DOCTOR SPEAKS

Prof B M Hegde

This new column, starting on the Rama Navami day, hopes to give you suggestions that you might need for a sensible way of living to attain health and happiness as long as you live. Disease is an accident.   No power on earth could ever predict as to who gets what disease and when. The question why one gets disease could never be answered by positive science. The usual health education columns in the print media, as also in the electronic media, deal with illness and also the fear of one or other disease waiting to attack you anytime. In short, they heighten anxiety in all of us. Philosophically, medicine should only try and allay anxiety-both patient anxiety of death and disability and doctor anxiety of having done enough or not. On the contrary, the conventional health related articles deal with the so-called risk factors of which there are so many around us that none of us could hope to escape their wrath.

“Happiness is living dangerously” is a good adage to remember. We can never make this world completely safe for us to live and if we try to do that we can never be happy! Death is the only certainty in life and, in fact, the only certainty on earth. The greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century has been the awareness of man’s ignorance. This series of articles, in every issue of the Bhavan’s Journal, from now on would give you a new kind of a message to help you to live happily without dying of fear every day. Death would come at the appointed time and nothing on earth could stop that. The so-called avoidable deaths, in fact, are only accidental deaths on the road. Bernard Shaw in his book Doctor’s Dilemma had this advice “never try to live here for ever you will certainly not succeed.”  “Prasanna atma indriya manaha swastha ithyabhidheeyathe”  says Ayurveda. If you could keep your soul, senses and the mind happy health would be yours!

Modern medicine lost an opportunity to change for the better by adopting the scientific principles of quantum physics. Instead it got itself lost in reductionist science in looking at the human body in bits and pieces and formulating theories of causation of diseases and their management. Quantum physics now understands the human mind and consciousness, which collectively are more important than all the blood reports and ECG reports put together to know your future. Modern medicine now is realizing the importance of the human mind in human disease. Study after study have shown the pivotal role of the mind-depression, hatred, jealousy and anger-in the causation of major killers like heart attacks and cancer. More than one hundred years ago a thinking physician, William Harvey, who for the first time found out that the blood circulates through the heart (Ayurveda knew this thousands of years ago!), had graphically described the effects of the human mind on the body thus: “in every affliction the body suffers-in anger the pupils contract, in infamy and shame the cheeks blush and the ears burn, in lust the member gets distended and erected quickly.”  Since there was no money business involved in this the advice got quickly forgotten. Things like cholesterol and sugar were highlighted as there is a big business in their estimation and life long drug therapy, and hence the fuss about the latter.

Apart from the quick fixes of emergency management where modern medicine has done very well, it has failed in all other fields. Be that as it may, modern medicine has not even been able to reach a quarter of this world’s population. A good 80% of the population even today lives without any help from modern medicine. This is a very sad commentary on it after nearly five thousand years of existence from the time it started as mumbo-jumbo, witchcraft and sorcery on the Nile Valley in Egypt. The problem has been that modern medicine assesses the body (phenotype) very efficiently to predict the future; but fails miserably as time evolution in a dynamic system like the human body depends on the total knowledge of the initial state of the organism (man). Having cut off the mind from the body and not knowing the genotype “ doctors have been predicting the unpredictable”.

The risk factor theory, therefore, falls by the wayside. All screening tests in a healthy person may not be of any use for future predictions. Even the West has realized this. “Routine screening may be dangerous” screams a recent editorial in the prestigious British medical Journal. “Cancer screening useless” screams another leader in the famous British journal The Lancet.

Quantum physics has taken modern science close to ancient Indian thinking of the Rishis who had   the awareness of the working of the world. Quantum physics has taught one good thing to modern science,  according to the editor of the Scientific American, who opines:“ I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when looked at in the right way, did not become still more complicated.”  That is the state in which modern medicine is at the moment.

To help mankind, which has lived on this earth in various form for well over 9,00,000 years in 50,000 generations without modern medical help, human body has the in-built immune system which corrects almost all the deviations from health in normal circumstances. Rarely man gets thrown out of this chaos of health into a static state nearer death. By and large he again falls back into the chaos of health. He may need the help of a thinking doctor here.

These series of articles would unravel the mysteries of human existence to make it easier for you to understand and live sensibly.

Thinking people all over the world feel that time is ripe to think afresh in the field of medicine for the good of humanity at large and complement it with the ancient wisdoms. Ayurveda is now recorded to be the mother of all medical wisdoms in this Universe. Let us see how life could be made happier applying the essentials of the ancient Ayurvedic system to the good things in modern medicine in this series of articles. As Ayurveda deals mainly with the science of life, these articles aim at making you help the wisdom of your body to live without external assistance as far as possible. Only when the internal machine fails ( man gets symptoms of any illness) should modern medicine or for that matter any system of medicine  intervene. Sir William Osler had this advice for his students, at the beginning of the last century: “ When man is doing well never interfere.”  This has been proved right even by present day studies.

If there are any specific questions in the minds of the readers they are welcome to write to the editor and the answers, to the extent possible, would be given in the subsequent articles so that other readers also get the benefit of the answers. Hope you enjoy these facts about the asset factors in human life that keep us going as long as we live. No man, no author, not even the greatest, ever provides the last word on anything. “Men are ‘vain authorities who can resolve nothing” wrote Michel de Montaigne, the greatest French philosopher of all times in his The Essays. How true!  I write these columns as I feel it is a weakens to be silent when it is proper to speak and also to speak when it is proper to be silent. I feel that we in modern medicine have been barking up the wrong tree for too long. Hence this effort. 

Sarve Janaaha Sukhino Bhavanthu.

" I hope that Lord Grey and you are well-no easy thing seeing that there are above 1500 diseases to which man is   subjected."
            Sidney Smith to Lady Grey, February 1836.

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