A reductionist western science is incapable of answering the ‘why’, science can only seem to answer the 'how'. Does science need to borrow from spirituality and vice-a-versa?

Nobel laureates, like Peter Medawar, tell us that science is designed to answer only certain (mundane) questions and not answer esoteric questions like ‘what after death’? Or ‘why does the heart contract’, etc. He compares science to a railway engine designed to run on a track but not fly like an aeroplane, in his classic, Limits of Science. The reductionist Western science is incapable of answering the ‘why’, although it tries to answer ‘how’ or ‘how much’. Unfortunately, answers needed are only for the ‘why’ questions.

As a doctor for more than five decades, I am disillusioned by modern Western science. Why does a young man, apparently healthy, die suddenly of a massive heart attack, despite his having done everything scientifically correctly, while an elderly gentleman, with advanced coronary artery disease, still jugs on beyond 80? Science is simply making models which are mathematical constructs and, with verbal jargon, they are supposed to work. When one sees liquid helium climb up the sides of its container to overflow one wonders what happened to all our laws of thermodynamics. Liquid helium, kept in a silicon bowl, leaks out through its intact base!

When we claim that the heart, a small muscular structure weighing just 300 grams, pumps blood into a capillary system of totally 500,000 kilometres, which are thinner than our hair, not letting even a red blood cell to pass through easily, we are not being truthful. But neither did we ask such questions nor do we let our students do that.

When I read science books which are more than one 100 years old, the authors did have sentences like: “My God, only God can answer this question!” Today’s science wants to be all-knowing and the concept of God does not seem to exist.

A recent science study in biology, of experiments with rats, showed that the sex and sweat smell of the researcher affects the results to the extent of 40%—male researchers being more effective. Observer’s consciousness does affect the results. Quantum physics is absolutely right when it says everything exists as energy vibrations but collapses into matter on observation. That final awareness, observation of the observer, his/her consciousness, makes this world come alive. How very true indeed!

Robert Lanza, a genius of a physician and his co-author, Bob Berman, a maverick astronomer, have written that wonderful book, Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe,  where they claim that the world lives around life and for life—bio-centrism—as they call that all-encompassing consciousness—which is at the root of all science.

Hopefully, medicine would become bio-centric and not drugs- and surgery-centric reductionism. Candace Pert, a daring young researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health, did show to the world for the first time that opiate receptors also exist outside the brain. Now we know that the human mind resides in every single cell at the cell membrane called MemBrain.
Providentially, I had written in my book, Holistic Living, in 1993 that there is a possibility of a mind in every cell. The editor of the publication had questioned my serendipitous thinking.
Recent research at Oxford, led by Professor Bingel, elegantly showed that all healing occurs, NOT because of our medicines but because of the patient’s belief in the doctor and the medicines he gives, true placebo effect, another brainchild of consciousness.

Only one thinking scientist in the Western world, Max Planck, has written that “I regard consciousness is fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.” I don’t think that the best surgeon will not able to heal a surgical wound in a dead body without consciousness!

Caring and sharing is spirituality in essence. Occult healing methods were used in healing in many civilizations and with success. We will have to re-invent them, for the good of mankind. Let us get out of our arrogant mind-set that only science can solve all our problems. This is partly due to the success of reductionist science-based technologies, like the semiconductor, etc, which have apparently made us more comfortable at the cost of our good health. Let wisdom prevail and God help mankind.

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