Archasalutis is a project which has a long standing history

Introduction

The image reproduces Raffaello Sanzio’s fresco entitled – individually and not by the Author – The School of Athens (datable between 1509 and 1511). The original fresco adorns a wall in the Stanza della Segnatura, one of the four “Vatican Rooms” located inside the Apostolic Palaces. The large painting –  strongly desired by Pope Julius II, I would say, with great “temporal foresight” –  certainly represents a “manifesto” of the anthropocentric conception of the Renaissance Human Being.

The work forcefully states that the human reason dominates the concept of reality, undermining an asphyxiating (and according to the “spirit of the time” , indispensable) mystical vision of the Medieval God. Behind the Renaissance symbology are to be found the self-esteem of man on his own intellectual faculties, the rediscovery of the Greek and Roman Classics, the domination of the seas, the growing wealth of the merchant and manufacturing middle classes, the discovery of the possibility of learning by dissecting and observing oneself in the most hidden details for the sake of knowledge, the development of increasingly sophisticated technologies that place the Human Being at the center of the universe.

All this occurs in a line of continuity between classical antiquity and modernity. The general theme of Raphael’s paintings – only readable in relation to the other paintings in the room – is the faculty of the “reasoning” soul to learn the Truth through science and philosophy. The presence of so many thinkers from various eras highlights the value of desire and of the effort to get to the knowledge, common to the whole ancient philosophy and connoted as an anticipation of Christianity.

The superimposed lines of the image highlight the perspective structure of Raffaello’s masterpiece. This symbolically reproduces some fundamental aspects of Renaissance Culture (and the millennial affirmation of a primacy that the Catholic Church intended to represent).

Located on the vanishing point perspective, Plato and Aristotle proceed towards the observer; the first – depicted with the face of Leonardo da Vinci – holds the Timaeus and raises his finger upwards to indicate the Idea of Ideas (the Good, the One). Aristotle in turn extends his right arm keeping it suspended in midair. The gesture indicates the opposite and complementary process to the one indicated by Plato. The process consists of: a (kind of) recomposition of the opposites; the return from the intelligible world (the world of thought, in which the Idea of Good, the Truth was found) to the sensible world (the apparent reality); the tension aimed at applying this idea through this new ethics – “objectively” founded – in order to interpret reality and make it become as close as possible to the idea (to make it “mean” the ideal).

Variously deployed in the picture, you can find: Heraclitus (depicted with the face of Michelangelo), Euclid, Pythagoras and probably a host of Neoplatonists. Starting from there we can also draw a symbolic representation of the seven liberal arts, with grammar, arithmetic and music in the foreground, from the left, geometry and astronomy on the right and, at the top of the staircase, rhetorics and dialectics.

Overall, the systemic vision that can be drawn from it is that Human Beings realize that they possess an Epistemology that projects them towards a form of autonomy. It represents a catalog of the tools of knowledge on which Western Civilization was established.

The scientific thought which has developed in Europe places the Human Being and his intelligence at the center of the world, while this did not take place in Eastern language-thought.

As a matter of fact, scientific thought never appeared in Eastern long-lived civilizations independently, as a native way of studying and mastering the natural world. It is no small matter.

In fact, scientific thought affirms a vision based on determinism, empiricism and physicalist reductionism as a perspective to be privileged in the study of Nature. The epistemology of Medicine in the East renounces all this, favoring a metaphysical and deductive approach to the inductive and abductive one.

Vital phenomena – however – having found in the application of the experimental method an incremental and evolutionary way to be revealed by a knowledge founded on evidence and on instrumental investigation techniques (matured in the second half of the nineteenth century), they partially escape from this research address. Probably and perhaps without a guarantee of an answer, what remains today to be discovered and transferred to clinical practice is the effect of the reassembling of Body and Mind units on the causal processes of Health Conditions. In short. The Holistic Aspects of Human Health, for their explanation and understanding, require an in-depth study of topics which, at present, either remain marginal or are totally disregarded.

