Why Well-Trained Human Senses Are The Most Mathematically Rigorous Wellness Approach

Not molecules or mechanical measurements

As I learned bodywork after 5 years of study in academic math and a two-year run as a machine learning engineer at Meta, I was surprised at how trainable my sense of touch was.

Now, in bodies, I can essentially echolocate to stuck spots in people’s fascia, by gently tugging on the intricate connective membranous web and following subtly uneven lines of pull. But before I put in the hundreds of hours of training, I didn’t feel any of that. And moreover, I thought my untrained touch felt all there was to feel - when really it was only the smallest sliver of what was possible.

Most people, especially with the amount of screens around us nowadays, are starting out with senses very dulled. So it’s easy to think our senses have nothing to offer us, when it comes to maintenance of health. But what I’ve learned is that well-calibrated human senses are more sophisticated than any molecular-diagnostic framework I’ve seen, and I want to see our culture treasure the gift of the technology that we already are.

For example, a year ago a client came to see me - she was 70, and had been in a car crash 13 years ago. Her right shoulder was in so much pain she couldn’t get on a planned plane trip to see her family. With no more than a few grams of force, I backtraced the patterns of variable density of fascia in her back, for 90 minutes, and the restriction unwound and her pain disappeared and never came back. A previous massage therapist had actually made it worse. This client wound up having a great time visiting her family!

And my bodywork method goes beyond resolution of pain - it can take someone from feeling healthy to very healthy, especially by way of the nervous system. One client in my sessions was able to finally forgive her ex. In another session, we found someone’s dread at potential incompatibility with her partner, stored in a muscular clump on top of the C4 vertebra of her neck.

I see an odd bias to think of “novelty of invention” as good, especially in tech. My academic study of math, and especially network science, has come to an opposite conclusion when it comes to health. Whatever natural forces made us were very, very smart, actually - the body is an awe-inspiringly complex, intricately balanced system of second- and third- and n-th order effects. So, instead of “outsmarting biology” (literally impossible, haha good luck) I plan to “listen to biology, partner with it, and support it.”

Let me elaborate on what I see as the literal impossibility of doing anything other than listening to biology and supporting it. An issue I see with nonholistic medicine is - by design, it ignores the second-order and third-order (and on and on) effects that are simply part of how a body works. So then at a population level, after receiving many nonholistic health interventions, people wind up becoming walking stacks of 90 different mild unintended effects, and wonder “why does life feel kind of bad all the time? oh it must be me, I must be broken.” No, this is a predictable downstream effect of treating a complex holistic network system like it isn’t one. The solution is to do holistic cleanup!

Because guess what - our senses are able to perceive, and engage with, the entire complex-holistic-network system at once. Our senses are systems themselves. They’re made by that same aspect of biology that is smarter than us, so they’re able to be its messengers.

I posit that increasing the sophistication of any approach that does not understand this will simply hide the nonholistic unintended effects in places harder and harder to see. So, an entry-level nonholistic approach will simply have a second-order unintended effect. Increasingly sophisticated nonholistic approaches might have fifth-order effects, or even 15th-order effects. Perhaps something that isn’t visible until generations later. I prefer holistic approaches, to sidestep this game of hide-and-seek and simply do the best thing now.

Coordinate Systems

Something my physics training got me comfortable with was the idea that there are many different ways to express the underlying dynamics of a system. There are many lenses on “truth;” there’s not simply “one way things are.”

I think of alternate medical systems (like bodywork) as similar to how math has alternate coordinate systems for navigating 3D space. The same point can be specified by (r, theta, z) rather than (x, y, z). Similarly, I describe health conditions in terms of unprocessed charge with qualities and textures stored in anatomical structures in the body. I resolve them at the level of space, shape, and texture. My clients get better, and I never once think about molecules.

The whole point of these alternate coordinate systems is that hard things in one are easy in another. Expressing a sphere in rectangular coordinates requires a lot of square roots, but in spherical coords it's simply rho = constant. It’s the same with medical systems. Allopathic medicine struggles with chronic conditions, but in Ayurveda or bodywork they're almost trivial.

