The Terrible Flaws of Medical Science

The goal of medical science should be to understand disease as a general phenomenon, to gain an understanding not limited to specific cases but applicable across time, space, type of society - even from one species to the next.

The goal of any science is to understand reality as it is, not as we would like it to be. Or at least that ought to be the goal.

But most explanations of disease focus on a particular condition or set of ailments, rather than approach the disease process as a whole. Thus there are far more explanations for obesity or cancer than there are comparisons of these diseases in a general sense.

Some medical scientists do make comparisons of two or three kinds of illness, but desist from further generalization. This situation, indeed, is no more than characteristic of our entire culture throughout its history, and the way every scientific discipline in our culture has become overwhelmingly particularistic.

The outcome of sticking to arguments about individual disease manifestations is that criticisms of these explanations have also become primarily factual. Rather than discussing the logic of creating a diagnosis in the first place, it's much easier (that is, lucrative) for critics to focus on factual matters: to show that the presentation of symptoms for disease X don't fit the proposed explanation. Thus, when medical scientists postulate a virus for the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome, or "genetic risk factors" for the cause of childhood autism, critics will either assert that evidence for viral causes and genetic risk factors is either inadequate or is contradictory to the description of the new diagnosis.

Rarely do doctors, patients or the media question the original diagnosis explanation. What if chronic fatigue syndrome and autism don't even exist as discrete diseases? How do or can viruses and genetics lead to disease or developmental disruption? Can these causes truly account for the pathological symptoms?

And virtually never do doctors, patients, or the media leave off the argument about details to get general enough to find real patterns: what do chronic fatigue syndrome and autism have in common with obesity and cancer? Why do some people get one disease or another and other people no disease at all?

If you believe that "Medical Science" has answers to these questions, you are incorrect. Medical Science very rarely ever even asks these questions.

This is an extremely important issue, because no detailed, factual explanation of chronic fatigue syndrome or autism can be adequate to justify the use of extreme measures such as drugs, surgery, or institutionalization as the only possible solution when the causes and generalities are unknown.

While some critics do raise such questions, the debate rarely goes outside the factual, even among naturopathic physicians.

If a medical expert questions the initial logic behind a diagnosis proposal, the details of the facts often immediately become quite irrelevant. This is what several doctors have done over the past 150 years, since medicine left its practical realm in the trade of "physician" and took a special place in the hallowed halls of expertise, so mysterious and important as to be unquestioned by even the greatest questioners of our society.

If any person, in fact, questions the logic behind any aspect of modern medical dogma, she is in for it big time. This is why it rarely happens: questioners are immediately labelled "quacks," then "insane," soon "dangerous death cult," and if you go too far with it you have attempts on your life. Really.

Perhaps this is all okay; after all, we have widely-accepted scientific dogma that says "survival of the fittest," meaning that anyone who falls outside the norm in their words and deeds is probably unfit and not welcome in the ol' gene pool anyway. Perhaps it's alright to just let the medical people keep their little unquestioned assumptions as long as they work away so steadfastly on the front lines of the war against disease.

It's not okay. It is not okay to unquestioningly accept the word of any self-proclaimed "expert" - or their informing media - on matters of your health, especially when these experts make a great deal of money from your illness, earn nothing from your health, and will suffer absolutely no consequence for being wrong. It is utterly immoral to leave decisions about your body-mind and especially the body-mind health of your loved ones who are more needy than you, in the hands of people who make a grotesque amount of money practicing a philosophy that is filled with a thousand logical holes. There is a reason why death rates immediately decline when doctors go on strike. It's because (well-meaning, I'm sure) standard medical practices kill people.

Doctors are not trained to connect with your consciousness or their own consciousness, or in fact any aspect of the greater Truth. They are trained to replace parts and to do tune ups.

The Big Picture of Disease
Let's take a step back here, outside the milieu, and look at disease and medicine in a completely general way. Amazing things are revealed when we do this.

The people of our culture, since earliest records, attribute disease to malevolent external forces. We have a general concept that the natural human condition is perfect health and well-being, but from earliest infancy we must chase out the wild, biological demons, to protect ourselves from the evil of disease. This sense of life being a continuous battle between good and evil is called psychic equivalence.

The only thing that has changed in the 8,000 or so years of our recorded history is - you guessed it - the details. For millennia, we have argued the facts while the generalities have remained unquestioned by the culture as a whole. It's because this understanding is very much a part of our cultural mythology: disease is caused by malevolent forces in the world outside our bodies. The devil did it!

Over time, the malevolent forces have taken on different appearances in our cultural story, but the concern and response are precisely the same.

• bad or angry spirits - to be cast out with herbs, rituals
• demons - call the priest!
• bilious ethers - cast out by inducing vomiting, diarrhea, blood loss.
• bad air ("mal aria") - cast out the bad air, the swamps, and the unpleasant surroundings
• contagion - cast out the contagious by quarantine, and cast out the contagion with mercury ("quacksilber"), bismuth, lead, and other poisons
• fungi and bacteria, discovered after the invention of the microscope - cast out with antibiotics
• viruses - a completely hypothetical devil, cast out with incredibly lucrative vaccination programs
• environmental pollutants - cast out with chelation therapy and detoxification regimes
• and the latest: bad genes that sneak into our very DNA! Bad genes set us up for cancer, and create amazing syndromes of all kinds. The only way (yet) to cast out the bad genes is to surgically remove the products of their evil work.

All the arguments in medical science - in fact, in our entire culture - are about which of these is the cause of the disease and by which technique to cast out these evils.

The Truth About Disease
The only problem with our cultural belief about the ongoing battle to defend our bodies against the invasion of evil forces, is that it's nonsense. We spend our lives and our children's lives chasing around trying to magically cast out demons based on a handed-down mythology that is utter nonsense.

Diseases of the body are, without exception, the brain-mediated response of the biological organism to the experiences that it has had. And those experiences had by the organism relate strongly to its biological predisposition because of previous brain-mediated experiences.

In other words, when you have a certain kind of experience, your brain responds very specifically and your body experiences relevant symptoms as part of that process. You are more prone to certain kinds of experiences because your brain and body have been conditioned to put you into certain kinds of situations.

That's a generality. As you can see, by going right up to the big picture like this, I have instantly made an argument about whether bird 'flu is going to be a pandemic this year or next year completely irrelevant and actually very silly.

Question everything in medical science. It is your moral duty.