Today science means technology associated with it and the resultant money that accrues from all that. So much so there is a big business behind selling science to the gullible public. If the label scientific is attached to anything, the label itself brings respect. If one talks against such business he/she is dubbed as unscientific and superstitious. Science simply is making models, mostly mathematical constructs, which, with verbal explanations, are supposed to work. Most do not. How I wish they did. As early as the 1950s one of the greatest medical scientists, Peter Medawar, wrote an excellent book entitled Limits of Science which goes deep into the limitations which must be understood by anyone wanting to get into this field of research.1 Although this book was hailed as his best, many seem to have ignored the book. One or two examples will suffice to show the hollowness of the scientific basis of modern medicine.



In the field of pharmaceuticals any chemical molecule that seems to have some effect on a group of animal cells is immediately called a scientific discovery and then on it goes through a set process of animal testing, formulation, pilot studies in humans and the so-called randomized controlled study before getting the license to sell the drug to the public at large. There is a huge market for pharmaceuticals these days as there is a parallel attempt to medicalize human life and to create a fear psychosis in the masses to sell drugs in the name of preventing future catastrophes resulting from the silent killers.2



A recent survey in the US showed that the present “risk factor hypotheses” would make 90% of the population, by the age of forty to have, at least, one risk factor needing drug intervention, going up to one hundred per cent by the age sixty. This is quite scary in view of the fact that most, if not all, those drugs used in treating asymptomatic, apparently healthy individuals to correct the “so called” risk factors seem, on long term audits, to be much more dangerous than the risk factors themselves.3



To cap it, our present statistical definition of “normality” to be the mean plus/minus two standard deviations from the mean, in a Gaussian distribution would, per force, declare 5% of healthy individuals as abnormal-the very much underestimated “false positives,” for each of the body parameters measured at any given time. The Total Body Scanner today can measure up to five hundred parameters at a given time. There is no way for any one who goes for a check up to come out as normal at all. The whole population of the world of six billion and odd, if they could afford total body scanner, would qualify to be intervened! This then would be the biggest business netting trillions of dollars annually.4



More than all these is the problem with the scientific foundation of modern medicine. All sciences depend on mathematics to formulate their hypothesis. Medical science is no exception. Ever since medicine, in its present avatar, was accepted as a science by the European Universities in the twelfth Century, medicine used the linear mathematics of deterministic predictability, used by other natural sciences, as its base. Although physics deviated from this orthodox rule in the early part of the last Century and went into quantum physics, medicine did not follow suit. How I wish it did! This is our curse today.



Human organism is dynamic and is continually run by food and oxygen. Since human physiology is not static, it does not follow the linear laws of deterministic predictability. Human organism becomes static only after death. “Doctors have, of course, been predicting the unpredictable” all through, wrote a leading physicist, William Firth, of the Strathclyde University, Glasgow, in one of his masterpieces in the British Medical Journal, way back in 1991. Who cares? The human body follows the laws of non-linear mathematics with fractals-the new science of CHAOS.5



In medicine there is a disturbing polarization of natural science oriented versus psychosocial oriented medicine. This has its roots in the traditional Cartesian division of res cogitans (thinking substance) and res extensa (extended or corporeal substance), the dualism of mind and body. If medicine were to incorporate the thoughts of modern physics more effectively, large stride forward could be achieved for the good of humanity. That would overcome the polarization and the conflicts caused by the fallacious dualistic thinking. Neils Bohr and other physicists of the Copenhagen group recognized way back in the 1920s and 1930s that in modern natural sciences-because of the quantum theory-the distinction between subject and object can no longer be made in many cases.



