“ Of course, the entire effort is to put oneself

Outside the ordinary range

Of what are called statistics.”

-Stephen Spender.





Modern medicine started as an art nearly five thousand years ago: en route, it got the label of “science”, around the twelfth century AD, when European Universities accepted medicine as a science. However, ever since then medicine has been riding piggyback on the natural sciences of physics, chemistry and biology. Whereas physics forked off to get into the new field of quantum reality around the beginning of the last century with chemistry following, medicine and biology are still immersed in the ancient Cartesian logic of static linear relationships, comfortable with the notion that they have found their “Holy Grail”. What with all the imponderables inside the non-linear dynamic human system, the deterministic predictability model seems inadequate, to say the least. Consequently, the science of medicine, as of now, is faulty.



The art of medicine, however, had already taken a back seat ever since the glamour of the scientific label glorified medicine. The result is that medicine today is neither an art nor a science. Rather, medicine is a pure business. Time was when the label of science gave medicine that much more respectability and acceptability in society, having been labelled sorcery, witchcraft and magic to begin with, five thousand years ago. Science also gave it a commercial status. Medi-business, a zillion-dollar business today, finds it difficult to divorce its linear deterministic model. The medical technology that developed over the years has been based on the linear relationships, anyway. Even though an occasional medical person realises the folly of the system, his/her’s would be the lonely voice drowned in the vast sea of opinions from the “thought leaders,” the new brand of medical Mafia that has grown around the establishment. This group has entrenched itself both in the delivery of medical care and its research wing. The indicators, therefore, find it difficult to swim against the current and eventually give up the fight.



The result has been that hospitals are getting slimmer, patients opting out to murky waters of alternative therapies, doctors frustrated, insurance companies broke, and even HMOs going bankrupt by the day, creating confusion all round in the west. Naturally, the players would want to go to third world countries in a big way. New companies are being floated with venture capital from the west to encourage local wealthy people to get into hospital business in those countries. Of course, doctors, all over, have forgotten the Hippocratic warning: “ Never try to make money in the sick room.” Hospitals are mushrooming in third world countries with greedy people wanting to make big money. Common people in those countries do not even have the bare minimum health needs like clean drinking water, enough food uncontaminated by human and/or animal excreta, avoidance of cooking smoke, as also the meager economic empowerment of women.



To cite an example, a recent “scientific” study, sponsored by a prestigious university in the west, looked at diarrhoeal deaths in small children in a third world village. The only water supply in that village was a small pond in which animals bathed, children defecated, women washed their clothes and, all of the former drank the same water. Obviously, the village was chosen because of the “statistical” possibility of getting a large enough sample of total deaths due to diarrhoea in record time! Th researchers did succeed in showing how the addition of zinc to the diet would bring down diarrhoeal deaths significantly in a controlled study that satisfied the statistical rigor for publication. The data, having been published in a “prestigious” journal, resulted in the sale of zinc tablets in the market.



The researchers achieved their goal, but the losers were the poor people. One quarter of the amount spent for the study, spent instead to dig a couple of bore wells in that village for drinking water, would have eliminated diarrhoeal deaths one hundred per cent in that village for all times to come for sure, sans statistics! That would have been cost effective from the humanity’s point of view. But alas! That was not to be for the good of “science”, citation indices and, the medi-business. Even John Snow would have obtained similar results in SOHO in London during the cholera epidemic, instead of destroying the Broad Street water pump and discovering, serendipitously, the mode of transmission of cholera for the first time, long before microbiologists had even seen the cholera vibrio! Thank God, he did not know statistics in 1854 AD!



Lately a new disease has been invented in the medi-business world. Drug companies have been discovered to invent diseases, using the expertise of their thought leaders, to sell their wares! Recent example is “female impotence,” a very wild imagination of the fertile mind of the thought leaders. Thanks to their ingenuity and their clout with the medical scientific establishments, this new disease is already in print having received a code number in the accepted list of diseases. You could expect female impotence as a disease in medical texts soon enough for the next batch of medicos to memorise for the examinations. It is known that medical texts are written with money from drug barons in the west.



