Integrative Health Studies

1. Integrative Health Studies Lecture 2 Yoon Hang Kim, MD MPH

2. Gaia Hypothesis • After much criticism, a modified Gaia hypothesis is now considered within ecological science basically consistent with the planet Earth being the ultimate object of ecological study.

3. Gaia Hypothesis • Ecologists generally consider the biosphere as an ecosystem and the Gaia hypothesis, though a simplification of that original proposed, to be consistent with a modern vision of global ecology, relaying the concepts of biosphere and biodiversity.

4. The Gaia hypothesis has been called geophysiology or Earth System Science, which takes into account the interactions between biota, the oceans, the geosphere, and the atmosphere. • Multiple professional societies recognize that, in addition to the threat of significant climate change, there is growing concern over the ever-increasing human modification of other aspects of the global environment and the consequent implications for human well-being.

5. The Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating system with physical, chemical, biological, and human components. The interactions and feedbacks between the component parts are complex and exhibit multi-scale temporal and spatial variability. • The understanding of the natural dynamics of the Earth System has advanced greatly in recent years and provides a sound basis for evaluating the effects and consequences of human-driven change.

6. Human activities are significantly influencing Earth's environment in many ways in addition to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. • Anthropogenic changes to Earth's land surface, oceans, coasts and atmosphere and to biological diversity, the water cycle and biogeochemical cycles are clearly identifiable beyond natural variability. • They are equal to some of the great forces of nature in their extent and impact. Many are accelerating. Global change is real and is happening now.

7. Global change cannot be understood in terms of a simple cause-effect paradigm. Human-driven changes cause multiple effects that cascade through the Earth System in complex ways. • These effects interact with each other and with local- and regional-scale changes in multidimensional patterns that are difficult to understand and even more difficult to predict.

8. Earth System dynamics are characterized by critical thresholds and abrupt changes. Human activities could inadvertently trigger such changes with severe consequences for Earth's environment and inhabitants. • The Earth System has operated in different states over the last half million years, with abrupt transitions (a decade or less) sometimes occurring between them. • Human activities have the potential to switch the Earth System to alternative modes of operation that may prove irreversible and less hospitable to humans and other life. The probability of a human-driven abrupt change in Earth's environment has yet to be quantified but is not negligible.

9. Ecology and Medicine • Pharmaceuticals lurking in U.S. drinking water

10. Petro-Medicine • Petroleum and Medicine

11. Energy Use and Medicine

12. Medical Waste

13. http://www.teleosis.org/ghcp.php • Introduction to Leadership In Green Health Care: A Course in Sustainable Medicine

14. Complexity Science • Complex systems is a new approach to science that studies how relationships between parts give rise to the collective behaviors of a system and how the system interacts and forms relationships with its environment. • The earliest precursor to modern complex systems theory can be found in the classical political economy of the Austrian school of economics • Order in market systems is spontaneous (or emergent) in that it is the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design

15. Austrian School • Austrian School principles advocate strict adherence to methodological individualism – analyzing human action exclusively from the perspective of an individual agent. • Austrian economists also argue that mathematical models and statistics are an unreliable means of analyzing and testing economic theory, and advocate deriving economic theory logically from basic principles of human action. • Austrian economists contend that testability in economics is virtually impossible since it relies on human actors who cannot be placed in a lab setting without altering their would-be actions.

16. Chaos Theory • Chaos theory is a field of study in mathematics, physics, economics and philosophy studying the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. • This sensitivity is popularly referred to as the butterfly effect. Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for chaotic systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general. • This happens even though these systems are deterministic, meaning that their future behaviour is fully determined by their initial conditions, with no random elements involved. • In other words, the deterministic nature of these systems does not make them predictable.

17. Chaos Theory vs. Complexity Science • Complexity theory is rooted in Chaos theory • Chaos is sometimes viewed as extremely complicated information, rather than as an absence of order. • The point is that chaos remains deterministic. With perfect knowledge of the initial conditions and of the context of an action, the course of this action can be predicted in chaos theory. • Complexity is non-deterministic, and gives no way whatsoever to precisely predict the future. • The emergence of complexity theory shows a domain between deterministic order and randomness which is complex.

18. Bayesian Logic • The Bayesian interpretation of probability can be seen as an extension of logic that enables reasoning with uncertain statements. • To evaluate the probability of a hypothesis, the Bayesian probabilist specifies some prior probability, which is then updated in the light of new relevant data. • The Bayesian interpretation provides a standard set of procedures and formulae to perform this calculation. Bayesian probability interprets the concept of probability as "a measure of a state of knowledge”, in contrast to interpreting it as a frequency or a physical property of a system.

19. What is Reality??? • What the bleep - Chapter 2

20. Vitalism • Qi Healing – Chapter 1 • Encounters with Qi Chapter 3

21. Alternative Medicine • Alternative Fix