B M Hegde

Why does one get ill?

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little
minds, adored by little statesmen and
philosophers and divines. With consistency a
great soul has simply nothing to do.
Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The

question why does not have an

answer in the all powerful science today.
Science did not have the answer to that
question in the past either. Charles
Sherrington, a Nobel Laureate physiologist,
said in 1899 that positive sciences do not
and can not answer the question why.
They can, at best, answer how or how
much but not why. Peter Medawar,
another Nobel Laureate physician, in his
book, Limits of Science also felt that the
ultimate questions can not be answered by
science because science, as it is today, is not
designed
to
answer
such
questions!
Naturally, questions like why, existence of
God etc are not filtered in the scientific fish
net hypothesis of Sir Arthur Stanley
Eddigton.
Now that quantum physics has broken the
scientific shackles of reductionism, we might
be able to answer such questions, if not right
now; but certainly in the very near future.
Werner Heisenberg's Gedankenexperiments
opened up the latest laboratory, the human
mind, to try and formulate answers to such
ultimate questions. Richard Feynman tries to
describe these attempts thus: We choose to
examine a phenomenon which is impossible,
absolutely impossible, to explain in any
classical way, and which has in it the heart
of quantum mechanics. In reality, it contains
only mystery. Physics was trying to grapple
with this wave-particle duality over several
decades with very little final understanding.
They had Young's double-slit experiment,
complementarity, Einstein's recoiling slit,
Heisenberg's microscope and also Feynman's
light microscope. Most of them got their
Nobels anyway but, we were where we were
at the end of the day with the mystery
deepening.
Hans Peter Duerr's a-duality hypothesis
which has shown the way forward in that
matter is but the other face of energy like
the advaita philosophy of Sankhya School.
Therefore, human body, in reality, is only an
illusion of the human mind. Consequently,
there will be nothing called mind and body.
It is mind-body as one. This puts an end to
reductionism, which is the bane of modern

medical statistical science. There will no

more be psychosomatic diseases; all
diseases are in the human mind. Human
body, therefore, becomes immaterial-mental
and spiritual. Spirituality is defined as
sharing and caring. Health could now be
defined as enthusiasm to work and
enthusiasm to be compassionate.
We can now put Rene Descartes to rest
finally and move on for the good of mankind.
Res Cogitans and Res Extensa now become
one and only Res Cogitans, the thinking
part. Let us allow our students also to think
for a change. We have never allowed that to
happen so far lest our scientific fort should
be invaded by a thinking student. It is not
for nothing that Nobel Laureate Alexis Carell
wrote that every new born child is a genius
only to be converted into an idiot in school.
We have built such a strong compound wall
around our arrogant science that dissenters
can not enter inside, thanks to our peer
review system and our tight control over our
cloistered indexed journal system. History
teaches us that if a King lives only on the
advice of his sycophants and does not allow
dissenting voices to reach his ears, that
kingdom would not last long! The kingdom of
modern science has started collapsing
slowly. Many thinkers feel science needs to
change for good as shown below. One might
argue that this is selective list of opinions. It
has to be, per force, selective to drive my
point home.
There is no logic to science. Scientists
create and adhere to scientific theories for
what are ultimately subjective and even
irrational reasons. It can not be denied that
the chief engine of human destructiveness
has been the phenomenal success of science
in the 20th century.
Paul Karl Feyerabend in his classic Against
Method 1975.
Intellectual integrity made it quite
impossible for me to accept the myths and
dogmas of even very great scientists, more
particularly of the belligerent and so-called
advanced nations. Indeed, those intellectuals
who accepted them were abdicating their
functions for the joy of feeling themselves at
one with the herd.
Bertrand Russell.
Theories cannot be derived from facts. The
demand to admit only those theories which
follow from facts leaves us without any
theory. Hence, science as we know it can
exist only if we drop the demand and revise
our methodology.
David Hume, Scottish philosopher.

Let me now come to my new hypothesis.

