What's Wrong with the Medical Profession?
A
plague doctor from the 1600s. They were called quacks because
of the beak-like masks they wore, which were stuffed with scented
flowers to combat the stench of the erupting buboes on the
sufferers.
Their science was light years behind the mathematics and physics
of the same period.
In
the 17th century, at the very time that Isaac Newton was propounding the laws of
motion and of gravity, analysing light, inventing differential and integral
calculus and writing the Pricipia,
the medics were still entertaining such illnesses as Gravel, Horseshoe-head, Timpany,
Rising of the Lights, Planet, Funny Leg, Purples and Evil Spirits in the Head.
In
the Industrial revolution, when townspeople ingested vast volumes of black smoke
from factories, they came up with another one, White Lung, which only seemed to
appear in country folk!
In
comparison with the other sciences, they don’t seem to have changed much. Now,
in the 21st century and the third millennium AD, the physicists have developed
relativity, multi-dimensional cosmological geometry, quantum electronics, space
travel, information micro- and nanotechnology, AI...... and the medics still can't
cure a cold.
In
fact, they still can't cure anything, once you’ve got it, that’s caused by a
virus, they can’t cure cancer, heart disease, AIDS, cystic fibrosis, motor
neurone disease, Alzheimer’s, spinal column breaks.... and hundreds of
others…. and even head lice, of all things, are now coming back, proving
definitively that even their slow evolutionary development is moving faster than
medical progress. In the whole of history, their only breakthroughs have been in
their discovery of anaesthetics, vaccines, antibiotics, and drugs to treat but
rarely cure a range of specific illnesses. That's it. That's 300 years' work.
Everything else has been provided for them by physics: the X-ray machines, the
radiation machines, the IV machines, the CAT scanners, the monitoring machines,
the internal combustion machines (ambulances), the pacemakers, the computers,
the optical tubes, the ultrasound scanners.....even the wires in the walls and
the lights in the ceiling. If in some marital bust-up between the two sciences
physics were to back the van up to the hospital and remove all that
they’ve provided, then all that would be left would be a lady with a lamp,
clutching a bottle of anaesthetic and a range of antibiotics and vaccines.
What
is wrong with them? Why the slower
progress? Not one of the major diseases which worry us all so much and cause us
such grief in the loss of our loved ones, has ever been completely conquered by
them.
Now
we’ve just seen that they still cannot cure any thing,
once you've got it, which is caused by a virus. That's why they can't cure a
cold. Their excuse is that the virus constantly mutates, and so as soon as a
drug has been developed which attacks a particular virus, the virus changes its
form so that the drug is useless.
But
that as an excuse is nonsense. Let's take HIV for example, the AIDS virus. This
virus attacks white blood cells. It mutates and changes its shape--- and attacks
white blood cells. It mutates again and changes its shape-- and attacks white
blood cells. But the specific genes in the virus' genome which direct the virus
to attack white blood cells cannot possibly be changing-- or by definition it
would stop attacking white blood cells! But if these genes are not changing when
other parts of the virus do mutate, then why don't they
think to develop a drug which attacks just these genes?
As
I write this, they're only just beginning to ask these questions.
They
seem a bit slow with cancer, too. Before the First World War cancer in Europe
was relatively rare and so researchers began to blame the large scale processing
of food, which came in during that war, for the sudden upsurge in cancer cases
which occurred at roughly that time. Food preservatives, flavourings,
stabilisers, emulsifiers.... all were blamed for the increase. Well it seemed
logical; after all, during our lifetime each of us will three times our own
weight in these food chemicals, which can't exactly be good for us, and perhaps
for some the wonder is that our human bodies when subjected to this kind of
abuse don't produce cancers more often.
But
by the 1980's there seemed to be something very wrong with this thinking. By
this time, the Third World had come to be eating more or less the same processed
junk that we constantly stuff ourselves with, as container ships from all over
the world began to supply them with the same processed this and synthetic that
--- and yet their cancer rate still remained at only a fraction of the developed
world's.
This
has finally led us to a point where the only remaining difference between Third
World people and us isn't food, and chemicals, at all, --- its muck.
Or rather our relative lack of it. The bottom line is that since the early part
of the 20th century when baths, WC's and showers first began to be
mass-produced, we have become very clean indeed, both in comparison with
the Third World and with how we ourselves used to be.
Too
acute a lack of dirt in our lives, as a cancer culprit, makes a lot of sense. We
all produce cancer cells every day, as cosmic rays from space and emissions from
radioactive rock deposits under our houses and towns shoot pieces out of our DNA
and cause genetic mutations. And it is our healthy immune systems which spot
these rogue cells and reject them, so that they literally end up down the
toilet. But it was not until HIV came along and attacked the immune system, that
we realised just how fast these cancers can appear when the immune system stops
working properly. To their surprise, researchers saw that you don't have to wait
decades for the necessary mutations to occur-- they can happen in weeks. And it
began to dawn on them that our immune system is all which stands between us and
unspeakable horrors.
But
the immune system is used to our being scruffy. That's how we evolved. For
millions of years cold and dirt have clung to even the highest and most
fortunate among us. But now that we're in this latest historical period of baths
and showers, and of us all being so powder-puffed and squeaky-clean, the
immune system, thinking it is not needed so much, is nodding off to sleep as the
body instinctively redirects its energies elsewhere.
And
this is quite literally fatal -- for the body still doesn't know that the cosmic
background radiation is still there and is still causing cancerous mutations all
the time by shooting pieces out of our DNA.
Also,
there are hundreds of different species of microbes that live on our bodies, and
anyone who understands how evolution works is bound to know that we and they
must be depending on each other in some way; the evolutionary compromise which
establishes itself in such cases being mutually beneficial. Now it turns out,
that some of the substances that these bugs excrete, are some of the most
powerful immune system boosters and anti-cancers in nature. So what are we doing
since baths and showers came along? We’re regularly and routinely washing them
off! We seem to have some trouble -- and we can blame anti-evolution religion
again for this -- in realising that we humans are evolved animals, not God’s
creatures made of angel stardust, and we’re just not supposed to be as squeaky
clean as we keep ourselves these days. Now I’m not suggesting that we all go
around caked in pig shit, but what I am saying is that we’ve taken this
cleanliness thing to an unacceptable extreme and we need to re-learn that we
shouldn’t be afraid of a bit of muck.
But
are the medical profession waking up to this? Not really; slowly perhaps, and
they also still pump most of their research billions into treating effects not
causes.
I
promised myself that this would not be a long essay. And so it isn't. But the
sad truth is that if it had been dedicated to celebrating the medical
profession's achievements instead, it would have been shorter still.
---
Michael Alan Marshall