There’s a similar concept in computer science, called the base of a number. The number 10 can be written as “10” in base 10, or 1010 in binary (base 2), or A in hexadecimal (base 16). If you didn’t know what binary or hexadecimal was, an equation like 1010 + 1010 = 10100 or A + A = 14 would make no sense. And so it is with alternate medical systems, like bodywork and Ayurveda. They take some initial onboarding to learn, but then once you’re inside them, they’re internally consistent, and rigorous, and coherent.

And I think it’s my familiarity with physics that’s guiding my willingness to switch coordinate systems about wellness. When quantum mechanics was in development, it was so controversial! Almost nobody wanted it to be true, it was totally unintuitive, with its particle-wave duality and assertions that some particles genuinely do not have local states until they are observed. And yet, the experimental results rolled in, and confirmed quantum mechanics.

So here are my experimental results. I’ve re-expressed my own understanding of health into a coordinate system that tracks charge and structure of a body, and then interacts with it holistically via human senses. (“Charge” includes emotions and energy; it probably has similarities to Qi dynamics in traditional Chinese medicine.) And my clients are very happy.

Note, results of my practice are still probabilistic and drawn from an underlying distribution - so, I’m not a good fit for everyone. But the 15th percentile result I get is “that was a pleasant relaxing time” and the 50th percentile result I get is “my migraine stopped instantly.” 90th percentile is a bit meaningless to report because it requires the person to have had very bad issues to start with; but I’m able to make big improvements in longstanding issues within one session, too. Especially car crashes or similar high-impact old injuries. (Here’s an obligatory link to my website.)

I’m also collecting practitioners who work in a similar framework to me and have similarly good results. My top two right now are

• Jessica Vellela, practicing Ayurveda. She is literally the only practitioner I know who is able to reliably make improvements in the metabolic aspect of chronic disease. That’s not for lack of looking. If you know someone else, send them to me!

• Myles O’Donnell, a bodywork colleague, who I sometimes refer to as a human MRI. My first session with them, they moved my right femoral artery.

Beyond the experimental results working - it was small experimental discrepancies that resulted in the massive frameshift to quantum mechanics. I’ve been noticing loads of small experimental discrepancies for our healthcare system, and to me it feels like the writing is on the wall. For example, there’s this medical doctor that knew the allopathic system had no treatments to offer her three-year-old who’d developed a dry cough. She fixed it with an onion poultice.

My 3.5 yr old son woke up 3am with a dry cough, it was near constant. I chopped and sautéed an onion, folded it up in a cloth dish towel, placed it on his chest under his thermal pajamas. It actually stayed in place easily. Also gave him a teaspoon of wild local honey, elderberry syrup, humidifier going, the usual cough things. Cough lessened in frequency and then ceased 45 minutes later. He’s back to sleeping. Praise. Nothing has worked like this onion poultice!

There’s the direct application to the skin, but then also the breathing in of the onion’s sulfur that draws mucus towards the skin? This is absolutely fascinating to me. Why, whyyy don’t they teach this in medical school?! I mean, I know why. But still, it’s infuriating. Ask a pediatrician what to give to help. They will assess for bacterial infection and then say, “nothing”.

And there are many such cases. I half-started a thread with examples of herbs working as effective healthcare, though it’s not complete. But I’ve met a few people who read voraciously and have photographic memories and have looked at the academic literature and concluded - wait, herbs work better than pharmaceuticals. One is my friend who’s also an MIT grad and is now an herbalist.

So honestly, I think much of big pharma was a mistake. It’s pretty radical to believe that we already had effective medicine growing around us for free, from the earth, and we would be better off listening to that, partnering with it, and supporting it.

If I had my way we would re-express our entire healthcare system in terms of sensory cues. A sub-case of this is we would also shift to viewing whole plants as “fundamental units,” not molecules.

Whole plants and system-to-system dynamics

Ok, this article started out about my bodywork practice, why am I talking about plants all of a sudden?

Mostly because I think they indicate the same underlying wellness thoughtform: something very special - and mathematically rigorous - happens when an entire complex system meets an entire other complex system, without first having been separated into constituent measurements or molecular pieces. Some people call this ‘emergence’, I think about it in terms of levels of abstraction. But I digress.

