The Scale (Ladder) of Health

By Dr. Dany Lousky

The scale (ladder) of health is the main characteristic of the format of integrated medicine. The scale of health was derived from the division into dimensions of the 32 intelligences. The scale of health is built of four dimensions and describes the person’s changing needs, the abilities that he can develop in every dimension, and the need to move between the dimensions for the purpose of balance. Whole health is possible through the balance between the different needs in each one of the four dimensions.
According to the vision of integrated medicine, the number of dimensions in the scale, the content, and the needs that characterize every dimension, as well as the need to transfer from dimension to dimension, are the milestones for whole medicine. The dimensions of the scale of health express conflicting and complementary interests that characterize the changing needs and challenges for a full life. The division into four reflects the entire range of life. The importance of the scale of health lies in its ability to assess and rank the four dimensions among the patients, from the stronger dimension to the weaker dimension, for the purpose of practice, treatment, or reinforcement of the weak aspects.

Four Dimensions of the Scale of Health
The World Health Organization defines health in a way that leaves no doubt regarding the importance of the different dimensions that comprise the whole as a way of achieving whole medicine. “Health is a state of complete physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual well being” (World Health Organization, 1947).
The world, according to the Book of Creation, divides into four dimensions – the Scale of Health. The four dimensions express contradictory and complementary desires that characterize changing needs and challenges for a whole and full life. The division into four reflects the complete range of life:
• The four elements: air, fire, water, and earth;
• The four realities: silent, growing, living, and speaking;
• The four tasks of life: love, career, money, and health;
• The four dimensions: physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual;
• The four animals of sanctity: bull, man, lion, and eagle;
• The four processes of creation: thought, words, effort, reality;
• The four ranks of being: body, mind, spirit, soul;
• The four types of healing: movement, nutrition, energy, awareness;
• The four types of communication: supportive, analytical, task-oriented, expressive;
• The four types of teachers: problem solving, appreciating, directing, challenging.
Each one of the four dimensions divides into a number of parts, so that altogether 32 intelligences are created. In each one of the 32 intelligences, there is the desire to receive and the desire to give. The balance between the desire to receive and the desire to give creates free will, which is the force of life (the chi). To create whole medicine, balance is needed between the desire to receive and the desire to give in every intelligence. The lack of balance between the two desires over time will cause pain, mishaps, and illnesses.
I chose the term ‘scale’ or ‘ladder’ to describe ‘whole medicine’, through the model of integrated medicine. The head of the ladder of health is found in the air (the element of air / the spiritual dimension), in the middle of the ladder are found the water and fire (the intellectual and emotional dimensions, respectively), and at the basis of the ladder is the ground (the element of earth / the physical dimension). I saw this image in the Biblical story of Jacob’s dream, which presents man’s longing to live in wholeness, in all the dimensions, on the Health Ladder. In this perspective, when the head of the ladder reaches the sky and its legs are on the ground, the ‘dreamer’ can go up and down the ladder freely, as he sees fit. “He had a dream, and behold, a ladder was set on the earth with its top reaching to heaven ….” (Genesis 28:12). The painting of Marc Chagall, Jacob’s Ladder (see the following picture), describes in the language of art the whole creation.
Ascending the ladder is similar to swimming against the current. Swimming against the current will lead to the source of the water (as well as the source of the problem). Descending the ladder is similar to swimming with the current, relaxation, change of approach, change of values and beliefs (desire to give). Descending the ladder necessitates connection to the joy of life, joy as a compass to successes and to destiny (desire to receive). In the encounter between the desire to receive and the desire to give, free will was found – the power of life for change, training, and healing (Lousky, 2005).

