ASPIRIN AND HEALTH
Posted by bmhegde on 1
There is a great enthusiasm now among the informed public that every adult should take a daily small dose of aspirin to keep the deadly heart disease and thrombotic stroke at bay. Millions are swallowing the small pill daily. This drug has been with mankind for hundreds of years, originally having been obtained from the European Willow bark. The first drug company that manufactured aspirin as such was the Bayer Company in Germany. The then chief of Bayer was a Jew in the 30s. Hitler threw him into the prison and gave the company to one of the junior technicians who was a Nazi. The latter copied the original notes of his erstwhile boss and made the drug in his own name.
Introduced as an anti-pyretic to reduce fever and a painkiller, this has now been known to be a very useful adjunct to heart and vessel disease patients, as a long term preventive measure. However, many questions still remain to be answered. After hundreds of years of use we still do not know the ideal dose of aspirin fo many conditions! Ever since it was found that aspirin could prevent intra-vascular clotting, it was used in many conditions where clotting is the main cause of the final assault on the blood vessels. The interesting aspect of this is that blood has to clot sometimes inside the vessel when the need arises. If this is also prevented it may result in abnormal bleeding giving rise to other complications. One is between the devil and the deep-sea situation. Drug companies have been trying to sell this as a panacea for all vascular diseases. There has been a large-scale propaganda that if an adult takes a small dose of aspirin every day he/ she could avoid serious damages like heart attacks and thromobtic strokes. The latter is not borne out by scientific evidence. In fact, a study by John Cleland showed that while a small dose of aspirin in apparently healthy people might or might not reduce the incidence of non-fatal heart attacks, it certainly increases, marginally though, the incidence of hemorrhagic stroke in those individuals.
There are lots of advertisements that exhort people to take this or that drug to keep certain diseases at bay. If one understands the business behind this kind of a propaganda one quickly realizes the reasons why this kind of hype continues. If a drug is being marketed for the relief of symptoms of any disease its marketability is limited to a few days to a few months only, but if a drug could be sold for preventing deadly diseases people would be enticed to take the drug for the rest of their lives. That apart, at a given time there may be a few million ill people qualifying for any drug intake or surgical intervention; but if we could advertise a drug or an operation as a preventive in an otherwise healthy person there are six billion customers on a give day. Thelatter makes better business sense. In the monetary economy what matters is marketability and successful is the enterprise that sells more!
All science in the twentieth century has been using reductionism as the basis where the world is split into its bits and parts and the latter are studied in great detail to understand the world. So also in biological sciences the body is split into its cells and the latter are studied for their function and structure to know their collective function as a part of the organism. How I wish this were true! More we study and the deeper we go the more obvious is the finding that what happens in a bit may not replicate in the whole. This concept of holism is the basis of Indian thought and Indian mathematics (Vedic mathematics). If one follows this science of CHAOS one realizes the fallibility of predicting the future with inadequate knowledge of the initial state of the organism.
Medical research so far had been beset by this curse. We have to change the route now. Let us take the Indian route to truth. So far science has been change. Today’s wisdom could be tomorrow’s folly in science. Now on we should strive for trying to understand the whole that might give us a better insight into human affairs both of the mind and the body. All rules of linear mathematics may have to change. Therefore there is no way you could take a drug when you are healthy to avoid future maladies, irrespective of what drug it is. Almost all drug treatment of apparently healthy has been shown to be futile by serious audits. Common man and, even, doctors in practice, do not come to know of this: even if they did it would take a long time to sink in!