Monday, December 19, 2011

What is my legacy?

I guess when you get older people ask you this question. I had a friend ask that last night. I don't tend to think in those terms. But what the heck?

I surprised her in saying I didn't think it was would be reflexology exactly. Rather I felt it would be helping shift the medical paradigm from a strictly allopathic model to a model that focused on the reflex.

The one thing that fields like reflexology have that medicine doesn't is a basic unit of behavior or change. That is why medical texts are usually quite large. The medical field combines many different technologies hence the large texts.

I am very fond on the quote," All acts of life both conscious and subconscious are reflexes." It was Pavlov's teacher who said this.

The term, "reflexology" is actually Russian in origin. It was Pavlov's rival, Bechterev, who coined this term in 1917.

If you look out "reflexology" in the older dictionaries you might find the original definition which is "behavior of the reflexes". The Russians saw health as a behavior. And they felt that illnesses were the reflexes behaving badly.

At this point in history medicine isn't meeting our needs. It is costly, not very effective for chronic degenerative diseases and it can inadvertently kill you.

My legacy (I hope) will be to point healthcare in a direction that will view illness as reflexes gone bad that can be coaxed back into functioning better rather than a battlefield where the cure is frequently more harmful than the disorder.


1 comment:

Jamie said...

It is good to hear the origins of reflexology. Thanks for posting.

day spa manhattan