Humans are a complex set of equations. If you think about the circulatory system, respiratory system, digestive system, skeletal system, the organs and their functions we are a tidy little packet of interlinked equations - the kind you see in linear algebra and those systems of equations that give rise to matrices. How many equations constitute a human I wonder? I have listed the more obvious systems that every (or pretty much) lay person is familiar.
In systems of medicine that use pulse diagnosis, they are working with the rhthyms of the being in front of them. You don't bother to do a mathematical analysis of music. You just process is it automatically and enjoy the finished product. Similarly these doctors plug into your particular rhythms or equations that define you as a being in this moment and place - space-time location if you will. Their job is to balance out the various equations which will ultimately sustain the life force in the body in front of them. To narrow down to symptoms like constipation or dry skin or tooth ache is to focus on one single thing, maybe a variable in an equation.
In order to begin understanding ourselves we need to see our selves as heat equations and all the other myriad equations we combine in ourselves. We are a delicate balance of these systems. Maintaining harmony and doing complex equational manipulation even in situations of seemingly catastrophic or extreme physical stress is how life energy pulses through the body.
Each culture has its own explanation of the human body. Each culture has its own explanation of the properties of the plants, minerals, animals, and the world itself around them. It would be grand if all this knowledge could be gathered and cross-referenced without bias or prejudice so that we can have a multilayered explanation for our selves and the world around us. For example off the top of my head I have heard of Chinese Traditional Medicine, Tibetan Traditional Medicine, Ayurveda, Unani, Homeopathy, Allopathy, Herbalism, Aromatherapy, Chiropractic systems of medicine. Each has a view of the human body. It would be great to be able to look at the body through each of these lenses and better yet look at the body through all of these lenses at once. I wonder what we would see. I wonder which views would cancel another view out. In physics we learn that light passing through colored lenses at different angles can completely block or prevent the passage of certain spectra in the light wave. Maybe these systems could enhance each other or hinder or obfuscate the information contained in an other system. But certainly it looks like it would be interesting to study the body by juxtaposing these paradigms of understanding the human body. Similarly, analysis of plants can also benefit from this treatment. We can subject plants to chemical analysis, form analysis, functional anyalysis and so on. I think by bringing all these aspects together we get a more complex explanation of what we are experiencing or encountering or viewing. These explanations may be macro-level holistic explanations or more micro-level explanations. It is important to be able to correctly identify the different nature of the various knowledge systems and be able to use them appropriately.