The reference must be distinguished into two broad categories of thought which, for extreme brevity, are referred to as the Biomedical Model and the Holistic Model. What matters for either one or the other of these different approaches is addressing authoritatively documented sources of information in order to offer critical tools that go beyond both the current specialized drift of the Biomedical Model and the somehow erratic field of pseudoscientific Holistic doctrines.

Health Promotion is not an ideology, while it is more correct to state that it is an approach characterized as a School of Thought driven by Ethics and Ecology and based on evidence; an orientation that values the doctor-patient relationship, the role and interdependence of citizens and politics, as well as the universality of the right to health.

On the other hand – this is the principle followed in the Archasalutis Project –every medical act, carried out on a generic client, is a political act.

The theories and investigation tools, or the data collected in experimental studies that have been informed by Salutogenesis, are important tools of knowledge and outline processes that can be found in the university teachings of Hygiene, Gerontology, Public Medicine, Global Health, or Epidemiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Psychology, Operations Research, or Philosophy of Science, Moral Philosophy, Economics, Information Technology, Technologies and models of organization of production and use of systems and services in the health sector in general and others.

Health Promotion does not foresee unmotivated prejudices, it makes use of the knowledge, the validating technologies and the skills that it acquires from the systems and methods of the Biomedical Model, from the consolidated and growing computerization of data, from the application of the new frontiers of biotechnology, genetics, bioinformatics, artificial intelligence, teaching, health and digital literacy techniques and more.

Furthermore, in selected cases the concept of Health Promotion has permeable boundaries with respect to particular ecological frameworks of Health Conditions, Health Determinants, certain individual attitudes and collective lifestyles, practices and remedies that have demonstrable effects on the condition of Living in Health. Many of these parameters may also belong to traditions and philosophies so-called Metaphysical, or Pseudoscientific.

It is important to distinguish the tools, in order to use the appropriate ones for each eventuality. The fact that this orientation announces a “functionalist” and “pragmatic” criterion in Medicine does not depend on inattention or naivety, but on the acceptance of a sort of compromise with reality. Ex Iuvantibus expresses the idea that a given remedy can belong to the practice of medicine even in a hypothetical and dubious form: “until proven otherwise”. It is difficult to imagine any doctor who has not made use, at least sporadically, of an Ex Iuvantibus reasoning.

The “metaphysical” themes are elaborated – with various titles and authority – by Philosophy, Art, Literature, Music, Traditional Medicines, as well as by some other and so-called Alternative Medicines to the Biomedical Model. Accessing the qualified evidence of these Schools of Thought – first of all to the Wisdom Transmitted by the most consolidated Traditional Medicines – has an essential function in the reconstruction of the Thought of Humanity.

It is not about a “radically skeptical” or, worse, “nihilist” or “animist” drift of those who admit everything and the opposite of everything pro domo sua; it does not draw on the recovery of a Perennial Philosophy or of a mystical and vitalistic vision which presupposes the Dogma of Life as an ethereal and extraneous reference to the bio-psycho-social and environmental actuality of each individual. However, it is recognized that Science does not have the task of affirming Truth, but that of questioning Nature. All this while the Philosophy of Science has the task of formalizing questions free of logical errors that serve to address the plausible ways to face the “secrets” of Life.

Indeed: comparing the conceptions and traditions that have consolidated their respective epistemologies; allowing the information users to build functional parallels to discover the logical-methodological differences of each Doctrine (including the Science implicit in the Biomedical Model) compared to the others, they assume a specific function to understand – with the methods made available by contemporaneity – what ethical and ecological direction is offered to Re-modelling Medicine in the 21st century. Actually, as the quest to understand the dynamics of any healthcare system becomes more intense, there is a growing need to rewrite the usual and customary explanations which are no longer sufficient platforms for policy formation.

