About science and Western medicine

A couple of weeks ago, I touched upon two schools of thoughts concerning medicine and I admitted to belonging to the category of people who do not, as a matter of principle, reject medicine but would rather go the natural route before subjecting themselves to the surgeon’s knife or starting to pop pills, both of which come with undeniable adverse side effects.

I want to reiterate that I do believe that Western medicine has a place in our society. I simply don’t want it to take control over my wellbeing, only because, as far as I am concerned, my body was given to me and to no one else and it is, therefore, my responsibility and no one else’s to take care of it. Unless, of course, I am no longer capable of doing so, in which case I will have to hand it over to someone who is. The idea, though, is to not allow that to happen since, as soon as I hand it over, I expose myself to the reality of adverse side effects. Which means that, as soon as I hand over my body, there is a good chance I will become worse over time, even if it doesn’t happen overnight. Remember that I started with the premise that misery ain’t what it’s cracked up to be and that illness and pain weigh us down and prevent us from enjoying life.

For many years, I handled medical malpractice matters on behalf of hospitals, physicians and caregivers in general. Those cases concerned many different situations, from the serious allergic reaction to some prescription to poor outcomes of surgeries and births of horribly deformed babies. As a result, I had a lot of opportunities to meet physicians of every specialty, so I did get a fairly good understanding of where most of them came from.

I will say that, in my experience and the majority of the cases, with extremely few exceptions, doctors want to help people. That’s the reason why they chose the field in the first place. It literally breaks their heart to see patients incapacitated by illness and pain and they try their utmost best to relieve them with the knowledge and experience they have accumulated. People do not choose to practice medicine for the money, contrary to what many of their adversaries proclaim: they really care. Louis-Ferdinant Celine, a French practicing doctor and acclaimed writer who spent a few years in the States between the two wars and eventually set up his practice in Paris , wrote in one of his many books: “I treat people because they are even nastier when they are sick”. Whatever their reasons, caregivers want to make a positive difference.

I cannot, however, count the number of times when a physician declared on cross-examination on the stand: “Medicine is not an exact science”, to explain and sometimes justify the poor outcome of his judgment call, whether it was right or wrong at the time.

So, here we have it: medicine is, indeed, not an exact science. So, why are we, patients, looking at it as though it were? What is science, anyway? “Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge” Dr. Carl Sagan, Ph.D. If science is a way of thinking, then, by changing the way we think, we can all become scientists. It really is as simple as that.

So, what do we need to become scientists? What are the qualities they use?

Knowledge would still be the first thing we need to tackle, elementary knowledge, that is. Knowledge of who you are and what your priorities are. You and I have a body with millions of parts, each of them completely interdependent and interrelated and yet with a definite individual role to play. Many of the physicians I’ve met made the same observation: people don’t know what their body is made ofand what it is supposed to do. They have a vague memory of what wellbeing felt like long ago but, most of the time, that’s all it is: a vague recollection. They used to be able to do certain things they no longer can do, they used to wake up energetic and vibrant, ready for a new day, and they no longer can, they used to expect good things from life and they no longer do. They don’t live anymore, they simply survive. Sad state of affairs. And I will let you in on a secret: when we feel lousy, we start avoiding whatever gives us pain or makes us feel worse. It’s called self-preservation and it’s built in everyone. So, as a result, we become “lazy”. We may start procrastinating on doing certain things for fear of triggering certain pains or bad sensations, we lose any desire to make any effort, we let things go and we quickly become overwhelmed by the amount of effort (or money) it would take to change the quality of our life. We no longer control our life: life controls us. We become depressed, sad, angry… In short, we no longer own our body: our body owns us. We are completely at its mercy.

Think about it: you feel pain, let’s say… in your belly. Where is it located? And what triggers it? You don’t really know, especially since you’ve already long stopped taking any action that would cause it to flare up. As time goes, that pain, far from subsiding, flares up more often and, as a result, you do less and less, until it becomes constant, you can’t take it anymore and you finally decide to pay your doctor a visit.

