Telos Journal Edition Four November 2013 | Seite 6

Be you practitioner or patient, “To be able to say ‘I don’t know’ is scary; it’s hard to live
that way,” she says.
Aiding the terminally ill for over twenty years has delicately refined Dr. Cathirose’s tough
New Jersey tongue. Her take-home message? Whether we sound the alarm, cue the
drummer, strum the eternal lyre, or just listen in silence, it’s forcefully all the same. It
sounds like this: “I don’t fuckin’ know, and nobody else knows. We know a few things.
Let’s look at what we do know.”
We do know that carcinogens are causal (sorry: smokers quit smoking; barbecuers stop
barbecuing), as with some radiations. But since the body works uniquely and reactively
in ‘ratios’, the introduction or substitution of nutrients affecting other ratios of other body
parts in different ways, she is carefully hesitant to grant any therapy principal status.
Therefore, when we speak about antioxidants or cruciferous veggies as malignant
preventers, when we consider chemotherapy or Gerson’s dietic therapy, we must
boldly look over and face what Dr. Cathirose faces everyday: the unconfirmed
evidence and terminally fragile people.
Around this point in our discussion, a haze of cloudy uncertainty took shape over me
and a classic epistemic question arose, the question of mind versus matter. In
philosophy of mind exists a core debate in this regard, an epic theoretical battle
between the immaterialist and materialist camps. Descartes thought that there is much
to be doubted in the physical world, and that what we by rote think is true, is usually
what we take for granted without proper knowledge. He looks over a piece of wax,
and records its characteristics as he perceives them through his senses. He smells and
feels it, looks over its size and color. But when he brings it to a flame, it loses these
qualities; nevertheless, he still deduces that it is still the ‘same’ piece of wax. He
concludes by choosing the faculty of judgment over sense perception as the proper
means of grasping the nature and constituents of our world. But materialists work in the
reverse method. Instead of explaining the physical world in terms of the mind,
materialists like Quine and d’Holbach before him explain the workings of mind through
what can be explained via material confirmations.