FEATURE

ARE WE BARKING UP THE WRONG TREE?

Prof. B. M. Hegde,

hegdebm@gmail.com

“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”  

Abraham Lincoln

What worries me is the news item that when the doctors in Israel went on strike in March 2000, death rate fell significantly in Jerusalem city, while it did not change in the coastal city if Netanya, where doctors worked as usual.  Even when compared to the month of March in 1999 and 1998 the fall in death rate in 2000 was noteworthy. Similar trend was reported from Los Angeles County in the 1970s and, possibly, also in Canada and Bogota in Columbia a few years ago. Even in the field of drug trials small studies seem to give striking benefit but under further investigations they “do not deliver the degree of benefit initially touted by their clinical champions and marketers.

All is not well in our thinking in this area. While the life expectancy seems to have gone up in the developed countries, mainly because of the change of mode of living and better standards of living, human life span has not gone up.  Health expectancy (a word I coined to denote the number of years a new-born baby could expect to live without the help of doctors and medicines) seems to have come down in the industrialized countries. Hardly anyone in the West goes beyond the age of ten without having to be taking multivitamin and many other pills almost as a part of their diet! In fact, health expectancy is quite high in some of the developing countries like India, where people in villages live almost their full lives without any medical interventions; the life expectancy being 67 years. 

There is hardly a “well man” in the developed West, what with routine screening making life miserable, to say the least, despite the fact that a recent editorial in the British Medical Journal avers that routine screening could seriously damage one’s health! 

 Modern quantum physics makes a mockery of future predictions in any dynamic system without the total initial knowledge of the organism. Doctors have been predicting the unpredictable. To predict man’s future his doctor should have complete knowledge of his phenotype, genotype and his consciousness. That seems to be impossible in the present state of our knowledge.

Diseases originate in the human mind (consciousness), the seeds being negative thoughts like greed, jealousy, hatred, anger, and depression.  If sown in a genetically fertile soil (with the correct genetic pattern), the seeds could grow well into the final tree (disease) with all its ramifications, when fed by the help of a conducive atmosphere, including tobacco and alcohol, which work like the best manure for the crop. Management, therefore, should take into consideration all these together; not just the changes in the phenotype. The latter has not taken us too far!

Now with quantum physics trying to understand human consciousness, time has come for modern medicine to divorce itself from the time-honoured reductionist logic of linear relations in dynamic systems. It is a pity that after so many fantastic claims of advances in medical science we have been able to eradicate only one disease, small pox. Incidentally, that was not being done with any advanced technology!  Edward Jenner, credited to be the father of vaccination, had to have his method authenticated and refined, with the help of a long term (twenty year) prospective study of the Indian system of vaccination, practised there for centuries with nearly 90% success rate, by a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London, Dr. T. Z. Holwell, in the year 1747. Holwell spent many years in India to study the system of vaccination with attenuated virus! 

 The directionless movement of mankind with the industrial revolution where value systems have been given a go by, resulting in even High School children shooting their peers for petty jealousies, we better move fast to keep them healthy on this planet. Let the wisdom of the human body play its part in the game of healthy living! Let not the medical fraternity think they are wiser than the body’s wisdom!

To compound our confusion we have been targeting these midway changes (like raised BP, sugar, fats etc.) as the cause of diseases and trying to reduce and/ or correct them mostly with disastrous results, as noted above! Proper audits of our interventions have shown many of the technologies, not to speak of drugs, have done more harm than good. Many midway technologies have never been audited at all! Many of the interventions in the intensive care units fall into this last category. The famous MRFIT study did show that while the risk factors could be modified by our interventions, the final RISK of precocious death can not be prevented! 

Antioxidant vitamins did not do much good compared to eating extra fruits and vegetables in a large group of Canadian postmenopausal women. Whereas some studies did show benefit from eating fish, larger studies did not show any difference between those that eat fish daily compared to those who eat fish once in a blue moon. Long term prospective studies did not show any benefit from regular screening and correcting the biochemical abnormalities in asymptomatic individuals. In conclusion, it is the body’s wisdom that keeps us going despite the medical industry’s efforts to make us their clients for their business!

“I was brought up to believe that the only thing worth doing was to add to the sum of accurate information in the world.”  

Margaret Mead