Honestly after all my science training, I consider energetic descriptions of “this herb has a cooling effect, this herb has a blood-moving effect” far more rigorous than “this herb works because it contains Z molecule” - because poetic descriptions are system-to-system. “This herb works because molecule Z upregulates molecule Y” is NOT an explanation; in a human body there's probably >10-20 other pathways and necessary cofactors that story leaves out.

Because, well, bodies have lots and lots of molecules. The metabolic networks have so many switchbacks and interdependencies and feedback loops that I view describing effects in terms of single molecules as a misrepresentation of the underlying dynamics.

As I’ve studied herbalism, I’ve recognized words like 'mucilaginous', 'nervine', 'astringent', 'warming', 'cooling', and 'bright' as sophisticated principle-component-analysis on intractably dense networks.

Backing up, what’s principal component analysis? It is literally a machine learning algorithm that recognizes - hey, when we have extremely high-dimensional data sets, it sure is handy to pull out underlying structures and shapes in the data and think in terms of those, rather than getting lost in the weeds of the datapoints themselves.

One explanation of it is here:

“Principal component analysis, or PCA, reduces the number of dimensions in large datasets to principal components that retain most of the original information. It does this by transforming potentially correlated variables into a smaller set of variables, called principal components.”

You can read more at this link. My relationship with PCA is, I learned it in 6.036 back in 2016, so it’s one of the algorithm-shapes that I’m trained to recognize. When I discovered herbalism in 2019, it was immediately obvious to me that herbalism was doing an analogous dimensionality reduction over the underlying space of molecular metabolic pathways! But apparently this is an unusual perspective, haha, so that’s why I’m writing this article.

Isn’t it so nice that thousands of years of prior work in herbalism already went and identified the principal components relevant to metabolic medicines? And also that they’re all along axes we can detect through our senses? Ayurveda and traditional Chinese medicine both have extensive bodies of knowledge about the health effects of different tastes of food. This is an exceptionally user-friendly interface via which the average person can choose their diet in response to what’s going on with their health.

Here’s more pieces about the system-to-system aspect of herbalism, from an unpublished book by my anonymous MIT-grad herbalist friend.

Herbs also have legitimacy by Western scientific standards. Many biochemical aspects of herbalism are validated by the most rigorous of scientific pharmaceutical standards: double-blind randomized clinical studies with large sample sizes (n>100) where the performance and side effects of the herb are compared against both a pharmaceutical control substance and a placebo.

[…]

Drugs are isolated molecules that usually target a specific pathway. Herbs are complex, co-evolved cocktails of as many as 20-30 relevant phytochemicals which work on many different angles of your body. There are many cases where a chemical extract that would have adverse effects on its own is nontoxic when the entire herb it came from is used all at once. A classic example is aspirin vs. willow bark, the plant from which aspirin is derived. Long-term use of aspirin (salicylic acid) is heavily correlated with stomach ulcers. Willow bark contains the *precursor* to salicylic acid, though it also contains many other compounds. When willow bark is eaten and first enters your body, it does not contain any compounds with adverse side effects. Willow bark actually does not get metabolized into salicylic acid until it reaches the large intestine, meaning that willow bark is physically incapable of giving you stomach ulcers.

As another example: Hawthorn (a cardiotonic, or in other words a substance that has a beneficial effect on cardiovascular function) is notorious for its whole-plant synergy. It is empirically proven to be extremely effective when the whole plant is used, but it has no individually “active” constituents that are effective when used in isolation.[1] [2]

The science is real and publicly available. Why haven't you heard of this? Probably because there is no way to patent a whole unmodified plant and sell it for a 10000x markup, the way you can with American pharmaceutical drugs.

[1] David Hoffman, FNIMH, RH(AHG), _Medical Herbalism_ (2003), pg 294-295.

How I explain this in my own words is -

Whole-plant medicines work as a whole network, versus pharmaceuticals work as an isolated molecule on one pathway in a network. The traditional pharmaceutical approach is to pick one molecular pathway and hit it really hard. But that’s not how plants work, which is interesting! For example, turmeric is not the best at anything. It hits a whole bunch of pathways a little bit.