Let us look at all the myths in medicine based on the linear mathematics. Let us try and demolish the myths one by one using the right kind of holistic non-linear mathematics and the new science of chaos, which alone could unravel the mysteries of the dynamic human system. Quantum physics would put the human mind in the driving seat in medical research. Everything is in the eye of the beholder, so elegantly pictured in Erwin Schrodinger’s Cat Hypothesis as early as 1932. This would displace the much touted reductionist molecular biology from the driving seat. The much publicised predictions about the human genome that there would be more than one hundred thousand genes in all to go round-one for each illness-became a myth already in that we humans have just about twice as many genes as a round worm has. There is, naturally, not enough to go round. Ian Wilmot, the creator of the celebrated clone-“Dolly,” the sheep, sobered down a lot lately, had to swallow his own words after he was forced to send Dolly to meet her real maker in heaven, for scientific reasons. Let us analyse the myths one by one now.



Myth One:



Every ill has a pill.



Truth:



Every pill has an ill waiting in the far corner. Iatrogenic diseases are going up exponentially with more drugs and technology in the market!



Myth Two:



Doctors can predict the future by routine check up of the apparently healthy.



Truth:



Doctors have been predicting the unpredictable using linear mathematics.

Routine screening of the healthy could dangerously damage their health!



Myth Three:



Anti-biotics would banish germs from this world.



Truth:



Anti-biotics have created new deadly germs.

Maggots kill those germs.



Myth Four:



Tight Control of blood sugar using drugs helps diabetics.



Truth:



Very tight control of blood sugar with drugs increases complications in the long run.



Myth Five:



Organ Transplant has solved problems.



Truth:



Organ transplant is mired with multiple old and new problems.

Prevention of diseases is the only answer.



Myth Six:



Pre-hypertension – a new disease!



Truth:



When systolic blood pressure falls below 30 mm Hg. there would be no (heart) disease!

Man might not be alive to get heart attacks.



Myth Seven:



Universal Vaccination eliminates all diseases.



Truth:



Dynamic cycle of diseases. Polio is back again in many parts of the world.



Myth Eight:



More doctors and hospitals make man healthy.



Truth:



More doctors less health.

More interventions increase deaths and disability. Ulysses syndromes.



Myth Nine:



Very heavy alcoholics do not get heart attacks. Drinking in moderation is good for the heart.



Truth:



Very heavy alcoholics do not live long enough to get heart attacks; they die young of liver disease.

Mild and moderate drinkers have higher stroke rates.



Myth Ten:



Coronary revascularisation is a boon.



Truth:



Better reserved for extreme cases.

Stroke rate quadruples if done immediately after a heart attack.

Usually done for money.



Myth Eleven:



Bio-medical reductionist model of health and disease is correct.



Truth:



The concept is dangerous. Human body works as a whole (holism)



Myth Twelve:



Organ Based specialties are a good concept.



Truth:



Yes, for making money.

Mind-body medicine is the future.



Myth Thirteen:



Hi-tech Medical Education is the ideal one.



Truth:



Humanism totally missing.

Medical education needs revamping.



Myth Fourteen:



Modern medicine is the panacea for all ills.



Truth:



Needed only for emergency care.

Complementary systems could save lives and precious dollars.



Myth Fifteen:



Health is the absence of physical illnesses. Artificially correct any deviation from the accepted normal range to remain healthy.



Truth:



Health is a very complicated holistic model of wellness. Mere absence of physical disease does not necessarily make a man healthy. Correcting normal deviations of various parameters need not keep one healthy. Change of mode of living could do that. Health is the birth right of every one. The body has a very powerful, in-built immune system to heal, except in rare cases where the immune system could be overwhelmed and result in death. Death and disease are only accidents, whereas health is the rule.



Myth Sixteen:



Rhythm is health.

Regulate body parameters. (Euboxic medicine)



Truth:



CHAOS is health.

Euboxic medicine could result in dysboxic death!



Myth Seventeen:



Reduce every one’s serum cholesterol to below the predicted normal.



Truth:



The Gaussian distribution curve for cholesterol for normal and vascular disease patients remains similar.



Myth Eighteen:



Regular aspirin use in the middle aged prevents vascular diseases! (What dose?)



Truth:



Marginally reduces non-fatal heart attacks.

Increases total death, though, in the end.



Myth Nineteen:



Tight control of blood pressure with powerful drugs is ideal.



Truth:



Very well drug controlled hypertensives have thrice the mortality of their normotensive cousins in society, after the first five years’, despite good control of box blood pressure.



“The mind of the bigot is like the pupil of the eye; the more

light you pour upon it, the more it will contract.”

-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.





BIBLIOGRAPHY.