 

Overall objective of the Archasalutis project

Data are the lifeblood that permeates the entire Archasalutis project. The attempt put in place is to structure them and make them conform to the well-known FAIR formula recommended by the European Commission for the accumulation, processing and reporting of data. Those that are processed here, in fact, possess the attributes referable to: Findability, Accessibility, Interoparability, Reusability. In any case, what is important is that they, as a whole, represent the fruit of a unified study aimed at outlining knowledge tools that participate in the construction of a complex model of what I have called the “Tao of Living in Sanity”.

It is well known that the medium of communication (technology and context) changes meanings. Since data recording and communication has become info-telematic, digitized data published on the Web have multiplied by leaps and bounds and have become the raw material for processing increasingly granular and dynamic information and for designing new research horizons.

Much of the research prior to the digital revolution (biomedical, historical, psychological, epidemiological, and other; especially those accrued in clinical and public health disciplines) is losing relevance, but it is sometimes essential for reconstructing the epistemologies and outcome processes associated with the evolution of knowledge and validating technologies.

All of the treatments presented here rely on the enormous availability of print and online publications of intellectual operas of all kinds and of which one can keep track.

Bibliographic research once made specialized libraries and librarians indispensable, which only a few Universities or Public Institutions and Foundations could afford. Today, most of the most important topics derived from the work of accredited Authors in the field of Human Health (among others) are codified and (meritoriously) made accessible for free on the Web very quickly.

Books not found in bookstores can be ordered online, and many otherwise unavailable texts are, at the very least, cited in other texts and/or commentaries.

Yet, this wealth has become so immense; the science, technology, narratives, accounts and opinions are so numerous that aids of various kinds are indispensable.

It is well known that the map is not the territory. Any model, evidently, is subject to the principle of simplicity and the requirements of an economically viable offering. It is always designed for an objective. Noting that both the goal and the systems and methods for designing its pursuit are always arbitrary, the intention expressed here is to launch a project and study that is not self-referential, but open to outside input and exchange.

This term is intended to evoke, by analogy, an autopoietic system (as described by contemporary Cognitive Science research) subject to continuous transformations, adapted to the environment, structured to adhere to the complex and dynamic nature of biological phenomena and, in order to this reference system and the conditions dictated by social contexts, agile and changeable, responsive to the stresses arising from implicit and explicit dynamics.

The name Archasalutis evokes the subject of Health and that of biodiversity that must be saved.

The founding element of this project in principle derives from the awareness of owning the data (stored in some 40,000 files that I have identified, selected and – mostly – even read, cataloged with the natural language allowed by Windows folder and file naming).

The collected material consists mainly of books, scientific publications, magazine and newspaper articles, pictures, book reviews, official documents issued by various “Authorities” or “Agencies,” and something else. It all covers topics pertaining to Medicine, Medical Humanities, Biotechnology and Digital Technologies, Cognitive Science, Sociology, Epistemology, Literature, Literary Criticism and related.

Each source is traceable (where appropriate, to the date of my last access via the Internet) and I have taken care to pour copies of each original version of the material found online into my computer memory (not in the cloud). The texts are in English (mainly ) and in Italian.

The fruit of this work, in fact, is what I have personally worked up to construct the discourse on the Tao of Living in Sanity.

The first of my publications is “Practicing Impermanence as a key to acquire freedom. The search for an ethical and ecological approach to the fear of dying” . Casa Editrice Il Filo di Arianna (2021). Unfortunately, this Publisher is not geared toward publishing an e-book that would enhance the very numerous hyperlinks in the footnotes, through which to access the bibliographical references I have recorded. However, I thank him, adding that I felt the need to avail myself of print because of the need to explicate my theses, to gain experience in the publishing field, as well as to develop an accessible language, aimed at the target audience, in the various possibilities offered by contemporary multimedia.

At any rate, my work has been enriched by two additional topics awaiting print and digital publication. These, together with the first, form a trilogy and are entitled: “The Language of Health Promotion. The Systemic Challenge, to Reshape Medicine” and “Tribalism. A Natural History of the Delicate Balance between Altruism and Defection.”

