Beyond a Single Lens : How Integrative Medicine Helps Us See the Whole Person

People often say that we see as much as we know.
But I have come to think almost the opposite.

We do not necessarily see simply because we know.

Charlie Munger once said that when you have a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail.
When I first came across this idea, I naturally thought of the consultation room.

Do we really see a person as they are?
Or do we see them through the way we have been trained to look?

“What might I be missing?”

A cell biologist looks for answers at the cellular level, a pathologist through pathology, a nutritionist through nutrition, and a psychologist through the mind.

None of these perspectives is wrong.

But the deeper we become immersed in one field, the harder it can be to step outside its way of seeing. We tend to believe that the answers most familiar to us are also the most correct.

The people I meet in clinical practice, however, are rarely that simple.

Someone with digestive problems may also struggle to sleep. Poor sleep can make anxiety worse. Stress can tighten the neck and shoulders, and when physical pain continues for a long time, the mind can become exhausted as well.

What may begin as a single symptom often turns out, when we look a little more closely, to involve the nervous system, digestion, sleep, emotions, and everyday habits in ways that are deeply interconnected.

So I began to ask myself more often:

“What might I be missing?”
“How are these things connected within the meridian system?”

I look at these relationships through the flow of the meridians. For me, the meridian system is a kind of map for understanding the pathways through which emotion and the body meet and influence one another. Rather than focusing only on the symptom a patient describes, I try to understand how that symptom may be connected with other physical changes, emotions, sleep, digestion, and everyday life.

This is how I use the lens of East Asian Medicine.

Over time, I also came to feel more strongly that, to understand one person, we need to unfold more than one map. I did not want to become confined within a single perspective. Rather than assuming that what I see is the whole picture, I wanted to hear what others were seeing and to discover what I might have missed through conversations with people who look from different perspectives.

So alongside pathology and physiology, I also explore psychology, nutrition, and neuroscience. At times, I look to the humanities and philosophy to see how they understand human beings.

This is similar to the way I have long approached religion. I have always been curious about how different traditions — Buddhism, Protestant Christianity, Catholicism, Taoism, and others — understand human beings and human life.

Not because I wanted to collect more answers, but because I was curious:

“How might this look from another direction?”

The work of one of my favourite scientists, pathologist Neil Theise, has encouraged me to think in a similar way.

His research team used new methods to observe living tissue and investigated fluid-filled interstitial spaces that were difficult to recognise in conventional pathology slides. What I find most interesting is not simply that they described a new structure. It is that something could remain unseen partly because of the very methods we had become accustomed to using in order to see tissue.

I like this story. When he encountered something unfamiliar that could not easily be explained by existing knowledge, he did not simply cover it over with a familiar explanation. He kept asking, “What is this?”, and looked again in a different way.

Because something may still exist even if I cannot see it.

For me, integrative medicine is not simply about combining different treatments.

It is about not looking at a person through only one lens.

It means respecting what modern medicine shows us about cells and physiological changes, while also considering the nervous system, psychology, nutrition, and lifestyle, and at the same time looking at the relationships between body and mind and the patterns of change that East Asian Medicine has observed over centuries.

And in between those perspectives, I keep asking:

What might I be missing?
How would this look from another perspective?
Would we still arrive at the same conclusion?

I continue to study and research the human body from an integrative perspective, and I bring those questions with me into clinical practice.

Not because I believe I have all the answers. Quite the opposite. I believe there is still so much about the human body that we do not yet understand.

A good practitioner, in my view, is not someone who always gives the right answer, but someone who understands that their own perspective may not be the whole picture — someone who is willing to look at the same person again, and from another direction.

That is also why it is important to remain open and to engage in conversation with other professionals. We know that one lens alone is still not enough to understand the enduring questions of human life, ageing, illness, and death. Rather than only speaking from our own answers, we listen. We engage with other perspectives, and sometimes we question what we thought we already knew.

Those who study and practise integrative medicine may relate to this. We do not want to argue simply to prove that one answer is right. We want to listen to one another’s perspectives and have conversations that lead us to better questions.