Backing up - what are “molecular pathways” and “metabolic networks”? Basically, in your body all the molecules circulate and recombine with one another in complicated webbings that look like this. There’s lots of fun math to be had on them, and this is why my math background took me to herbalism and bodywork.

[Source link]

[Source link]

Back to bodywork

So, it’s through learning herbalism and also mathematical network science that it first became clear to me that qualitative approaches could actually exceed the rigor of quantitative approaches.

This freed me up to make sense of the phenomena I was observing in my bodywork practice!

Like “Inuit languages have 50 words for different kinds of snow” I work with ~50 different kinds of “muscle tension.” Alas they do not have pre-existing names. However, because they exist kinesthetically at the level of direct experience, I am still able to resolve them without ever having named them!

Human sensory cues are thorough preventative medicine

In my bodywork practice, I have learned to feel structural restrictions at the level of granularity where - oh, this contracture of fascia between the ascending colon and right illiacus is at risk of snowballing into large pain in the next 10 - 20 years, but let’s clear it now. The “clearing it now” takes 15 seconds, versus resolving the large-pain-snowball takes a lot more untangling - easily something like 20 hours of intense dedicated bodywork. To me, my approach seems like obviously the mathematically sensical way to go. An ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure.

Another thing I love about my sensory-enabled approach is that, most people do feel the immediate boost - they go from feeling “healthy” to “even healthier.” So in this case, the short-term and long-term incentives totally align! What a boon for coordination.

Jessica Vellela, in her Ayurveda practice, says something similar, except it’s about metabolic cues rather than structural cues. So for example, burping a lot, or fatigue after eating wheat, or any signs of indigestion, to a trained observer can be read as an early sign of something brewing that could be intercepted, cared for, and resolved, before it ever has the potential to snowball into a more extreme or intense metabolic condition. 

That said, I don’t want to overrepresent my approach as overly structural and anatomically deterministic. A lot of what I do is “sensing vibe” on a nervous system level, and having nonverbal conversations with a client’s body. One of my hypothesis is that my sessions help the client find deep-parasympathetic states that correspond to the body’s autonomic repair processes. So the experience of receiving is oceanic, warm, and dreamy - and then people reliably get up feeling more like themselves, and also metabolically and structurally clearer. I’ve explained this before as “I can potentially help with anything that stress is upstream of.”

Because, there’s my willingness to switch coordinate systems again! When I was fresh out of massage school, I asked myself - what’s the most lasting positive effect I can have, given that I know six months worth of anatomy, not years, and yet I’m already interacting with fractal-ly complex body systems? As an answer, I developed a method that let the fractal-ly complex body system steer its own repair process. Awesome! This lets me resolve issues that I can detect via feeling but cannot yet name.

Human senses are trainable

But even if you’re on board with me that holistic approaches, and especially those that involve human senses, are the way to go - don’t expect them to work right off the bat. They’re like motor skills, in that they require practice and repetition to hone. Some of my teachers are the equivalent of olympic weightlifters. They’ll detect whether or not a client’s esophagus and aorta can glide vertically against one another, or whether a client’s posterior intercostal arteries are tight. However, they’ve been practicing for 50 years! Someone who’s just starting out will probably still need to do the tactile-sensory equivalent of lifting 10-pound weights before they can lift 200-pound weights. Pick a spot on a leg and feel the broad layers: the transition between skin, and muscle, and bone. (I teach tactile anatomy classes that cover how to do this!)

So, it’s not just a matter of looking through an effective frame. It’s also a matter of skill navigating inside the frame. This is why I’m so, so deeply grateful for trained practitioners. They may as well be worth their weight in gold.

A colleague of mine relates to the journey of developing tactile sensitivity as similar to learning to read. At first, there are all these sensations - but it’s not clear that the squiggles on the page, or the textures underhand, cohere into anything meaningful. But after enough practice, they conjure up a clear story and trajectory. It’s so strange to me that many hyperintellectual people are still bodily illiterate. I myself used to think that my body sensations were random TV static. But no, there is signal amidst them! For example, my somatic coach colleague tells this story of a client whose shoulders would tense every time she needed to say no to an invitation. The shoulder tension cued her off to when she was saying something out of genuine desire, versus out of people-pleasing tendencies.

