The word paradigm has frequently been used since the physicist and philosopher Thomas S. Khun¹ wrote about it in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Paradigm is a model or a pattern to be followed in studying phenomena and reality. It represents a system of learning to learn and establishes rules for the development of future knowledge (Crema)².

Science means human knowledge acquired mainly from observing nature, human intuition and more recently, from analytic research. It aims to provide comfort, peace and happiness for the human being. Science developed relatively sparsely and inordinately until the middle of the 16^th century, without very established foundations of study and research. It was then strongly influenced by the thoughts of the great geniuses of that time, mainly Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), master of theoretical deduction, Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the creator of empiricism of investigation, René Descartes (1596-1650), creator of analytic geometry and Isaac Newton (1642-1727), creator of the principles of mechanics. Descartes developed the deductive rational scientific method and defended the dualism of nature, that is, matter (res extensa) and thought (res cogitans); in this way, he favored human being dualism (body and soul, both under the help of God, whose existence he judged to have been demonstrated from logical reasoning). He was capable of distinguishing two knowledge sources: intuition and deduction. However, for him all human knowledge would only depend on reason or on thought and never on sensation or imagination. He considered all material bodies including human bodies as machines which operations obey mechanical principles⁵. Newton consolidated the deductive rational method of Descartes⁵ and so the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm was created, which influenced and still influences practically all the fields of human knowledge today. This paradigm basically presumes that to know the whole it is necessary to take apart all components and to study each one of them separately. The whole is then the result of the union and intertwine of the smaller parts. For instance, to know the operation of a machine it is necessary to disassemble its parts. Therefore, under this principle, dividing is knowing.

Medicine, as a science, has been developing mainly since Alcmaeon of Croton (6^th century B.C.), who attributed the cause of diseases to the imbalance of the forces of nature, questioned the power of magic that was predominant in medical practice. Hippocrates (5^th century B.C.) delve into Alcmaeon's concepts and denied the old one, that stated that disease was punishment by the gods, when he concluded 'each disease has its own nature and originates from external causes'. Among his greatest merits, was his stressing on ethics in medical practice. Galen, a Greek doctor who worked in Rome from 164 a.D., introduced innovative concepts of anatomy and physiology that are pertinent until today*. He is considered the creator of experimental physiology. He emphasized, above all, the organic nature of diseases^3,4. The Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm also influenced the development of medical knowledge when it encouraged the study of the human body through the breaking down of its parts. Galeno had already initiated this work. Progress in physiology and pathophysiology was then made possible, while creating conditions for a formidable advance in prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases. The complexity of diseases was manifested in such a way that the emergence of different medical specialties occurred, in which the doctor deepens his knowledge in certain organs or organic systems, and almost always puts the approach of seeing the human being as a whole on the back burner. In other words, the specialist has deep vertical knowledge and limited horizontal knowledge. (A. Einstein, in a veiled critic to fragmentism, is said to be responsible for the observation that the specialist knows almost everything about almost nothing).

The Cartesian analytic method, without a doubt, was one of the pillars in the fantastic evolution of the modern world. However, it is equally undeniable that it contributed to the negligence of the human beings intimate feelings, by virtue of the emphasis on the mechanic approach. For instance, it was good for creating confusion between material wealth and individual happiness - and this explains, partly, why social imbalance exists (which is so well known everywhere) and the systematic destruction of our ecosystem, which on behalf of progress, threatens the existence of life, including human, on earth. These observations lead to a paradoxical verification: science, which objective is to provide man comfort, peace and happiness, in spite of its fantastic development was not capable of making man discover peace nor happiness and [overall] love! On the contrary, it arouse a world dominated by selfishness, cruelty, poverty, hunger, oppression, wars, indiscriminate destruction of nature and negligence for the true values of being. Knowledge as it appears today suffocates wisdom and is disastrously imposing.

In medicine, something similar happened and this is why modern and conscientious doctors are frequently and simultaneously euphoric and perplexed. Euphoric because they judge themselves as knowledgeable - due to medical science evolution - and perplexed for they feel that, even with so much knowledge, they are still unable to solve definitively most of their patients' problems. They note that their current knowledge is fragile and transitory, because it comes from the analytic scientific method (Cartesian), which is not always capable of revealing the truth in itself. For this reason, doctors are usually plenty of uncertainties⁴. (Some philosophical chains, unlike Descartes, admit that truth comes from intuition and that intuition is an absolute dimension of our being, therefore independent of analyses. However, we are not used to, with rare exceptions, being intuitive in our scientific studies).

Jiddu Krishnamurti⁶ (1895-1986), considered a wise Hindu, explains those paradoxes: "we have technical progress without equivalent psychological progress and, for this reason, there is a state of imbalance. Extraordinary scientific conquests have been made and, yet, human suffering continues to exist, empty hearts and empty minds continue to exist... An empty heart plus a technical mind do not make a creative human being..." F. Capra⁷ reports a dialogue in which Krishnamurti stresses: "first you are a human being and then you are a scientist. Before this you have to become free and that freedom cannot be reached through thought. It is reached by meditation - the understanding of the totality of life, in which all forms of fragmentation cease." (Krishnamurti argues that "thought… will never be able to renew itself..., because it is always the answer to antecedents - our conditionings, our traditions, our experiences, our personal and collective accumulations." For this reason, he completes, it is not capable of creating anything new. Moreover, it is an enemy of absolute truth, because it obstructs the capacity to meditate and to sense intuition. The truth surfaces when we have empty minds, that is, when we got rid of thoughts⁹!)...

