CHAOS-A NEW SCIENCE OF NON-LINEARITY.
Posted by bmhegde on 1
“Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.”
Macaulay.
Nature has a reason for everything, but man’s reasoning may not be able to understand that. The present day positive sciences can never answer the question “why”, although they could, at best, answer the questions, “how” or “how much.” Ratio rei is, therefore, not reason why! A physician could explain how does the heart pump blood but, will never be able to say as to why does the heart pump? Man is a very, very tiny part of Nature and lives in harmony with nature. Man, therefore, like nature, is dynamic, changing from second to second and never remaining static, at any given time, except after death. How nature could tie such complexity to such simplicity that one sees in man is far from obvious.1 One can only think of it as a miracle, the simple laws of theory and experiment, as is practised in the present day static sciences, can never apply to this dynamic human body. New concept of consciousness, which physics is trying to grapple with, gives us an inkling into the way man merges with nature.
This requires serious differential equations and not simple difference equations! In simple sciences the physical causes dominate. Human body follows natural selection that operates not at the level of the genes or embryo, but at the level of the final product-the final cause. Goethe’s Theory of colours and his On the Transformation of Plants go to explain this dichotomy very well. The dynamic man is continually run by food and oxygen to do what he/she does. Ecology simply means that everything here is related to everything else.
Consequently, health is that state of dynamic equilibrium where man is in tune with all that is around him. In the broad sense, health has to be a judicious combination of physical, psychological, emotional, spiritual, ecological, political, and creative wellbeing. Illness is an exception and, is an accident. Health is the birth right of every one. Preserving that healthy state and living in harmony with nature should be our aim in life. That is the essence of the ancient system of medical care, Ayurveda (Ayush=life and vid=knowledge), which has been in existence since “time out of mind” in India. It is said to be a part of the Vedas, the Indian scriptures of the Sanaathana Dharma - ageless wisdom for all mankind. It is not a religion in the strict sense of the word. God concept in that system is represented by love, truth and high ethics. Nature is thought to be our mother and propitiating nature in its bounty is considered propitiating the supreme power, prajaapathy, that bestows Nature with all its bounties. That kind of God concept is really good for healthy living since there is no room to exclude anybody from that belief. As such man becomes tranquil, hating no one- an important pre-requisite for good health in Ayurveda.2 (Aapthopasevi Bhaveth Aarogyam)
“Swasthashya swastha rakshitham”-Try to keep the healthy well, is the bija manthra, the essence of Ayurveda. To preserve health, as defined above, one needs the total involvement of all that is mentioned above in nature that man is a part of. Health, therefore, is a dynamic concept in Ayurveda. Ayurveda has elaborate methods of keeping the harmony between man and his surroundings, to prevent him from breaking down with illnesses. However, occasionally, and certainly when one’s sojourn here ends, man could fall ill. In such an unlikely event Ayurveda has many methods of disease management to “cure rarely, comfort mostly, but to console always.”3
Modern medicine started as mumbo-jumbo, sorcery and witchcraft, nearly five thousand years ago, on the banks of the river Nile. During its passage westward modern medicine got transformed into what we call today a “science”. It was in the twelfth century that the European Universities accepted medicine as a science. Since then medicine has been riding piggyback on the natural sciences of physics, chemistry and biology. Physics forked off in the early part of the last century to unravel the mysteries of the quantum world and came up with the idea that this world is a wonder and a wonderful wonder, where the only certainty is uncertainty and everything is in the eye of the beholder (maya). Medicine, on the contrary, still follows the biological sciences of deterministic predictability in a dynamic system. This has been the bane of modern medicine in that it has now come to a cul-de-sac from where it does not know how to get out.4
The reductionist science that biology follows is mired in statistics and it earns its livelihood from statistics. Unfortunately, linear mathematics and its statistics do not apply to a dynamic system like the human body. Consequently, doctors and scientists have been predicting the unpredictable all these years. Wholistic science of chaos is the only remedy. This is the science followed in the holistic concept of Ayurveda, nay in Vedic mathematics of which Ayurveda is only a part. The history of science is replete with examples of how real progress had been halted by such tragedies for centuries. It is very difficult to swim against the current. For five long centuries “scientists” repeated what Ptolemy said about the sun moving round the earth up until Copernicus came on the scene. For nearly fifteen centuries medical scientists believed that blood originally circulates from the liver to mix with air from the lung through the small holes in the median wall of the chambers of the heart. William Harvey, in the seventeenth century, discovered that the heart pumps blood out that circulates round and round. He literally had to run for his life under cover of darkness and hide for one long year because he opposed Galen who had said that blood circulates from the liver. History repeats itself: let us not suffer that long before we realise that linear mathematical rules do not apply to a non-linear systems like the human body.