So, ultimately, any healthcare system that integrates the richness of human senses will still need rigorous means of training its practitioners. That’s a topic out of scope for this post, though.

The statistics of the natural world are “rich“ in a way artificial stimuli are not

At the heart of my orientation towards sensory approaches to wellness is - a view that

The statistics of the natural world are “rich” in a way that artificial stimuli are not.

Credit to one of my twitter followers, Thomas Varley, a dual PhD in complex systems and neuroscience, for phrasing it so succinctly! Here’s the context in which he first mentioned it:

I suspect that the human brain probably evolved to expect certain distributions of stimuli (probably matching the patterns present in the natural world) as a kind of evolutionary optimization, which got encoded into the physical "wiring" of the brain.

In the same way that the body kind of seems to "expect" a distribution of foodstuffs high in fiber, low in sugar/fat, maybe at uncertain intervals, the same might be true of our incoming sensory stimuli.

There's a lot of evidence that time spent in nature is good for us - both emotionally and physiologically. There's a lot of confounds to tease apart, but I think part of it might be that the statistics of the natural world are "rich" in a way that artificial stimuli aren't.

This emerged from an online conversation we had, where I shared that I expect AI-generated information to be weirdly unexpectedly bad for minds at scale in the same way that processed food is weirdly unexpectedly bad for bodies at scale. So, “human-made information” will be the new “whole foods” - it’ll still be important.

In the same vein, I’m pretty unexcited-borderline-averse about development of medical devices. I suspect that filtering assessment and treatment through a human practitioner is very important for reaching full health. So, bodywork will be an integral part of any sustainable and fully-functional health system.

Holistic and sensory approaches can lead to full health

There’s so much more I could say on this topic! Truly, so much! For example, how it seems like our senses of taste and smell are keyed into detecting soil ecosystem health, and nutrient density of food. But the last thing I’ll leave you readers with is - the thing I like most about holistic and sensory approaches is they seem able to lead to real, genuine well-being.

There's an archetypal failure mode of allopathic medicine where a doctor says “I’m sorry, you'll have to be on this medication for the rest of your life.” And I’ve realized that my frustration with that failure mode is not the “for the rest of your life” piece, but the fact that the medication will usually not actually leave people fully healthy.

Holistic wellness interventions might still be lifelong. For example, the regular sleep schedule that Ayurveda’s so adamant about, or a particular consistent movement practice that keeps your circulation going and your posture limber and strong.

The sad part I see about taking a medication forever is - it can keep people stuck at a health local maximum by covering up a deeper imbalance. I want more aiming towards the "full underlying health" that most medication doesn't actually reach. Lifelong practices for genuine full underlying health are fine by me, actually.

This comes up often in bodywork! People ask “so how much of this do I need?” and, my response is that a good chunk of it is maintenance. Usually when people first work with me, there is rapid legible improvement for the first 3 - 10 sessions, as we work through a backlog. Then after that, the rate of change slows, and sessions shift to more of a “maintenance and longevity practice” regime. That said, every few months I’d definitely still find new things to work with. Bodies tend to accumulate adhesions in the same way that even the cleanest rooms tend to accumulate dust. It seems like there’s a fundamental amount of ongoing-maintenance-against-entropy that is simply part of how life is shaped.

Conclusion

So, in summary, I see human senses as incredibly sophisticated filtering, signal processing, and feedback mechanisms on a complex system. I expect any wellness system that doesn’t make use of this advanced-technology-that-we-already-are is needlessly handicapping itself.

And I want my society and culture to be a health-supporting one! So if you have ideas for how the ideas I express in this post can help support public health, leave a comment or drop me a line <3

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Footnote

I was working on this article, and also happened to flip through Salt Fat Acid Heat, by Samin Nosrat. And wow, right on page 133 of a bestseller, she says “good cooks obey sensory cues, rather than timers and thermometers.”

My hypothesis is that the best healthcare practitioners do this too. So, I’ll leave you with these pages of hers as further examples to mull on.

[2] Legal disclaimer: Herbs are not drugs. Do not use this as medical advice, do not self-diagnose, and do not use herbs as a substitute for appropriate medical care.