This hypothesis needs the support of Max
Planck's strong views on consciousness,
which medical science ignored for so long for
its own detriment. Planck wrote years ago
that Consciousness is fundamental. All
matter is derived from consciousness. We
can
not
get
behind
consciousness.
Consciousness is the universal wisdom of
which human mind is but a small fragment
(individual consciousness). In the medical
field we have lost ourselves in knowing how
one gets ill. We were very logical in our
quest for that question how. Time was
when our ancestors thought diseases were
due to bad spirits or wrath of Gods. Malaria
was thought to be due to bad air (mal aria).
Then came the era of germs as our enemies,
almost from the time of Joseph Lister of
Glasgow fame, and Louis Pasteur. That
theory was supported by many in the last
hundred years, prominent among them was
John Snow. Thanks to Theobald Smith, an
American
Physician,
who
in
1915
propounded the Grimm's Law, which states
that while disease might be directly
proportionate to the virulence of its cause, it
is inversely proportionate to the resistance
of the host? Host resistance or immunology
came into existence then but it took another
70 years for it to get wings in 1981 when
two white young men on either side of the
Atlantic died of identical disease which has
become famous now as AIDS.
Hippocratic and Galenic medicine developed
a stranglehold on medical innovation that
suffocated progress for over 2000 years.
Their great "therapies" of bloodletting,
purges, and emetics were dangerously
ineffectual except in so far as they
stimulated the placebo effect. A very recent
2011 study led by Professor Bingel of Oxford
did show how the placebo effect is probably
the only good effect of all our efforts to date.
Up until the time of the great brains of
medicine mentioned above had their
theories, they were not motivated by any
material gains from their studies or theories.
In the last 50-100 years newer theories of
diseases emerged where the therapy was
connected to disease theories in a big way.
They got a great push after the deadly
contagious
diseases
were
apparently
defeated thanks to the discovery of penicillin
in the 1940s. That was the theory of risk
factors.
Using
these
theories
greedy
pharmaceutical lobby made hey when the
sun was still shining on the risk factors.
The death and disability scenario hardly
changed with this theory also. But every
thing under the sun became a risk for illness
and the industry had a ready answer by way

of a new pill or a new device to intervene

(go in between with malice). The divine
interventionists, aided and abetted by the
industry, went hammer and tongs against all
human ills. The result has been, according to
a
recent
audit,
that
the
medical
establishment has become the leading cause
of death and disability in the world! Drugs
have been a curse instead of a boon.
Curiously now we use germs, which are a
part of us and are our friends, to cure
illnesses. Recent studies at Johns Hopkins of
using human faeces (faecal transplant) with
its normal germ content to cure deadly
super-bug infections of the gut by such silly
germs like Clostridium Deficile have shown
that germs ARE our friends in need. We have
come one full circle from germs as enemies
to germs as friends. Human meta-genome
has just 25,000 human genes while its has
trillions of germ genes making a mockery of
our efforts at genetic engineering and other
related efforts, another strong blow to
reductionism in medicine
Although the risk factor hypothesis has been
shown to be not based on strong foundations
people were not allowed to get to know the
truth, thanks to medical claptrap and the
advertisements. The latter in the eyes of one
of the leading economists, John Kenneth
Galbraith is: those corporations do not use
advertising to inform us about products that
might state our independently determined
desires. Rather, the function of advertising
and marketing is "to bring into being wants
that previously did not exist." Galbraith calls
this "the dependence effect," and goes on to
argue that this is an indictment of the entire
system of capitalistic production, which is no
more defensible than a town doctor routinely
running over pedestrians in order to keep
the hospital beds full.
The last example of Galbraith has now been
shown to be true in the medical field where
disease mongering is the rule rather than
exception. Galbraith would not have dreamt
of that happening when he wrote his book
Affluent Society in the 1950s. Drugs are now
advertised on TV in the USA! Final blow on
the coffin of the risk factor hypothesis was
driven by the long term (25 years) follow up
of the (in) famous MRFIT study which spent
$115 million dollars sanctioned in 1984 by
Richard Nixon who had told the researchers
then that it was big money and he wanted a
strongly positive result. Roger W Sherwin,
the lead author concluded that In other
words, they found that changing the "risk
factors" does not apparently change the
risks. This necessarily means that the "risk
factors" are not as important as was
thought. Indeed, it should be concluded that

the "risk factors" were no such thing, at least

as far as MRFIT trial is concerned.
We need a paradigm shift in our thinking as
to why people get sick and not how; in the
background of what quantum physics has
taught us. All diseases, according to
Ayurveda, originate in the mind. The same
holds good in quantum physics today. Our
present understanding is that the human
body is bundle of vibrating leptons which are
held in 50-100 trillion individual body cells.
Though the cells in different parts of the
body have different shapes to suit their
convenience, they all work identically.
Metaphorically the human body is colony of
50-100 trillion individual human beings who
lived as independent living organisms for
millions of years before coming together as a
colony. Each cell has its own mind (in the
cell wall) and is capable of all activities that
the whole body is capable of.
One can now track the photon light emission
from each atom in the human cell. This biophoton camera of physicist Fritz- Albert Popp
can now photograph the body to show if all
the cells are in sync. If they are not in sync
one is ill. When they are in sync, one is
healthy. Our cells love one another so much
that they work together for our common
good. If, for any reason, we hate another
person (whom our cells love, anyway) the
cells get confused with that me-you
concept. This hatred (or greed, jealousy,
anger, pride, super ego etc) might sow the
seeds of a new malady in our system. Every
single disease from common cold to cancer
will have this root cause-the why of
disease. From then on individual diseases
chart their own course based on the
environmental circumstances and our metagenetic make up. I wish to call this aetiopathogenesis as social auto-immune disease.
Similar is the beginning of our auto-immune
diseases where our own antibody cells forget
to recognize self- our own body cells.
To show how body cells work in tandem, the
example of a non-fatal myocardial infarction
would be ideal. When one gets a silent heart
attack, the first change that occurs is the cell
death at the core of the heart muscle cut off
from its blood supply suddenly. If no one
interferes, the neighbouring cells feel sorry
and slip out of their moorings in the heart
muscle wall to take the place of the dead
cells. As soon as a cell slips out, the collagen
skeleton that holds the cell feels the pinch to
produce
extra
collagen
(fibroblastic
proliferation) to help the slipped cell. Now
the healthy cells far away from the dead
cells, which can not slip that far, try to
become stronger (hypertrophy). By this time

one gets a strongly remodelled heart again

without outside help! The sequence of cell
death, cell slipping, fibroblastic proliferation
and hypertrophy are all mediated through
our emergency service, the autonomic
nervous system. One wonders at the wisdom
of the human body in having this autodoctor with the best healing technique inbuilt
into our system.
One wonders how reductionist medical
science lost sight of these auto-healers in
the human system in the first place. May be,
outside intervention was our primary goal in
the reductionist medical science. In the
present
holistic
thinking,
where
consciousness holds the reigns of running
the human body under all circumstances of
health and disease, things get better
understood. It is only in the unlikely event of
the body's built-in healer failing, do
symptoms develop. Outside help might be
needed only at this stage to help the internal
machine, the so called placebo effect,
described above. This boils down to
Hippocratic affirmation that a doctor cures
rarely, comforts mostly but, consoles
always. It is not surprising, therefore, that
our misguided efforts to intervene in the
pre-symptomatic stages of illnesses have
landed us in a mess.
Time will not be too far when, instead of
going for the drug cupboard to get relief
from an odd headache, we would sit down to
meditate to get to that stage of relaxation
where our own forebrain secrets enough
opioids to relieve our pain. A study published
a week ago (November 2012) has clearly
shown that meditation would help most
degenerative disease sufferers! Modern
gadgets will help us document those events
for the hard boiled scientists to document.
We have come one full circle. Hippocrates
wrote that we should study our patient more
than his disease, quantum physics tells us
that the patient is the only one that we need
to concentrate on. This is called Whole
Person
Healing
(WPH),
a
neologism
introduced by that great scientist, Late
Professor Rustum Roy of Sol-Gel fame.
Human body being energy which is seen as
vibrations of varying frequency, the future
treatments in the symptomatic stage of
illnesses should logically use energy methods
to heal. We have been working on this for
the last decade under the aegis of our World
Academy of Authentic Healing Sciences
where we have a group of world renowned
scientists helping us. Our findings have been
getting published, albeit slowly, thanks to
the peer review rock fort built around
science publications where the peer knows

only what is already known. Sixth sense

does not work there. Hopefully, this concrete
wall of (Randomized Controlled Trials) RCTs
and peer reviewers will slowly give way to
rational world wide post publication peer
reviewing through the internet where
communications have become easier than in
the past. There seems to be some ray of
hope in the distant horizon. Sir Michel
Rawlins, the head of NICE, the highest
clinical body in the UK, was of the opinion
that RCTs, which ruled the roost for decades,
had been, unfortunately, put on an
undeservedly high pedestal. This is good
news. May God help mankind to survive
despite the medical establishment of drugs
and interventions? Humane doctors will
always be needed as long as mankind lives
on this planet.
A multitude of causes unknown to former
times are now acting with a combined force
to blunt the discriminating powers of the
mind, and unfitting it for all voluntary
exertion to reduce it to a state of almost
savage torpor.
David Hume, Scottish philosopher.
Email: hegdebm@gmail.com