The Relationship between Body and Mind on the Health Scale
The relationship between body and mind is the basis of integrated medicine, which is the integration of scientific medicine (body) with lousky medicine (mind). This relationship is essential to observation, assessment and treatment, to the rising and descending on the ladder of health, which is, as aforementioned, the main characteristic in integrated medicine.
The body can be described in the following ways: through pain, through pleasure, through posture, through body language. We also describe the twists and pains of the soul through the body. When we say ‘his legs froze’ perhaps we are speaking of the legs on the physical level but refer to fear (bodily and emotional) found in the legs. When we say ‘green eyed monster’, we do not see eyes that are physically green but refer to jealousy (intellectual dimension). Expressions such as ‘sharp tongued’, ‘grinding teeth’, ‘blood going to the head’ and others express a mental situation (spiritual, intellectual, and emotional dimensions) and not necessarily a physical situation. Lousky medicine addresses these expressions in their dual meaning, ‘body mind’. Sentences that describe, apparently, a physical problem, do not only remain in the physical meaning. According to the holistic approach, they also are expressed in other areas. When a child is constipated (physical dimension), he is brought to a pediatrician. Why should the mother, kindergarten teacher, or teacher not treat constipation that originates from the emotional blockage of the intestines (Reich, 1991) . The body is not a separate entity, it is an expression of the mind, just as the mind expresses itself through the body. The body is the home of the soul, the temple of the soul. The body tells the story of the soul, the body talks endlessly, sometimes it also yells aloud and sometimes the shout is through the deafening silence (Reich, 1991).
The body expresses itself in different ways: through beating, concentration, grounding, focusing, breathing, holding, moving, relations, and connections. The body expresses contents and a framework of the contents – what and how. Body language is sharp, intuitive, lacking in comprises, without masks. The body expresses itself through body language, which is the expression of the social and cultural conditions. The body also expresses itself through body positions posture, and expression and these express the outlooks, beliefs, and educational influences. The body writes everything, every mental state is recorded in the body lines, in the body postures, in the body language, and in the body grasp. The body is the soul’s home. When a person does not feel at home, in many ways, he is not balanced, he is not at his best. This unbalanced situation, when it continues over time, invites mishaps and illnesses.
Life is a type of movement even when there is no movement. Life is movement and change. Movement in the body is created through beating (Reich, 1991) and there needs to be fit between the pace of beating and the environment. Experiences (emotional dimension) create muscle contractions (physical dimension) and become armor (intellectual dimension). The armor of the body is similar to defense mechanisms in psychology. The armor, like the defense mechanisms, must be slowly and carefully removed. The removal of the armor will provide the result of the qualities in the body and body posture. The armor will appear between the latitudinal and longitudinal lines of the body. There are seven latitudinal lines in the body and they are parallel to the energy areas according to chakras. The armor appears between the latitudinal lines (chakras) and the longitudinal lines (meridians). The armor is like a dam that on both sides appears imbalance: on the one side there is a flood and on the other side there is a drought. The blockage (dam) must be slowly released and the flood must be gradually dried out.
Every emotional process leaves its mark on the body. Every emotional imbalance begins its path in the spiritual body that influenced the intellective body – which created approaches and beliefs, which created feelings of ear, which were imprinted on the body. Armor is created as a result of insults, the armor is created as a result of developmental traumas and a result of the experience of the word ‘no’. The experience of insult is an emotional blow, ‘you do not understand anything’ as a way to emphasize the inferiority of another person and emotional exploitation to provide narcissist needs (desire to receive). The insult remains in the physical memory and creates the armor. Flexibility, melting, or decomposition of the armor is possible through work with the body – touch, movement, breathing, and sounds. These are experiences that the body remembers and they will appear in the form of contractions and pains in the body. When a person ignores his feelings and experiences and conceals them in the storage room instead of taking them, through the heart, they will appear in the back part of the body – they will appear through pain in the waist, back, nape of the neck, and the head (Reich, 1991).
We see that every emotional process leaves its mark on the body. Every emotional imbalance begins in the spiritual body and influences the intellectual body, which created the approaches and beliefs, which created feelings of fear, which were written in the body. When the therapist has training in treatment methods for the treatment of each one of the four dimensions, the therapist can treat the dimension that is not balanced and thus stop the mishap, before it appears in the body. The necessity to train therapists in treatment methods to treat the four dimensions (health ladder) is at the basis of integrated medicine.

