Despite much scientific progress, health and sickness remain poorly understood. We know a lot about what causes disease and what prevents us from falling sick; nevertheless, we know little about why someone will get sick at a certain point in time while someone else with the same risk factors and exposures to the same microbe stays unscathed. We are used to think in linear cause and effect relationships. If you get exposed to a certain risk or germ, if you live a unhealthy life-style and engage in unhealthy behaviors such as smoking, you get sick. This linear thinking appears to be incomplete for understanding health and sickness.
As in other complex systems health and sickness follow non-linear rules. Nobody can exactly predict when we will get sick or who will get sick when facing a certain threat such as for example a virus or some toxins that alter our DNA and create cancer. Our complex states of health and sickness are dynamic interactive processes and deeply unpredictable. Health is a poised critical state that minor disturbances can tip out of balance and create disease states of all sizes like avalanches of sand in a sandpile. We live constantly on the edge of unpredictable change.
A new medical paradigm takes a Process- and Systems-based approach. It looks at the specific narrative of one’s individual process. So called healthy states and health-disturbing symptoms are seen as competing roles and energies in a dynamic field. They are embedded in a story with some states that are given centrality and preference and other states that get marginalized. A symptom becomes an untold story that we reject. Using health as a cultural landmark we pathologize other experiences and treat them as renegades. The new paradigm approaches health and sickness as experiences that are interwoven with a cultural and environmental field and competing dynamic forces. It explores the narratives and untold stories. For example, asthma as an experience often takes some form of pressure. This constricting pressure can be seen as a marginalized role in a larger narrative. Once the story gets to be told and explored a new awareness and new choices become available. This allows for more meaning and coherence.