If we analyse the human body beyond organs, cells and molecules, and atoms to the level of subatomic particles, one quickly realizes that the subatomic particles can never be understood as corporeal structures in the res extensa concept. They can only be construed as mathematical structures. The human mind can never be confined to the brain alone. It is an integral part of every human body cell at its subatomic level. Werner Heisenberg even referred to these structures as being closely related to Plato’s forms. So our present thinking in medicine of mind-body separation does not hold water any longer. Freiderich Wilhelm Schmahl and his colleague Carl Freiderich von Weizsacker, belonging to the Copenhagen group mentioned earlier, passionately write the following final paragraph in their message in The Lancet in 1998. I have drawn extensively from their thoughts in this article.6, 7



“Modern Medicine must respond to the developments in its natural scientific base, and rethink its own position with regard to them. The traditional strict division between psyche and soma must be overcome and a unified, holistic approach to the patient be encouraged.” Mainline medical researchers could not care less as this new thinking, right though it might be, is detrimental to the hefty business of medicalising the population and drugging them with the false promise that they will be spared of untimely death and disability through routine screening and intervention. Both the latter have been time and again proven wrong at the cost of extra lives lost in such intervened groups at the end of the day. Time evolution in any dynamic system depends not on the partial knowledge of the initial state of the organism but on its total knowledge. The latter is impossible now if we consider the holistic concept of modern physics. This was and is the basis of Indian Ayurveda, the great science that has stood the test of “times out of mind” with its holistic quantum physics base!



Health is a dynamic but chaotic attractor in phase space competing with another static attractor, death, in phase space. Disease is only a temporary state where the human organism is thrown out of the chaotic healthy attractor towards the static attractor. Most of the time the natural tendency for the human organism is to fall back into the healthy chaotic attractor again. In this process what matters is the holistic change in the life style of the organism and not our reductionist medical interventions. But rarely the human organism could get thrown out too far into the phase space reaching almost the static attractor, from where the organism might find it difficult to fall back into the healthy chaotic attractor. In this case the patient also might have unbearable symptoms. Here is the right place for the doctor to intervene to cure rarely, comfort mostly, but console always, as advised by the father of modern medicine, Hippocrates. Occasionally, even the latter event might turn out to be a surprise jump for the human organism to fall back into the healthy chaotic attractor, notwithstanding our intervention.5



If one understands quantum mechanics governing human physiology, we quickly become humble and realize that we are only there to facilitate the human organism to fall back to the chaotic healthy attractor on its own most, if not all the time! One could read with profit this beautiful article by Prof. Firth in the British Medical Journal of December 26th 1991.5 If the medical world does not wake up from its deep slumber, we will be worsening the plight of the hapless patients. Already the writing is on the wall. A recent Institute of Medicine report in the US showed doctors and their interventions to be the third important cause of death there followed in the fourth place by the notorious Adverse Drug Reactions of the common drug used by doctors!9 When doctors went on strike in Israel recently death rate and disability count fell significantly in all cities in that country only to reach the original state after doctors returned to work. Be warned.10



Bibliography.



1) Medawar P. The Limits of Science. 1986. Oxford University Press.

2) Hegde BM Genes, Dreams and Realities. J Assoc.Physi. India. 1999; 47: 1191-1193.

3) Smith R. Where is the Wisdom?...The poverty of medical evidence. BMJ 1991; 303:798-799.

4) Smith R. The Screening Industry. BMJ; 326: 889.

5) Firth WJ. Chaos-predicting the unpredictable. BMJ 1991; 303: 1565-1568.

6) Schmahl FW, von Weizsacker CF. Medicine and Modern Physics. Lancet 1998; 351: 1291-1292.

7) Heisenberg W. Physics and Beyond. 1971. New York: Harper and Row.

8) Bohr N. The quantum postulate and the recent development of atomic theory. Nature 1928; 121 (suppl.) : 580-590.

9) Starfield B. Is US medicine the best in the world? JAMA 2000; 284: 483-485.

10) Benarde MA. You’ve Been Had! : How the Media and Environmentalists Turned America into a Nation of Hypochondriacs. 2002. Rutgers University Press, New Jersey.