When practicing medicine, we can consider that our relative (in)efficiency is due, at least partly, to the excessive emphasis that we usually dedicate to the disease (part) and relative negligence to the patient (whole). While we try to know the disease in his most intimate mechanisms and details, we do not realize that, beyond the sick organ, lies a highly complex person, who possesses a brain, feelings and mind, and this mind is constantly in tune with the universe, as it is part of the universe. In short, we are technicians that take care of human beings, but we do not use to pay attention to the human being himself - or we do in an insufficient way, imposed by a method we adopted. We in true hardly know ourselves.

The nature of human beings is usually not approached in medical curriculums. Generally this subject is only found in psychology synopses or in psychosomatic medicine⁴. However, how are we to practice human medicine appropriately if we do not know man in his totality?

According to the World Health Organization, man is biological, psychological and social (Fig. 1); health means a perfect balance among these three components and not simply absence of symptoms.

Mutatis mutandi, diseases can be considered, at least acquired ones, as a result of the imbalance in one or more of the individual's components. In other words, it is a manifestation of intimate disturbances in the person's physical, psychic and/or social sphere. A disturbance in one of theses components unavoidably contemplated the other two components, for they are interrelated and unseparable (individual), generating a sequence of events that will appear as symptoms and signs of a disease (Fig. 2).

Medical schools, as we pointed out, emphasize the disease in detriment of the patient and for his/her [disease], they address diagnostic and therapeutic resources. They do not take into account that the disease just represents a manifestation of internal problems of the human being⁴. They emphasize the part, and neglect the whole. Their view of being is mechanical or organical and lacks global evaluation. It is common to observe that modern doctors are more prepared to hear, to feel and to notice the organs better; however, old doctors noticed people better. Modern technology investigates disease well, but it is cold, impersonal, insensitive and unable to penetrate into the soul of the patient. This patient does not eagerly await modern conduct for his or/her case, but hopes to find a competent technician (doctor) that is also a confessor, a protector and a friend. From the technician, he/she expects solutions; to the confessor, he/she reveals his/her intimate problems, sometimes timidly, but courageously; to the protector, he/she surrenders his/her destiny; and from the friend, he/she expects solidarity, understanding and human warmth. It is then evident why the computer does not substitute the doctor in that role, because that is essentially human⁴. Another more complex approach of the human being visualizes four dimensions of the patient; soma, psyche, nous and pneuma and was developed by Philon of Alexandria and Karlfried Graf Dürckheim⁸. Figure 3 displays a graphical representation of the human being and its four dimensions:

This last anthropological concept introduces the doctor to the holistic perception of the human being. It intends to be the basis of a new rationality by connecting man intimately to his interior (homeostasis) and exterior (ecology), and by considering him as not dissociable part of himself and unavoidably linked to his destiny. Holism (of holos: all) represents a system that has been thought of since Heraclito, in ancient Greece, but became more systematized after the publication of the book Holism and Evolution by Jan Smuts in 1921. It tries to be a scientific model based on the interrelation of the phenomena, where everything has to do with everything, not only in the human being, but in every part of universe, in an intertwine that unites everything to everything^2,10. Boff¹¹ clarifies that "holism does not mean the sum of the parts, but the reception of the organic totality, unites and is diversified in its parts, but always articulated to each other inside of the totality and being made up of this totality."

The perception of human being in its totality adopts this synthesis system or aggregation of the components of being, unlike the analytic, reduced or fragmentary Cartesian method. It is essential to join [the parts] in order to know [the whole]. It emphasizes the physical, but intimately interrelated with the mind, the conscience, the spirit and with the energies of the universe. It considers the acquired disease not as cause, but as consequence of the interior disturbance of being and it admits that the limited treatment to the disease is many times insufficient to reach the definitive cure (fig. 4). The diseases would have, necessarily, a foundation far beyond our current perception and certainly would go through the different dimensions of our being until manifesting themselves in our bodies, the most evident stage of the process. In our current evolutionary apprenticeship, we are far from clearly understanding the intimate phenomena of nature, be them macro (universe), or micro (human being). In that manner, we still do not have answers for the countless questions that come about.

Notwithstanding, good current medical practice demands that understanding the patient is necessary to explain his/her disease. This new reality can become a new paradigm, the holistic one, which is believed to be supplemental to the old Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm and increases the knowledge of the whole. Under this new paradigm, it is expected that the doctor will aim more toward the human being as a whole using existent means - or those yet to come - that can truly favor his/her global balance. Therapeutic means that are prone to take into account the human being as a whole, such as homeopathy and acupuncture among others, although are still seen as uncertain in some aspects, allied to transpessoal psychology and a transdisciplinar approach and complemented by effective medication for the disease, may mean a model of integral conduct before the ill individual. This type of model could result in real benefit for the patient. It is necessary to dare to progress, conscious that our destiny is beyond what we know today and that our essence, the spirit or pneuma, develops for the perfection of God.

Through the organization of UNESCO in 1986, 19 celebrities representing several areas of human knowledge from 16 different countries, including 2 Nobel Prize winners and the president of the Nobel Committee of Stockholm, met in Venice to discuss the future of science in the world. At the end of the Conference they published the conclusions of the work in a report that was known as Declaration of Veneza¹², which content is reprinted below (in Portuguese and French)

Os participantes do colóquio "A Ciência Diante das Fronteiras do Conhecimento", organizado pela UNESCO, com a colaboração da Fundação Giorgio Cini (Veneza, 3-7 de março de 1986), animados por um espírito de abertura e de questionamento dos valores de nosso tempo, ficaram de acordo sobre os seguintes pontos:

Les participants au colloque "La science face aux confins de la connaissance : Le prologue de notre passé culturel" organisé par l'UNESCO avec la collaboration de la Fondation Giorgio Cini (Venise, 3-7 mars 1986), animés par un esprit d'ouverture et de questionnement des valeurs de notre temps, sont tombés d'accord sur les points suivants: