The essentials of western medicine could be clubbed with the best of other systems like Ayurveda, Homeopathy, Siddha, Unani, Acupuncture, and Herbal medicines to make sickness care less expensive, more useful and less dangerous

"Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship to restrict the art of healing to one class of men and deny equal privileges to others; the Constitution of the Republic should make a Special privilege for medical freedoms as well as religious freedom."  -Benjamin Rush, MD., a signer of the Declaration of Independence and personal physician to George Washington.

India is a very vast- almost like a continent- country with a little over 1.2 billion population. Majority of us are below the age of 30, but there is a growing population of the elderly and even the old elderly. We are biologically, culturally, racially, ethnically, environmentally and even in our food habits totally different from the white Europeans. As such the western model of what is believed to be scientific medicine does not fit in here. Even in the west their own system is felt to be outmoded for their present day needs.

(Amer. J.Med 2004; 116: 179)

Organ-based mechanistic reductionist model of the human physiology is found not to work in a holistic dynamic human body, which is nothing but the human mind (consciousness)-energy vibrations. Health is when the body cells, of which there are one hundred thousand trillion in all, are in sync. Disease is when they are out of sync.

Naturally, treatment is to reset the energy balance using various methods available in many systems of medicine all over the world. Unfortunately in the last century, money bags in the US joined hands to support only those medical colleges using their reductionist chemicals for treatment declared as “scientific” and the rest as unscientific, based on the Abraham Flexner report. Incidentally, Flexner was only a High School retired Head Master and knew nothing of medicine or science!

India’s major problem in health care is the poverty related malnutrition that not only kills young children of nutritional immune deficiency syndrome (NIDS) but saps the strength of the immune system in the majority of the poor adults as well making them vulnerable to many illnesses. Poverty also is a double edged sword in illness. Whereas it makes the poor more prone to illnesses, it takes away their daily wage earning capacity when they fall ill, thus pushing them further into the bottomless pit of want. If the government could work on a war footing to try and provide the following to all citizens, our sickness load almost vanishes with a few chronic illness left behind. They are:

Clean drinking water for all citizens

• • Three meals a day uncontaminated with human and /or animal excreta
• • A toilet for every house with sanitary drainage facilities
• • A roof on their head in place of the star-lit sky
• • Smokeless choolas in every house to avoid carbon monoxide laden smoke from getting into the house to kill women folk of heart attack and cancer and small children of pneumonia
• • Keeping the girl child in school and college till the age of 20 to make her a healthy mother and also to drastically cut our fertility rate
• • Self-help groups and cottage industries to help keep our village women economically empowered to counter their husband’s squandering money on alcohol, resulting in the wife and children going in search of their next meal-the killer stress indeed!
• • Let every able bodied man and woman have opportunities to work hard to make a healthy and honourable living

Illnesses need a new working classification, which makes it easier to identify and also to treat easily using the best in all medical care systems being practised in India. I had suggested such a system years ago published in peer reviewed journals. I shall condense it here for the government to take notice if they want.

Disease classification:

• Emergency medicine………………………………………5%
• Minor illness syndromes…………………………………..35%
• Degenerative diseases……………………………………...10%
• Doctor-thinks-you-have a disease syndrome………………10%
• Patient –thinks-s/he-has-a-disease syndromes……………..10%
• Congenital diseases…………………………………………5%
• Incurable diseases like cancer etc…………………………..15%
• Psychological illnesses………………………………………5%
• Miscellaneous………………………………………………..5%

Today’s top heavy five-star hospital based western medicine spends almost three fourths of the money for emergency treatment of diseases most of which do not get “cured” anyway. We are only palliating making our intervention worse than his disease. We do need western medicine for emergency care of seriously ill patients but their proportion is very small in the whole picture. Top heavy western medicine must be confined to emergency care and corrective surgery alone. The large chunk of minor illness syndromes whose sheer numbers belie their benignity but they could all be managed with most of the alternate systems like, energy medicine using known and occult energies, Ayurveda and Homeopathy, Siddha, Unani, Acupuncture, and Herbal medicines. There are proven methods of treatment for degenerative diseases in some of the alternate medical systems.