‘Tridoshas’ are genetico-constitutional types of human beings. Vaata, pitta, and kapha do not mean any symptom of disease. Ayurveda with this kind of classification has made it easy for future controlled studies in medicine which could be more scientific compared to the present controlled studies in medicine where only a few phenotypic features are matched like sex, body mass index and age et cetera. The latter does not have any meaning in a dynamic system. Time evolution in dynamic systems depends on the total initial state of organism-the mind, body and the genes. When a good Ayurvedic physician tries to classify people into these sub-types and their innumerable permutations and combinations, he would arrive at a reasonable group of people who could then be divided into two matched groups to conduct controlled studies on drugs and interventions. Modern medicine has come to grief through those controlled studies. Drug treatment of hypertension, hyperglyaemia, hypercholesteraemia and many other drug interventions based on controlled studies in the long run have done more harm than good.5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,11 Let us not try and extrapolate modern medical methods as such to Ayurveda, which does not follow linear mathematics.
Modern medicine has one more curse for mankind. That is the saga of screening the apparently healthy in society for any sign of future disease to be corrected early. Ayurveda leaves the well alone and tries to help them to remain well as long as possible with the help of immune boosters and a system called Panchakarma- a natural method to help the body get rid of accumulated toxins and postpone ageing. Screening is one of the dangerous procedures. No one gets any benefit in the long run, as linear relations do not hold good as time evolves in any dynamic system. That apart the very idea of the “normal” is faulty. Normal is the mean +- 2SD from the mean value of the Gaussian distribution. Simply put, this amounts to 5% of healthy people falling into the abnormal range in any study. If a study like total body scanning were done on the population it would throw up thousands of values in the abnormal range creating truckloads of anxiety for those thousands.
It would also make them consume potentially dangerous drugs for no fault of theirs. One in four drugs given to patients would have serious side effects resulting in a large chunk of the hopsitalised patients suffering from iatrogenic diseases at the end. It is very expensive, in addition. Two examples would suffice. It would take 850 healthy people, with borderline elevated blood pressure, to take unnecessary medicines to prevent one man from getting stroke in the next five years! Worse still is the picture of 1000 women needing screening for 35 long years to prevent one death from cervical cancer. One nurse doing 200 tests in one year would take 38 years of continuous work to prevent one cancer death. In that time interval she will have seen 152 women with false positive results, over 79 women would be sent for invasive investigations, and 53 women would have abnormal biopsy report of cancer where none exists. Is there anything more serious than this statistical blunder?12, 13
The greatest drawback of using reductionist scientific methods in holistic science could be gauged from this experience. Pharmacology uses extracts of plants from Ayurvedic texts to conduct various studies to sell them as drugs. Herbal ayurvedic drugs do not work that way. To cite a common example, tomato is very rich in ascorbic acid. If one thinks that giving ascorbic acid as such is as good as eating fresh tomato, one is making a big mistake. While vitamin C in tomato is the same as in a tablet, the other chemicals present in tomato (whole) have the power to suppress the long term side effects of vitamin C, given as a drug. Daily intake of vitamin C in large doses has been shown to be associated with cancer, but that does not happen with eating tomato. The same principle holds good to other redcutionist methods vis-a-vis Ayurvedic pharmacy. The drug has to be administered as is described in the ancient texts.14
Similarly straight-jacketing vaata, pitta, and kapha into bio-statistical models could look attractive to the reductionist scientists in modern medicine, but may not work that way in the holistic concept of Ayurveda, described above. We may have to find complicated differential equations for that purpose, simple difference equations will not do. We will have to think of newer scientific methods of measurement in a holistic science of chaos in the human body where rhythmia could be illness and arrhythmia could be health.
“No man, no author, not even the greatest, ever provide the last word on anything. Men (women) are vein authorities who can resolve nothing.”
-Michel de Montaigne.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Gleick J. Chaos - The amazing science of the unpredictable; 1998. Vintage Books, London
2. Hegde BM: Wellness - a new concept ; editorial J.Indian med assoc. 1996; 94:286-288
3. Hegde BM: "To do or not to Do - Doctors' Dilemma." Kuwait Med J 2001; 33 : 107 - 110
4. Hegde BM: Coronary Artery Disease - Time for Reappraisal - Proc. Roy.coll.physi. Edinb. 1995; 26:421 - 24
5. Firth WJ. Chaos - Predicting the Unpredictable . BMJ 1991; 303: 1565 - 8
6. Spodick DH. Revascularization of the heart-numerators in search of denominators. Am Heart J 1971; 81:149 - 57
7. Anyanwu A. & Treasure T. Prognosis after heart transplantation; BMJ 2003; 326 : 509 - 510
8. Hux JE, Naylor CD. In the eye of the beholder. Arch Intern Med. 1995; 155:2277 - 80
9. Stewart - Brown S and Farmer A. Screening could seriously damage your health. BMJ 1997; 314:533
10. McCormack J, Greenhalgh T. Seeing what you want to see in randomized controlled studies: versions and perversions of the UKPDS Data. BMJ 2000; 320: 1720 - 3
11. Smith R. The Screening Industry. BMJ 2003; 326: 893
12. Swenson SJ: Screening for cancer with computed tomography. BMJ 2003; 326 : 894 - 895
13. Steven Milloy. Science without Sense, 1997. Cato Institute, Washington DC