“I am as bad as the worst, but, thank God, I am as good as the best.”

Walt Whitman.





The above caption of a Chinaman’s tale is lifted right out of Bertrand Russell’s wonderful book The Conquest of Happiness. It tells the whole story. Modern reductionist science in medicine, if ever it qualifies to be a science, looks at every aspect of human wellness and illness in bits and pieces. Risk factor hypothesis is one such. Many things could have associations but to make the association a cause-effect relationship is what the reductionist scientists do.



The French Paradox, referred to in a recent article in the British Medical Journal, is a good example of this kind of science that is best described in Dutch thus: “Wetenschap Is Wat Wetenschappers Doen.” Science (reductionist) is what scientists do. Every single paper that connects two aspects of life which would help medi-business becomes a very important story and is picked up as “scientific truth” to be sold to the gullible public. Science today enjoys respectability in society. No two people agree with a single definition of science, although everyone has a clear picture of what it is. It is the fable of the blind men and the elephant raised to a higher power.



I remember having seen a caption, a catchy one at that, in the New York Times, years ago which read: "very heavy alcoholics do not get heart attacks…………." Framingham data. That was it. It made the day for the alcohol lobby. I am told, I can not vouch for that, that the alcohol sales went up three fold in the next year or so. Any one in his senses would capitalize on that statement. Who wants to get a heart attack? If a good and tasty thing like a peg of wisky could keep the heart attacks away all the more welcome!



Some one wanted to read the whole Framingham report. When read, it was explicitly clear: "Very heavy alcoholics do not get a heart attack as they do not normally live beyond thirty years and die early of liver failure. Consequently, they do not get a heart attack as they do not live up to the age when heart attacks are common-fourth and fifth decades." The second one was not published in the New York Times! News papers and even epidemiologists love catchy titles. Diabetic bomb, killer heart attacks, killer high blood pressure, coffee and cancer- are some of the very attractive titles. Most of them are not true!



There are as many studies showing that alcohol, even in small quantities, might harm human health, although it might make an apparent dent in the non-fatal myocardial infarction incidence. French Paradox is one such. The French have the lowest level of the myocardial infarction related genes while the Finns and the Scotts have a much higher percentage of the gene. In addition, there are many other imponderables in this game of disease incidence and gene penetrance than what meets the eye. To say that drinking alcohol reduces heart attacks is as unscientific as saying that buying trousers would increase the heart attack rates! In Europe, since the Second World War, heart attack rates went up gradually and so did the sale of trousers. Does that mean that trousers are the cause of heart attacks?



Every teaspoon of alcohol, any kind-red or white, raises the systolic blood pressure temporarily and this is said to be associated with a higher risk of stroke at the end of the road. Higher liver diseases in those that drink regularly is another story altogether. More than all that every person who starts to drink small amounts for social occasions might end up with the Chinaman’s tale mentioned in the caption. They drinkee for drinkee to begin with and end up as drunkees. This has a significant deleterious effect on the family and society.



Asking people to drink regularly for reducing the incidence of non-fatal myocardial infarction with all the above negative data is unscientific, to say the least. If one drinks a couple of glasses of red wine, doctors need not make life miserable for him by prohibiting that. In moderation and once in a while one could indulge in pleasures like drinking. To ask non-drinkers to start this potentially dangerous habit is bad doctoring indeed.



The advice in this regard in the ageless Indian wisdom of Ayurveda is worth quoting from Charaka’s treatise: “People enjoy drinking small quantities of alcohol of different types with food and depending on the seasons, but a man who wants to keep away from diseases is well advised to avoid alcohol completely.” Whole man healing looks at all our problems from a different perspective. Reductionism in science has killed modern science. One can never assess a dynamic human body in bits and pieces. It not only works as a whole, it also works in tandem with Mother Nature.



“Three things are good in little measure and evil in large: yeast, salt, and hesitation.”

The Talmud.