A doctor thinks you have a disease syndrome and need no drug intervention but need advice to change the mode of living to a healthy life style avoiding smoking and alcohol, encouraging regular exercise, sensible diet, and to avoid negative thoughts. Patient thinks s/he has a diseases and need sensible psychotherapy and behavioural therapy. So also do some of the psychiatric diseases where western medicine pushes lorry loads of dangerous chemicals. The latter are now known to damage the brain to produce the new syndrome of dementia. (Dementia-a drug induced crime on mankind-book by Professor Grace Elizabeth Jackson)

Medical education:

India needs an integrated medical system education that takes the best in all systems after due authentication by hard scientific methods. We need a new curriculum and reorientation for teachers. The essentials of western medicine could be kept, which is to be clubbed with the best in other systems to make sickness care less expensive and more useful and less dangerous. The curse of western medicine today is the adverse drug reactions (ADRs), which are the leading cause of death in that system.

Doctors' training should stress on producing good, humane, empathetic healers who are very useful as we now know that the medicines and the interventions that we practice do not heal. It is the faith that the patient has in the system and his doctor that heals. Mind heals and reductionist chemical drugs only harm. (Genetics 2008; 179: 727 and Sci Transl Med 16 February 2011)

Medical education is crying for a change but that cannot come about in the present setting as all the vested interests have a stake in maintaining the status quo ante. We need some drastic changes right away. The idea of having more tertiary care centres spending tons of the tax payers’ money is a retrograde step. We need to close some such centres for the good of society as well. A fourteen country advanced nations study did reveal that where there are more doctors per capita and more specialists THERE IS LESS HEALTH AND MORE DEATH. The dangerous medical myth is that vaccines for every infectious disease will eradicate the disease. The recent rotavirus tragedy is one futile effort to prevent diarrhoeal diseases. Good childhood and pregnancy nutrition coupled with adequate rehydration therapy should control and eventually eliminate rotavirus diarrhoea. We should not fall prey to western propaganda even when the vaccine is locally manufactured.

The Future:

Long term observational studies of human species running into twenty five, (MRFIT) seventy five, (Grant study) and ninety years (Termen study) have upturned the findings of scores of short term cross sectional randomised controlled trials to show that there are nothing called risk factors, but there are risks of precocious death. The last two studies showed that for man to live long and healthy, one needs a healthy life style consisting of:

• Happiness is love. Full Stop. Love all to live well.

• Improve social relations— spend time with friends to lose the “I” (illness) to get the “WE” (wellness)
• Increase levels of physical activity— go for a long walk.
• Help others and express gratitude to those who have helped you
• Take on new challenges to remain fresh and in-the-moment at any age!
• Age is only a chronological number.
• Some worry is good for longevity and good health.

In addition to all these, India has the great legacy of that all-powerful health tonic in Yoga, the ancient Indian wisdom. We could make it a part of primary educational physical activity. Coupled with meditation this could lay a good foundation for healthy living lessening the burden of sickness care in later life as well. Yoga has no religion attached to it and is being practised in churches as well. If one carefully mulls over the above details one wonders how our ancient sages had thought of all these centuries ago! I should be pleased to give more details should the need arise. I have in fact a ready module in place which we tried on a small scale with success. So, all that is written above is doable.

 "At the end of times the merchants of the word will deceive the nations of the world through their Pharmacia."  (Sorcery) - Rev 18:23

(Professor Dr BM Hegde, a Padma Bhushan awardee in 2010, is an MD, PhD, FRCP (London, Edinburgh, Glasgow & Dublin), FACC and FAMS. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Science of Healing Outcomes, chairman of the State Health Society's Expert Committee, Govt of Bihar, Patna. He is former Vice Chancellor of Manipal University at Mangalore and former professor for Cardiology of the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, University of London.)