Medicine was accepted as a scientific discipline in the twelfth century in the European Universities. Naturally, medicine followed the other natural sciences like mathematics, physics, and biology. Physics, being the king of sciences, medical research followed Newtonian solid state physics that was the highest wisdom of the day. However, physics changed a lot in the early 1900s, despite losing many a gem in the World War I. The new physics of quantum mechanics was not very popular even among the big names in solid state physics of those days. Albert Einstein himself was skeptical when he termed Erwin Schrodinger’s “Cat Hypothesis” as a mathematical “trick.” In reality, it was quantum mechanics that gave respectability even to chemistry.



However, medicine did not fork off to follow quantum physics but continued to toe the linear mathematical line of the solid-state physics. Lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then. Newer insights have opened up new vistas in medical research. Unfortunately, even now most of the medical research looks at the human body in bits and pieces-the Cartesian model. The knowledge thus gained is then projected on to the whole organism. Human body works as a whole and not in bits and pieces. Our efforts at predicting the future outcomes in a dynamic system like the human body, per force, will only have fifty-fifty chance of success.



Even now, with all our new sciences, it is the “Doctrine of Probabilities” of Blaise Pascal that works. Deterministic predictability does not. Controlled studies in medicine, the bench mark for drug and technology audits, compare just a few parameters of the human body like height, weight, and body mass index between the study group and the control cohort. Time evolution, on the other hand, depends on the total initial knowledge of the organism. Altering a small fraction of the initial state, with drugs or surgery, might not hold good as time evolves.



Present knowledge of the human body does not allow us to know the total initial state of man for any predictions of the future to come true. The former includes the body, mind, and the genes. As such our results and future predictions are only probabilities. Quantum physics has come to the same conclusion about the physical world. Schrodinger, having devised an innovative experiment of enclosing a cat inside a closed box, along with a decaying atom and a phial of poison to see if the cat dies when the atom decays and the phial breaks. But the future of the cat depended only on the observer opening the box and looking inside. There was no way one could predict the rate of decay of the atom, the chance being only fifty-fifty. Science is back to the “Doctrine of Probabilities” of Blaise Pascal.



We get to realise the importance of the mind in human disease and its management only when we look at it from the point of view of quantum mechanics. Mind is also a quantum concept. Mind resides in the subtlest of the subatomic particles of each and every human body cell. There are one hundred thousand billion cells in the human body. Newer studies in this direction have already yielded results that show the importance of the mind in disease. Two of the ongoing interventional studies (ENRICHD-Enhancing Recovery in Coronary Heart Disease and SADHART- Sertaline and Depression in Heart Attack Study) would soon give us better perspective in this direction. ( Editorial. Cardiovasc. Rev. & Reports 2001 June, 334-335) Two elegant studies of intercessory prayer helping patients after a heart attack to reduce death and disability show how the leptons (lepto-quarks) of the person who prays transmit the soothing effect on to the patient at a distance. (Harris WS, Gowda M, Kolb JW et.al A randomised controlled trial of the effects of remote, intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients admitted to the coronary care unit. Arch. Intern. Med 1999; 159: 2273-8) In addition, the groundbreaking research of the Nobel winning botanist, Barbara McClintock, revealed the power of the mind even on the genes-the Jumping Gene Hypothesis.



Our own work and the work of some others in the field of heart rate variability (HRV) has thrown more light on the interconnectedness (mode-locking) of the systems in the human body. Breathing being the most dominant rhythm, it controls all others like the ultradian and the circadian rhythms. Newer physiology of menstruation shows how the Moon’s gravitational force influences the infradian rhythm of the menstrual cycle giving the 28 days cycle in a healthy woman. The latter shows the effect of the environment and other planets on human physiology.



