Light and Health

摘要

This is an edited version of a paper delivered at the Workplace Comfort Forum on the 'Importance of Light' in October 1998. I am a medical doctor, with experience of the NHS, the pharmaceutical industry and healthcare consultancy. My experience is of a healthcare system based exclusively on the mechanistic, reductionist model of Newtonian physics and shaped to a large extent by the pharmaceutical industry. Although there have undoubtedly been major advances in healthcare in the past 50 years, we do have a fairly restricted view of the world, medically speaking. Many things can not be explained and other medical traditions (some thousands of years old) are arrogantly dismissed, because they do not fit our way of thinking. If we can't explain it then conventional wisdom assumes that it must be quackery. We've had a very narrow-minded view of healthcare for the past 50 years or so — and it's high time we saw the light...!