The easiest way to understand the phenomenon of generativity using your own experience is to look at your ability to use human language. At any point in time, you are drawing from a finite set of words. The elements of grammar are limited: markers for time, person, place, plural, etc. Your available lists of words to refer to objects and activities in your life is larger, but even that is limited. You do not, for example, use every word listed in the dictionary of your language.

Your language also has a set of rules for organizing the words to say what you want to say. For example, in English the word "that" can only occur in front of a word. You can use your finite set of words and their acceptable patterns of combination to say whatever you want to say. Likewise, you take in nutrients from the world, convert them to tiny molecules, and then use these molecules in thousands of different chemical interactions to a variety of physiological processes, such as growth, energy production, cellular deconstruction and reconstruction, pathogen destruction, etc.

Like language, new elements enter your system, in the same way that you can learn a new word. Unlike language however, you must bring in new content because all of the elements in your biological system are designed to die after a certain amount of time. It takes 7 years for your body to regenerate completely: the YOU standing in front of the mirror today has been completely remade for no cells remain from the YOU who stood in front of the mirror 7 years ago.

Systems can be small and simple such as a pendulum, composed of two parts, a string, chain, or thread, with a weight attached to the bottom. To understand the system, we have to understand how the two parts work together to create the action of the whole -- swinging back and forth. Systems can also be complex. A complex system is comprised of many elements, arranged in various relationships. The components act in harmony to product a variety of different behaviors or functions, none of which cant be fully understood or explained by examining how the individual components operate on their own. To understand the individual parts, we must study how they work together to create the actions of the whole. Likewise, to understand the whole, we need to understand the nature of its component parts.

According to Dr. Peter D'Adamo, a recent approximation of the number of proteins found in the human body is 64,000, and all are in various stages of activation at any particular moment in time. He notes "if we assume that 25% of them are involved in expressing your current physical form (your phenotype) and of this, 25% are of medical interest, we could begin the process of contextualizing the basic pathways of health and disease from a starting point of 4,000 parts." He further comments that "this is the approximate number of parts to be seen in a modern automobile and... that it takes a surprisingly short period of time to chunk the parts to a particular model automobile that one is restoring." (Generative Medicine, Peter D'Adamo ND,2010: 20)

This means that our physiological vitality is quantifiable, and generative medicine offers a way of breaking down the complexity of the whole to make information about it clinically available to the practitioner. It may not, however, be able to quantify information related to our psychosocial complexity, or to the way in which the mindbody whole interacts with the world as a consciousness, with the same degree of accuracy. Here is where medical traditions that integrate models of consciousness into the process of scientific inquiry, such as ayurveda, yoga, and integral medicine, may offer ways to complete our understanding.

For a helpful discussion of the principle of complexity go to:
www.necsi.edu/guide/DCSchapter0.pdf/

Self-Organization and Resilience

Complex systems are self-organizing. Self-organization refers to the way a complex system evolves to produce a dynamic state of balance (equilibrium) through local and individual interactions of its component parts. You are a unique, self-organizing biological system  You are also (as a separate entity) part of a larger ecosystem comprised of other self-organizing biological systems.  You interact with these entities to form a higher level self-organizing whole -- your ecological and social community.  This means that you exist in a dynamic state of self-organization on multiple levels simultaneously.  

You yourself are comprised of organs and bones (which are, in turn, comprised of cells) which self-organize into an entity that is able to move itself through its environment independently of other similar entities, despite the inability of the individual cells of which it is made to do the same. In order to effectively diagnose and treat a metabolic dysregulation, it is critical to identify at which level of organization an imbalance is occurring and where to intervene in order to most effectively stimulate an appropriate and effective self-regulatory response from the organism.

For example, in Western medicine people with bloodtype O have been found to be more susceptible to gastrointestinal infections with E. coli 057 than bloodtypes A, B or AB (Anstee 2010). In Ayurveda people with a pitta constitution are more likely to experience inflammatory disorders than those who have a kapha constitution.

Lectins occur in all natural organisms and are used by them to their benefit. For example, our own liver cells have lectins that attach to bacteria so that they can be eliminated from the body. Viruses and bacteria also have lectins, and some of these are bloodtype-specific, meaning that a particular bacterium or virus will be more likely to survive in people of one bloodtype rather than another. Of course, while this may be to the benefit of the bacterium or virus, it may be to the host. This is why people of one bloodtype are more susceptible to particular diseases than people having another bloodtype. For example, research has shown that a specific subtype of bloodtype O individuals are more susceptible to lectins in H. pylori, a bacteria associated with stomach ulcers, than a specific subtype of bloodtype A. This is discussed in the article
"The relationship between blood groups and disease" by David Anstee.

Interactions also occur between lectins in foods and other substances (including medications and nutritional supplements) that you consume and your blood cells. Some enhance your metabolism while others interfere with it in specific ways, creating predispositions for developing certain diseases rather than others. So, for example, people with bloodtype A are more susceptible to cancer than people with bloodtype O, but these individuals are more predisposed to asthma than type A. This is discussed in Peter D'Adamo's well-known book on bloodtype medicine Eat Right For Your Type.