The texts I have so far prepared in Italian (about 2,000 folders) can also be used in the form of “supervised translations” of the English originals that I have used extensively in my own work.

My ambition, however, is to test new technologies to make the lessons I would like to disseminate widely usable. Among these, I have identified a first step that consists of: a) defining a generative language model to be populated with the data I have collected; b) checking the consistency of the training data that I am able to supervise in both input and output; c) deploying applications of AI (NLP, Deep Learning and possibly GPT-3 type models).

The main functions to be tested as outputs of the system and which I have envisioned as general goals to be pursued are: a) to select from a pool of indexed sources, through semi-automatic processes, those topics that pertain to a systemic view, aimed at identifying and processing syntactically, semantically and, perhaps, pragmatically natural language (including the language we call “specialized” in the relevant domains). This is what focuses and allows for the parameterization of the themes that I have deemed relevant to framing Living in Sanity.

My “hunting and gathering” has been oriented mainly on the specifics of the Bio-Psycho-Social and Environmental Model of Medicine (a “broader” and “more systemic” view of the disciplinary specializations pertaining to the “Biomedical Model”) and, therefore, on Cognitive Sciences, Sociology Economics, Information and Biomedical Technologies, Integrated Care, Politics, Ecology, Health Promotion (with a perspective that includes traditional and psycho-physical practices of Eastern origin), Humanistic Disciplines in Medicine (Medical Humanities), and Network Medicine. For example, from 2020 to the present, with regard to the various perspectives in which the COVID-19 pandemic has manifested itself and been studied and commented on by papers in the hundred thousands, I have catalogued about 2800 files within 440 folders; b) “transforming” and “generating,” based on a prompt formulated in natural language, relevant arguments and bibliographic sources that are selected in order of the available processed data and algorithms previously trained for the purpose.

A second step, also dependent on the eventual success of the first, is to prefigure the structure of a series of educational video games on one or more topics of relevance to Living in Sanity. These would make use of a model organized on a relevant number of parameters, the database articulated as described, well-focused and continuously updatable following “rules of the game,” ” semiotic domains,” educational principles, pedagogical paths and transparent and optimizable heuristics.

In conclusion of this brief introduction, the image shows the graphic representation of the “Meikirch Model of Health” consisting of five components that are related to each other by at least ten complex interfaces (double arrows): Health occurs when individuals use their biologically given and personally acquired potentials to manage the demands of life in a way that promotes individual and collective well-being. This process continues throughout life. Health is constituted by all three dimensions – individual, social, and environmental – addressing the Determinants of Health and actually tackling their target.

Each volume of the series (published or unpublished, at the current date) includes topics that outline a sequence that the Author has considered convergent towards the assigned title.

The fact that they have all been written by myself shouldn’t worry too much. In fact, these are documents in which the sources I used are reported. What matters is that, as a whole, they represent the fruit of a unitary study aimed at delineating tools of knowledge that participate in the construction of a complex model I have called the Tao of Living in Health.

The topic has assumed such proportions that a unitary publication in paper form is highly improbable. However, having considered the format and way of using it as a priority, it was decided to tackle the outlined issues by grouping them into thematic “macro regions” and to progressively launch them for publication.

In conclusion of this brief introduction, the image shows the graphic representation of the “Meikirch Model of Health” consisting of five components that are related to each other by at least ten complex interfaces (double arrows): Health occurs when individuals use their biologically given and personally acquired potentials to manage the demands of life in a way that promotes individual and collective well-being. This process continues throughout life. Health is constituted by all three dimensions – individual, social, and environmental – addressing the Determinants of Health and actually tackling their target.

The Therapist-Patient Relationship in the broadest sense , as well as the concretization of processes of empowerment, protection and promotion of Health at the individual and societal levels play a prominent role in this area.

Those interested in more information about this project and/or who feel they can contribute to its realization should not hesitate to contact me by writing to the email address: segreteria@archasalutis.it

Valerio Di Vincenzo