The Health Ladder and the Human Pyramid of Needs
The different dimensions of the health leader express all that is. They create contradictory and complementary desires that characterize changing needs and challenges for a full life. Every person has different needs, during his life and during his development, according to the division into levels of the ladder of health. The human pyramid of needs describes the person’s factors of motivation, arranged hierarchically, when the fulfillment of the essential needs precedes the fulfillment of less essential needs (Maslow, 1960) . The lack of realization of some of the human needs creates imbalance in the absent level. The prolonged lack of balance will cause mishaps and illnesses.
It is customary to describe the hierarchy of needs as a pyramid, when at the basis of the pyramid are found the fundamental needs necessary to ensure a person’s physical existence. As one rises in the pyramid towards its apex, the needs become spiritual. When needs from a lower level are realized, the needs of the level above become relevant. Every type of needs is accompanied by an analysis of what happens when these needs are not fulfilled.
1. The physiological needs are found at the basis of the pyramid: breathing, water, food, maintenance of temperature, and sleep.
2. The need for security: This need is found above the physiological needs. When these are provided, the person is then troubled over his need for quiet, security, stability, and protection; lacking the satisfaction of this need, anxieties, tension, and a series of behaviors deriving from this lack then develop.
3. The need for love and belonging: The need for relations with other people, for friends, for love, for children, for a sense of community belonging. The lack of satisfaction of this need induces feelings of loneliness, social anxiety, etc.
4. The need for appreciation: It is necessary to differentiate between the need for the appreciation of other people – social status, degrees, recognition, publicity, and political power and the need for self-appreciation – self-confidence, achievement orientation, independence, and freedom. Lacking the fulfillment of this need, feelings of lack of self-confidence, inferiority complexes, and low self-image appear, and these awaken mental problems and psychological disorders. The first four layers of needs are those that cause the person a lack, when they are not fulfilled, and when they are realized – he does not feel a thing. All these needs are existential needs, which the person needs to maintain his physical and mental health (Maslow, 1970). A severe lack in the fulfillment of these needs in childhood may lead to the development of disorders in the person’s behavior and to the impairment in his functioning. The person who suffered from this severe lack will be focused all his life on his frustration and feelings that he has missed out.
5. The fifth and supreme need is the need for self-fulfillment. This need is not realized or balanced. This is an ongoing need for self-expression, for inner happiness, for creativity, for the full actualization of the individual’s abilities. The fulfillment of this need, which is not existential like that previous four needs, is very rare. The motives behind this fulfillment are the search for truth, morality, beauty, wholeness, essentialness, uniqueness, justice, simplicity, happiness, independence, and meaning. When people fill their basic needs (the first four levels) but do not succeed in achieving self-realization, they suffer from different psychological problems, such as depression, alienation, despair, etc. (Maslow, 1970).
The fulfillment of human needs at all the levels of the health scale create the whole, the holistic. They express contradictory and complementary needs that characterize changing needs and challenges for a full life. The fulfillment of the human needs in all levels, according to integrated medicine, is the key to holistic health

Movement between the Four Levels of the Health Scale
The movement bottom up and top down on the ladder of health is what allows the integration of all the needs into the shaping of the personality of a whole person. When the person’s needs in one of the levels are not fulfilled, imbalance is created. The pattern of integrated medicine proposes certain tools for balance between the levels, through the training of the weak intelligences and through lousky medicines for support and reinforcement of the weak levels.
The individual’s personality is divided into four worlds (levels) – the objective world, the subjective world, the symbolic world, and the holistic world. King emphasizes and enhances the need for balance between the levels through movement on the health scale (King, 1988) .
• In the objective world (the physical dimension), the assumption is that every thing has a beginning and an end. The color of the trees, the smell of the flowers, the song of birds, the feeling of cold, the reality of plants, animals, people. Things that can be seen, smelled, and touched, things for which we can collect information and process it in the framework of empiric experiments are a format of objective thinking. The expression of the objective world is separation and is external to the observing person. In the observer’s eyes, it appears obvious and acceptable as a single possible truth. In the objective world, everything is measurable and there is only one (scientific) truth. In this dimension, the healing occurs through medicines, analyses, massage, plants, movement, and nutrition.
• In the subjective world (emotional dimension) everything is related, everything is found in one circle. The truth is not one and everything is correct and true. A person is aware of the light and forces that act around him, he feels himself a part of them, one part, not separate. The past and the future occur in the present, energy is natural communication, thoughts and feelings are conveyed naturally from person to person. Hence, every harm to one person or to nature is harm to every person. In this dimension, healing occurs through an integration of arts, energetic balance, energy transference, healing, shiatsu, stones, etc.
• The symbolic world (intellectual dimension) is a world of symbols. A person is a part of everything. The birds sing their promise of happiness and the sunrise is the touch of the Creator’s light. The person writes or draws to capture the symbolism of the moment. A dream, too, is a symbol and therefore reality is a dream that can be changed. Every experience in the symbolic world is the person’s reflection. To change the experiences, a person can change what the event symbolizes for him or change himself so that his refection will change and then the event, too, will change. This is an excellent tool to differentiate between how beliefs are reflected in the body and experiences and how conditions and systems of relations change when the beliefs change. In the symbolic world, the meaning that everything has is the meaning that the person gives it. On this dimension, the healing occurs through different treatment methods such as deciphering dreams, guided imagery, positive thinking, mantras, and in the types of healing that required the patient’s belief in himself.
• In the holistic world (the spiritual dimension), the person is the light and he feels how the light of the sun becomes power. The person’s presence is what allows the light to be what we were. Since everything has one identity, ‘everything is me’, ‘I am the thing itself’. A person can assumes roles and experiences successfully so that the experiences delineate him. On this dimension, the healing occurs through finding purpose and destiny, through forgiveness and prayer.

