Holistic Medicine and the Extracellular Matrix: The Science of Healing at the Cellular Level by Matthew Wood, 2021. Published by Healing Arts Press, a division of Inner Traditions International. A Sacred Planet Book. 245 pages including references and index; illustrations in black and white.
Offering densely packaged nuggets of information, books offer words and images you can look at to your heart’s content. Some of them are worthy of your reference shelf and invite you to inquire further. Following are my impressions and review of the book Holistic Medicine and the Extracellular Matrix.
I find Matthew Wood’s presentation in Holistic Medicine and the Extracellular Matrix brings into focus a number of alternative ways of thinking about health. While the book doesn’t provide all the answers, it asks the questions we have about human health and disease. The author proposes new angles, a different perspective (his key word) and a whole array of ideas about the microbiome and the cellular terrain.
Is health a self-sustaining phenomenon?
A concept of health says that healing comes from within the body and not from outside. Such an outlook may be why Wood wrote Holistic Medicine and the Extracellular Matrix. If so, I would agree that his perspective is objective and suggests a self-sustaining model of health.
“Perspective” is Wood’s term for looking at the phenomena of life. Using a different perspective than we are used to, the author briefly outlines a background in anatomy and physiology, one that counter-balances the expected view that the cell is the basis of life. Rather, he recommends taking into account the cell’s environment, otherwise known as the extracellular matrix.
Support of the matrix
From Wood’s vantage point, the work of mid-twentieth-century scientists clearly shows that cells develop to maturity only within their matrices. Thus the matrix is also known as the extracellular matrix, pointing to the relationship of a cell to its immediate surroundings. The matrix is a structure, albeit a loose one, a self-sustaining phenomenon of life.
The author comments on papers by Alfred Pischinger (1991 and 1975) and others who describe the phenomenon of the matrix, a position that has been ignored. Most important, original concepts that defined life-perpetuating systems go back to Hippocrates and the humoral system. Now, Wood indicates taking into account the humoral system may inform our understanding of the extracellular matrix.
Wound healing is instructive
The author explains that extracellular matrices are the ground substances of wound healing. And that injuries do not heal unless these substances function well. He advises that studying the process of wound-healing is key to understanding how the matrix provides the basis of health.
Six sections of the book describe the body’s physiology at the extracellular level, including one section that explains cells, tissues and organs in their environments. To a reader with basic knowledge of these topics, Wood’s emphasis might seem confusing, yet just such an inflection is what the author intended. His interpretation of holism is that forms of life cannot be sustained unless nutrition is brought to them from their immediate environment or extracellular matrix.
Perspective on the Matrix
At the end, Wood offers an essay on homeostasis and the matrix. By focusing on the holistic perspective, Wood describes a “self-healing reaction of the organism” that can occur by dosing with herbs. Regarding the possible reactions to dosage, the author brings up more inquiry: in view of the extracellular matrix, how much medicine is needed in the case of a specific condition or disease?
With so much to think about, herbalism is, in tandem with food, medicine for the body if viewed in a holistic way. A belief in the primacy of life systems is a radical approach to healing, also seen in Chinese medicine and Ayurveda and as noted above in ancient Greek hypothesis. Our culture, our linear way of thinking and learning, leans into context.
In my opinion Matthew Wood’s herbals and reference books on Western herbalism are exceptional. His style is both casual and discriminating while the subject he represents is profoundly complex. Here my point is that the author’s experience with herbs and herbalism is not self-limiting to plants, however consuming they are. Wood’s intent to inquire, pursuing frontiers of knowledge is essential to healing. Now that Holistic Medicine and the Extracellular Matrix is on my reference shelf, I think it sets a new standard in healing and herbalism, also in mainstream medicine.
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