Modern medicine has failed to predict the future in the present reductionist linear relationships that we follow in our research methods. Long term studies of interventions in apparently healthy people with one or two abnormalities of body parameters (raised blood pressure or blood sugar) had shown the unpredictable calamities in some treated patients. Time evolution follows the rules of the Cat Hypothesis. The probability of asymptomatic hypertension or hyperglycaemia in an otherwise healthy individual resulting in organ damage in the long run is only fifty-fifty. Those who do not go in for any change in the long run get exposed to the long-term side effects of the chemical compounds that they have been taking. Prospective studies of multiple interventions in those with the "so-called" risk factors also produced unexpected results.



None of the above uncertainties are unexpected if one understands quantum mechanics. Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle rules the world. Our future course of action should be to treat the human body as a whole with its inherent genetic and environmental make-up. This would yield the desired results. We should stop predicting the unpredictable in healthy people. We should be very careful in intervening in asymptomatic patients unless they are either heavy alcoholics or smokers to begin with. The human mind sends signals each time something goes wrong with the body. Many of us are incapable of listening to the signals because we dull our senses by our habits of smoking, alcohol intake and large doses of stimulants like caffeine and other drugs. In the absence of these stimulants, one could easily listen to one’s mind and try and correct the deviations to a large extent.



Human mind has been extensively studied in the ancient Indian system of Ayurveda wherein interventional methods are also suggested. Ayurveda classifies human kind into constitutional types based on their mind, body and the genes. This would facilitate better research tools to do controlled studies. In the future modern medicine will have to draw inspiration from other complementary systems as well. It is the subtlest, the lepto-quark-the last bit of an atom, like the human mind that runs the show. With this background I had suggested elsewhere a newer concept of illness, where the mind plays the major role, about which we shall learn more next week.





MIND OVERSEES BODY’S HEALTH



Prof. B. M. Hegde,

Hegdebm@gmail.com





Every disease starts as a seed in the mind. It is not what we eat that kills us but what eats us-negative thoughts- those kill us. The seed grows slowly in the body, aided and abetted by our environment (e.g: tobacco smoke) and our genetic make up. This could, after a lapse of time, result in the final disease. Management should, therefore, start with the mind and then proceed systematically to correct all the faults holistically. Our present system just studies the human body in isolation to detect abnormalities (raised sugar etc) that might only be the beginning of the future disease and could get corrected on its own if other factors change as time evolves. Instead, if we try and lower that elevated level by drugs, we might be (50-50) harming the process. The body’s repair mechanism would try and set things right in every situation. Doctors could profitably intervene only when the internal balance fails and symptoms come up.



Sir Arthur Eddington summed up the situation in quantum physics thus: “No familiar concept can be woven around the electron….it is something unknown and is doing we do not know what!” The model of the atom predicted by Neils Bohr and other great physicists did not stand the test of time. It is an irony of fate that in 1906 J.J.Thomson of the Cavendish Laboratory fame, got his Nobel Prize for showing that electrons were particles; in 1937 his son got his Nobel for showing that electrons were waves. Both father and son were correct. Neutrons and protons are also similarly waves and particles.



But nobody has seen an electron so far. Similarly, in medicine we have now realised the importance of the mind, which no one has seen so far. Where is the mind? Never mind. What is matter? No matter. But what is important is what the mind does for the matter. Present research and the future direction of medical research must accept the supremacy of the mind over matter for better medical care delivery. To put it in Sir Arthur’s words: “Mind is something unseen and is doing what we are still trying to grapple with.” Just as nobody understands what really goes on inside an atom, medical science does not understand what goes on inside the human mind. Mind is, like the electron, a sub-atomic quantum concept. We could easily study what the mind does to the body and its diseases. A complete break with the past thinking is the only answer to better patient care.



Eventually it is the subtle, the sub-atomic particle, the lepton, which is the king. Leptons run the whole show for the mind, body, and the genes. Until we realise this and make suitable changes in our medical research methodologies, we would be making the same mistakes that we have been making in the last few centuries. “Learn from history, as otherwise we will have to relive history”, is a good advice by the great Roman thinker, Cicero. Let us learn from the history of quantum physics. Great physicists of repute those days vehemently opposed the newer developments. I am sure the same opposition would be there to change medical thinking. Let us respect the subtlest to get the best. Mind should rule over matter.