To Move between the Dimension for the Purpose of Inner Change
The imbalance appears when a person acts only in one dimension and does not move between the dimensions and does not combine between the different needs. To move between the worlds, a person needs to effect an inner change, to change approach and the direction related to his goals, to experience the world and the place where he is found from love, to hold onto love and not let go. An inner change occurs when a person moves from dimension to dimension: “I am separate, I am within, I am a part, and I am the thing itself”. The movement from dimension to dimension allows change to occur for the purpose of the improvement of abilities (intelligences) and the performance of the life tasks (love, career, money, and health).
When a patient is engaged solely in the physical dimension, meaning ‘I am separate’, he can bring the knowledge as it was the ‘single truth’ and to treat without involvement. When the patient rises in the ladder to the emotional dimension, he brings his knowledge as a relative truth and examines it versus the patient’s feelings. This way empowers the patient and allows him to assume responsibility on the treatment. When the therapist works in the intellectual dimension, “I am a part”, he adjusts the treatment to the patient’s beliefs and in this way the inner forces he recruits inner forces for healing, which enable a ‘quantum leap’ (Chopra, 1997) . The quantum leap is an inner change, which alters the genetic code and effects ‘spontaneous healing’ . When the therapist works in the spiritual dimension, it is as if he were the patient, the illness, and the possibilities of healing, all one unit. Only the therapist’s and the patient’s free will are what determines what to choose. The ability to move between the dimension is what induces the desired miracle and it enables the ‘quantum leap’ and whole healing.
A person is an entity constructed of four dimensions that express the whole. The four dimensions express contradictory and complementary desires, which characterize changing needs and challenges for a full life. The division into four reflects the complete range of life: the four elements – air, fire, water, earth; the four realities – silent growing living speaking, the four tasks of life – love, career, money, health; and the four dimensions – physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. The body is an expression of the world of emotion. The emotional dimension is an expression of the intellectual world (attitudes and beliefs). The intellectual dimension is an expression of the spiritual world, which is the ability to define the desire to give or receive and to determine the direction freely. Every mishap or difficulty, and happiness and success, in one dimension appears in the other ones. The different dimensions indicate the same phenomenon with a change of form – change of form from air to fire, and from fire to water, and from water to earth. This is the same entity that goes up and down on the ladder. This is the same entity that speaks in different languages. The four dimensions are one unity that expresses different frequencies on the whole human ladder. We saw that only an integrated action and movement in all four of the dimensions is what ensures body and mind balance (King, 1988).
At every moment over the course of life, a person is found and acts in one of the worlds (dimensions). Frequently a person acts in both or in three or in all four worlds (dimensions) at the same time. Although there is a world (dimension) in which the person lives naturally, the way to integrated medicine is balance among the dimensions. A person needs to be aware of his desire to receive and desire to give in every dimension and to balance between the desires. When a person does not act over time in one of the four dimensions, imbalance is created. To restore the balance, it is necessary to act opposite to the personal nature (movement from bottom up); it is necessary to change approach and then to change habits. At the end of the process of ten stages (the therapists circle, discussed in the continuation) the reality changes.