The Relevance of Anthroposophic Medicine for Our Times

by Ricardo Bartelme, MD, and Walter Alexander

The following is excerpted from a longer essay which we expect to make available soon in a new online edition of being human.

Conventional medicine based on the natural sciences almost exclusively focuses on the physical body, the lowest member of the human organism. This is where chemistry, physics and mechanics play a legitimate role in medicine when the knowledge is adapted to the human being. Of course, biological sciences also contribute to conventional medicine’s knowledge base, but the results are usually interpreted materialistically and are by and large not addressed directly and consciously for true therapeutic effect. The supersensible etheric life body is the true orchestrator of basic biological processes like growth, reproduction, development over time, synthetic anabolic processes, selfhealing, nutrition, vital energy and our sense of well-being. What we can investigate about biology with natural scientific methods is only a physical reflection of the very real, determinative, supersensible and independent-from-the-physical etheric body. For anthroposophy and anthroposophic physicians the etheric body brings new, emergent properties to a living organism that cannot be predicted or explained by a lower level like the physical body.

The third member of the essential fourfold human is the nonphysical realm of the astral body out of which the human soul develops. The astral body allows us to have a field of consciousness, an inner life of mind, inner perceptions, feelings, sentience, desires, impulses and much more. For the soul this is the psychic life of conscious and subconscious processes. Certainly, any good conventional clinician will take account of a person’s psychological aspects of an illness. However, besides counseling, psychological support of various kinds, and various forms of mind-body practices now common in integrative medicine, there is still no coordinated and organized view of how these psychological or mind-body treatments relate to each other and to the bio-psycho-spiritual human being as viewed in anthroposophy. Anthroposophic medicine has specific remedies and modalities that work with the etheric body and bring more vital health.

For anthroposophic medicine the astral body and soul are independent, supersensible, and determinative members or “properties” of the human being that cannot be explained out of its physical or biological aspects. What natural scientists see reflected in animals and humans that aren’t found in minerals or plants are the emergent properties or characteristics of a nonvisible, independent, species-specific astral body that brings in new phenomena of not only sentient, psychic life, but also reflexes, self-propelling motion, catabolic metabolism, internal organ formation, and many aspects of neurochemistry and neurophysiology. All these emergent properties cannot be derived from the basic building blocks of amino acids, carbohydrates, fats and minerals. 1

1 Dr. Peter Heusser has documented much of this in Anthroposophy and Science: An Introduction (Peter Lang, 2016).

The unique fourth member of the human being is the spirit or “I”. With the incarnation of the “I” in an earthly human life comes self-consciousness, rational thinking, heart thinking, free will, all aspects of morality and values, insight, coping skills, the unique human form, and all aspects of spirituality and spiritual development. With the presence of an “I”, all these characteristics emerge independently of the presence of the three lower members that humans have in common with animals and plants. In addition, the presence of the incarnated “I” means that all aspects of our physical body, etheric body and astral body have unique features and properties that are species-specific to human beings. They cannot be found in the other, lower kingdoms of nature. It also means that biomedical research on animals may provide some insights, but the results cannot easily and accurately be translated to human biology.

When Ehrenfried Pfeiffer presented some of his findings from research studies relevant to biodynamic farming, then newly developed out of Rudolf Steiner’s indications, Steiner told him to stop that research, ostensibly because those results could not be usefully and safely introduced into the wider world until certain other advances had occurred. Steiner included specifically the understanding that the heart is not fundamentally a pump. Work on that subject by Branko Furst, MD, professor of anesthesiology at Albany Medical Center, is steadily gaining a wider audience in conventional research circles. In The Heart and Circulation: An Alternative Model (Springer, 2020), drawing on exhaustive research backed by many hundreds of scientific studies, Dr. Furst shows that the heart is not a propulsion pump, but is similar to a hydraulic ram pump. Ram pumps depend on an already moving stream. The heart’s ventricles, rather than producing the bloodstream’s movement, actually impede, pressurize, give rhythm to, and redirect the flow of blood. How does the blood move on its own then? That is a key detail.

