The wisdom of the human body and not medical technology helps in healthy living

When doctors in Israel went on strike, in March 2000, the death rate fell significantly in Jerusalem City, while it did not change in the coastal city of Netanya where doctors worked as usual. Even when compared to the month of March in 1998 and 1999, the decline in death rate was noteworthy. A similar trend was reported from Los Angeles County in the 1970s and, possibly, also in Canada and Bogota (Columbia), a few years ago. Even in the field of drug trials, small studies seem to give striking benefit but, under further investigations, they do not deliver the degree of benefit initially touted by their clinical champions and marketers.

All is not well in our thinking on this subject. While life expectancy seems to have gone up in developed countries, mainly because of the change of mode of living and better standards of living, human life span has not gone up. Health expectancy—a word I coined to denote the number of years a new-born baby could expect to live without the help of doctors and medicines—seems to have come down in industrialised countries.

Hardly anyone in the West goes beyond the age of 10 without multi-vitamin consumption. In fact, health expectancy is quite high in some developing countries, like India, where people in villages live almost their full lives without any medical interventions; the life expectancy being 67 years. There is hardly a ‘well man’ in the West; routine screening makes life miserable, to say the least, despite the fact that the British Medical Journal avers that routine screening could seriously damage one’s health!

Modern quantum physics makes a mockery of future predictions in any dynamic system without the total initial knowledge of the organism. Doctors have been predicting the unpredictable. To predict man’s future, his doctor should have complete knowledge of his phenotype, genotype and his consciousness. That seems to be impossible in the present state of our knowledge.

Diseases originate in the human mind (consciousness), the seeds being negative thoughts like greed, jealousy, hatred, anger and depression. If sown in a genetically fertile soil (with the correct genetic pattern), the seeds could grow well into the final tree (disease) with all its ramifications when fed by the help of a conducive atmosphere, including tobacco and alcohol, which work like the best manure for the crop.

With quantum physics trying to understand human consciousness, time has come for modern medicine to divorce itself from the time-honoured reductionist logic of linear relations in dynamic systems. It is a pity that, after so many fantastic claims of advances in medical science, we have been able to eradicate only one disease: small pox.
Incidentally, it was eradicated without any advanced technology! Edward Jenner, credited to be the father of vaccination, had to have his method authenticated and refined with the help of a longitudinal study of the Indian system of vaccination practised for centuries with nearly 90% success rate, by a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London,

Dr TZ Holwell who spent many years in India to study the system of vaccination with attenuated virus!

To compound our confusion, we have been targeting raised blood pressure, sugar, fats, etc, as causes of diseases and trying to reduce and/or correct them, mostly with disastrous results. Proper audits of our interventions have shown that many of the technologies, not to speak of drugs, have done more harm than good. Many medical technologies have never been audited at all!

The directionless movement of mankind, where value systems have been ditched, has resulted in children shooting peers for petty jealousies. Let the wisdom of the human body play its part in the game of healthy living. It is the body’s wisdom that keeps us going, despite the medical industry’s efforts to make us their customers!

Professor Dr BM Hegde, a Padma Bhushan awardee in 2010, is an MD, PhD, FRCP (London, Edinburgh, Glasgow & Dublin), FACC and FAMS.