The biology taught in school and college, especially in relation to the process of human evolution, does not match my observations of human beings and their illnesses as a doctor for over half a century.
The new evolutionary biology and the systems biology in it make a lot of good sense with the background of the new quantum worldview.
A judicious combination of those two, in conjunction with Indian wisdom of eons, explains a lot of things in medicine and reaffirms my faith in our indigenous wisdom even in disease management.
Western science that we believe as gospel truth did not come from God. It was very much a human creation. I now believe those creators, people of science who are venerated by us, went terribly wrong in treating this universe as a separate non-living entity where man has a right to exploit nature for his benefit.
The truth seems to be that nature is a living and steadily evolving system, and man is just a part of the whole. Consequently, the health of this planet is so much connected with our own health and well-being.
Total reinventionHuman physiology needs total reinvention. The reductionist ideas of milieu interior, where the internal environment of the human body is maintained by keeping all the parameters of the known body systems under control, looks childish with the present knowledge. What we forget is that this human system, which has developed from consciousness to begin with, is a living system as an integral part of nature with the built-in capacity to correct most, if not all, changes that the system is heir to. It has got such sophisticated technology that can shred proteins into small parts and reconvert them into new proteins or even, if needed, destroy the protein itself. When we teach physiology in medical school, we never stress the inherent capacity of the human body to correct itself without outside help. It is only in an unlikely event that an outside help (doctor) gets to help the system.
Unfortunately, the mindset that the student develops in the present culture is that “every ill has to have a pill or surgical manipulation to put things back into shape”. This is the bane of modern western medicine.
The truth, however, is that “while there is no pill for every ill, there is an ill following every pill”, as the latter is a foreign invader in the holistic system that is built to mend itself in need.
This brings to mind the permaculture of ancient India long before the British taught us their bad agricultural habits that would deplete the earth of all its nutritive value in some decades. We need to have this permaculture style of management in human physiology that will preserve the body’s own immune system.
Living world modelEastern philosophies, Indian Ayurveda and yoga systems are built to fit into this living world model proposed by evolutionary biologists even in the West these days. The students’ mindset should be moulded in such a way that human physiology is a self-correcting system that does not tolerate outside interventions in minor illness syndromes. With this change in the mindset, the curse of adverse drug reactions (ADR) and iatrogenic diseases could be reduced.
Today, the equivalent number of the seating capacity of four Boeing 747s are dying every week due to ADR and iatrogenic problems in the U.S. alone. Viewed through this wholeness looking glass, cancer does not become a disease. It is the body’s own cell that got mutated to survive a hostile environment created by the present lifestyle and the greed of man to exploit nature to make money. Reductionist ideas of killing cancer cells using chemical poisons looks equally foolish.
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