Within the blood that carries oxygen and nutriment to all cells of the body, the erythrocytes (red blood cells) actually sense oxygen levels in surrounding tissues, and in the presence of low oxygen saturation, release substances (ATP–>nitric oxide) that open up blood vessels to increase flow to the deprived tissues. In this manner, a dynamic tension, a polarity between the lung’s supplying of oxygen and the peripheral tissues’ consumption of it through metabolism—in other words, between the etheric and astral life of the organism—is what moves the blood. So, you have on the one hand a model of blood flow that depicts an inert fluid being pushed by a mechanical pump, and in the other, a living substance, a dynamic fluid organ that senses the physiologic state of the tissues, and then, responding to metabolic need, shapes its own passage through the body’s causeways. Furst’s work paves the way to see the heart more comprehensively as anthroposophists do—as the seat of the two higher members working with the two lower members, and as the field for our feelings and our deep intentions. How wonderful a picture of what differentiates the mineral level of inert substances from the organic and higher levels of interrelated processes!

So what will anthroposophic medicine practitioners bring to the COVID-19 era out of their more expansive and nuanced perspectives? Do they view disease and suffering as attacks against otherwise healthy and comfortable bodies? With a world conception that links physical, spiritual and moral domains individually and cosmically, the short answer is “no.” While a connection between lunar cycles and menstrual rhythms is recognized conventionally, the notion of variable solar and planetary influences affecting health is still smirked at and viewed in the same light as Sunday newspaper horoscopes. Open systems biology, on the other hand, is gaining credibility, and it departs from the reductionist drive to find all causes at the level of the physical.

Emergent levels

Peter Heusser, MD, 2 points out that open systems biology recognizes the reality of organisms, not just particles and forces. Organisms are comprised of levels of organization. Physiology and molecular biology, he states in Anthroposophy and Science, with their precisely coordinated processes in the nerves, metabolism, and vascular supply, can be understood, not mechanically, but as complete spatial and temporal events that require an “active systemic organization at a higher level than the genetic and other events.” Molecular laws and forces are directed from and subject to the higher level of biological laws and forces.

2 Dr. Heusser is former chair of Medicine at the anthroposophical University Witten/Herdecke in Witten, Germany.

It is not only atoms, molecules and macromolecules which are hierarchically organized in their compositions and structures, but also higher organic structures such as organelles, cells, organs, organ systems and finally the organism as a whole.

Each hierarchical layer has its own emergent laws and properties. So, the parts have to be there in the lower level, but they are organized by the next higher level. Forces at the level of life (the etheric) forestall the decay and disintegration until death, after which the lower-level laws of mere matter intrude. And then going up the ladder, above the level of living tissues and organs and organ systems, the organism itself is the architect of the layers below. This is recognized conventionally in those adhering to an open systems view. But anthroposophically, the connections continue vertically to include psychological and spiritual aspects—and their connections to karma and cosmos.

Rather than invasion by foreign bodies (such as bacteria/viruses), disease may be characterized loosely as a disharmony among the basic constituent members of the human organization, namely, the physical, etheric, astral and the self or “I”. The problem with the more simplistic, materialistic view, as Steiner saw it, is that it diverts attention from deeper, primary causes. 3

3 Lecture of March 10, 1920, Spiritual Science and Medicine, CW 312.

Stating that “whenever lower organisms find suitable soil in the human frame for development, that soil has been made suitable by the real primary causes of the disease,” he was already pointing to the immune system as an alternative focus for healing. The challenge becomes to identify what makes an individual susceptible to becoming a host for replication of viral particles, for example, and to find therapeutic substances that can help restore balance. 4

4 Chapter 1, Fundamentals of Therapy, (1925).

Understanding how those substances (primarily but not only plant) can offer healing depends on understanding how they and we are integrated into the domains of nature and cosmos out of which they and we are created. Speaking at Anthroposophy NYC, Branko Furst, MD, said:

Immunity is an individualized mark of the self stamped on every cell of the body. To be immune to something is a sign that the organism has conquered an aspect of the environment or an existing weakness. Disease is an opportunity to overcome a hindrance at the level of the organic.

From this perspective, vaccines can be seen as both blessing and curse. They may remove or reduce an immediate threat, but at the cost of diminishing the strength gained by overcoming disease naturally, individually and at the community level. It’s relevant that conventional chronobiology has shown that too regular a heartbeat is a sign of ill health, of reduced vitality and responsiveness to the varying conditions that living creatures are subject to. It’s a sign that the body is descending toward the purely mineral, mechanical laws rather than the organic ones at the level of life processes (the etheric).

Ricardo Bartelme, MD, is a graduate of the University of Michigan Medical School and was chief resident at the University of California-San Diego. Walter Alexander is a regular contributor to being human and writes for medical publications. He has served as president of Anthroposophy NYC for many years.