exits into the rejecter's home, place of work or social space to express anger, despair or passionate love."

By using fMRI to track the participants' brain activity as they looked at the photo's of the lovers who jilted them, and to nobody's surprise found the pain of breaking up the same same as physical pain, craving and addiction, that is to say they share a similar pattern of brain activity.

Besides attesting what we know; that the mind cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality, that every pain is just the same as any other, and that how we feel is more a choice than the result of our experience, the study highlight the fact the pain is unpleasant, even more so if we think it should be, and that the pain of romantic rejection is just as real as hitting your thumb with a hammer.

Seen in the context of similar research on the brain and how it works, it informs our recent understanding that minds make sense of the world through a system of pattern recognition that orchestrate most of our awareness to a seamless flow of highly predicted existance. It is only when we experience something new that our mind come to focus our reason, tickle our fancy, spark the flame of curiosity, and bring our senses to the high alert of adventure and discovery.

Quite the opposite to how we think under the bain of heartache, rejection, loss and pain, but then we must accept that broken hearts don't live well, and just as emotion will twart any attempt at logical thought and deductive reason, we cannot expect to find any meaning without the courage to open our hearts, and share in love and living life.

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Modern science fails medicine

Contemporary medicine has come a long way since the Ancient Greeks, where getting a cure meant sleeping over in a temple where a deity would appear to give us advice in a dream, but there is many a wisdom that has endured, and much of the knowledge they gained we have lost.
 

With the high-tech tools at every clinicians beck and call, and modern day diagnostic devices to prod and to probe every cavity and crevice we have, the familiar Rod of Asclepios may seem like a rock to an Apple, but the traditional system of medicine as practiced by the ancient Greeks still form the foundation of Western Medicine.

 

In the East, the Indian system of Ayurveda is in practice much the same way as it was, centuries before Hippocrates formulated his Oath, but it was the Greeks that started to shift the focus of healing from a spiritual practice to a physical science. 

Since the dawn of the scientific method, modern day medicine has established rigorous research methods, where the results are testable and reproducible, and where there is little room for veda’s or pressure points or any of the other “alternative” medical practice. As science and technology developed, medicine became more and more reliant on medications, and the practice of finding remedies and cures in the natural environment slowly gave way to the pharmaceutical industry that we have today. 

The development of biologically active chemical compounds introduced medicine to statistical measures to ensure therapeutic value. It also gave raise to concepts like the Bell Curve distributions we commonly see in study populations, and anomalies like the Placebo Effect that we still can't explain. Far from being the infallible measuring tool, the scientific method is at a loss it would seem and the attitude of most researchers have typically been to keep a good eye on it, and then cautiously ignore it. 

While some are insisting on finding a reason for the anomaly, others are starting to wonder if the scientific method is the staff of good measure that we claim, and every so often there are murmurs that question the validity of biomedical research, particularly as practiced by the pharmaceutical industry.

While the Temple of Asclepius may have long since crumbled to dust, there are those that wonder if the smoldering smoke doesn't mean there's a fire after all. Meanwhile the "art" of Ayurveda is still alive and well, and like traditional Chinese medicine it has seem to have stood the test of time. Though neither may  be able to provide the answers with statistically proven relevance, I cannot help thinking there's more to the so-called 'ancient' arts of healing than most of our physicians would care to admit.