As the metaphor that biology and more importantly our bodies are machines fades into history, our understanding about the organization and function of our bodies as nonlinear systems grow. But practices related to health, from medicine to exercise still largely ignore this fact and people engage in those practices without recognizing that the so-called 'facts' that formed the foundation of those practices are no longer true. While the persistence of memory constrains most people and their practices, some innovators are developing new practices, from medicine, exercise and diet to interpersonal relationships and group functioning. Broadly, these 'system' based practices entail aligning those practices with the complex functioning of bodies. There are new metaphors that better describe the complex, nonlinear, systems functioning of our bodies. By complex, we mean many simultaneous, interdependent processes are always happening and they are iterative, meaning the output of one process is a partial input to itself and other processes. This collective is a non-linear system, where the 'size' of the inputs are not directly correlated with the degree or size of the output. Small inputs can have large effects and large inputs can have negligible effects. One common feature of these kinds of nonlinear systems, biological or otherwise, is something called 'scalar invariance.' This means that relationships and/or structures are highly similar no matter the scale at which they are viewed. Like a tree to a branch to a twig, they have the same structures across all those scales, constituting a 'fractal.'
For us, this is a fundamental property of humans and especially human health. In the old metaphor, human health was about machine maintenance. Isolated, compartmentalized, virtually independent sub-systems interacting in very specific ways. But the body is not a set of separate systems, but an active community of self which can only function as a complete unit. Like other fractals, we can see that what people take for health, meaning the ability to function readily and easily in everyday life, is only at one level of resolution, the 'eyeball' level. But investigate across scale, to systems, organs, tissues, the very cells themselves and you will find a similar level of 'health,' the whole body functions as robustly or as poorly as the organs function, so too tissues and finally cells. Health is the same at all scales.
Interventions have been designed at the level of the body, say exercise, which does translate to improved cellular function, i.e. exercise engages the body across scale, or much more narrow interventions, like drugs, that are designed to effect, in general, some specific cellular activity. That kind of intervention can and does have effects at other scales, but is not aimed specifically at health, but at disease.
Directly addressing the cellular function, liken that to cellular health and the inter-cellular milieu, think of that as the culture and influence cells have on each other, begins to get at the generation of health from the cell up, through the other levels of health and finally even to interpersonal healthy functioning.
Another core feature of biological systems, unlike machines, is timing. Our bodies are not the same over time. Not in birth, adulthood and old age, and not in summer and winter and not in day and night. Different systems are in use, different genes are being transcribed, different behavior, from cells to our whole body are taking place. Most interventions, whether cellular or behavioral, simply ignore this biological fact. Fitting intervention to the best time is as critical as fitting it to the best scale.
In the same way that our bodies function across scales and time, so do interventions that are most empathic to the challenge. Design the proper intervention, from exercise to supplements to mediation aimed at the right scale, from cells to selves and deliver them at the right time, day or night, summer or winter. Then we can begin to rebuild health and wellness in its own organic image and leave the ancient machinery behind.