The man wants to help, so he asks you questions that you can’t really answer. You have a general idea of the different regions of your body: you have a head going from your hair to your throat, a chest, going from the throat down to your last rib, and a belly, from the ribs to the pelvis, followed by legs and, finally, feet. You know left from right and up from down. So, you tell your doctor: “It’s up, in my left side”, pointing to an area the size of your hand. What you don’t know is that where you point, you have, among many things, a pancreas, part of the colon and part of the small intestine. You also have an intricate nervous system, which role is to transmit the pain to your brain and millions of blood vessels. So, you’ve sent your physician on an exploratory expedition. Like you, the man has exactly twenty-four hours per day and, like you, he has a family and other interests to pursue, in addition to being a doctor. In order for him to help as many people as he can and to comply with the many time constraints imposed on him by many different sources (HMO’s, packed waiting room, little Suzy’s dance recital tonight…) he can only allocate a certain number of minutes to his investigation. He shoots questions at you like a machine gun: where does it hurt exactly, how often, when did it start, what triggers the pain, what kind of diet do you follow, do you drink alcohol etc. You try to answer as best you can but since you’ve avoided the pain for quite some time, you can’t remember accurately what triggers it and you give imprecise answers. In addition, you eat a lot of junk food and are not adverse to gulping a six-pack on occasions but since you know that it is not the best thing you could be doing and he is likely to comment on it, you don’t mention it (no one is going to dictate how I live my life!) remaining vague instead. The doctor becomes frustrated and a tad snappy, you become defensive, he is “on the clock” and so are you, you want to feel better… yesterday, you demand some magic pill. The doctor is conscientious: he won’t give you a prescription, knowing that the wrong one may kill you. Instead, he sends you away with a list of tests to undergo.

So, you’ve spent half-an-hour in the waiting room, fifteen minutes in his office and a $20.00 co-pay (if you have insurance, of course), you still don’t know what’s wrong with you and don’t feel any better and you now need to spend additional time running all over creation to get the tests performed, which means footing another $200.00. Back in your car, you decide that the doctor is a jerk and a quack, he knows nothing and “they are all the same anyway”: greedy incompetent, out to get your money. Besides, you have better things to do than waste your time in waiting rooms and your money on expensive tests you wouldn’t need if doctors knew what they were doing. You will bite the bullet and do nothing a little longer, in the hope that, if things don’t get better, at least they won’t deteriorate too fast. And because you are ticked off and still in pain, you take it on the dog (your spouse, your kids or your employees), thereby proving how accurate Louis-Ferdinant Celine’s statement is…

In fact, what you were looking for is not a doctor but a mechanics. Sadly and regardless of how well educated people might otherwise be, the majority of them do not take the time or the effort to understand their body, their “vehicle”, the only tool they have that can take them anywhere (your car will only take you as far and as long as your body can drive it). Of note, if you repeat the above scenario enough times, you will still not get better, you will become angrier at the medical professions and your spouse, kids or employees will start avoiding you like the plague. What a way to live!

Think now about how your life could be if you decided to become a scientist:

On a Friday morning, you suddenly wake up with an excruciating pain in your left side. As you bend down, you realize that it radiates to your right side. You use your mind as a scientist would. You lie down on your back and, with your fingers, start poking to figure out exactly where it hurts. As you poke, you realize that the acute pain is, in fact, very localized, right below your rib cage. You’ve done your homework and you know exactly what you are pressing on: your colon. In fact, as you keep pressing and exploring, you also feel that it is harder on the left than in your right side. It also feels round, like a little golf ball, and it is deep inside your colon. You take your temperature and have no fever so you are fairly satisfied that it is not a raging inflammation or an infection. Because you know exactly what is inside your body, you are pretty confident that no major organ is involved. Also, you’ve had that body for quite a long time; in fact, you’ve been together ever since you were born. You know how it feels, you are completely intimate with it. As you keep pressing and massaging, you hear loud gargling sounds. You keep on and notice that, as the sound becomes louder, the pain appears to dissipate. That’s good news. As you continue on, you run in your mind the list of what you ate the previous day. Hmm… chili. You love chili but you’ve noticed that the last few times you ate some, you seemed to end up with gas. Well, chili doesn’t agree with you anymore. So you then decide to stop eating chili until you’ve found out why it triggers pain, why it only started a few months ago and what the underlying cause for it might be. Your goal is to ultimately resume eating chili (you love it so much!) and you are determined to reach it. You’ll look into it tonight instead of watching TV.

In the meantime, your pain is gone. You get up from the bed and tests how completely it has subsided. You bend over and backwards, move you waist, stretch sideways. Yup, all gone. In less than a half-an hour, you’ve taken care of a situation which might otherwise have made your day miserable. You feel good, happy not to be in pain anymore and ready to go to work. You might get there later than usual and might even be admonished for it but you feel good and strong and that’s what matters.

As you arrive at the office, you are immediately summoned into your supervisor’s office. As expected, you get chewed out for being late but, because you feel so good, it does not perturb you: you listen politely and, full of confidence, explain that, yes, indeed, you are late and you apologize for it. When you woke up, you felt so terrible and were in so much pain that you considered calling in sick. Fortunately, you know how to handle those situations and you took care of it. The pain is gone, you now feel very well and you are grateful that you were only an hour late instead of absent for the day. In fact, you are amazed that, since starting working there, you have never once called in sick. What you said is so undeniable and reasonable that your supervisor cannot and will not add anything except grumbling noises and you can walk back to your desk, in a good mood, confident, strong and healthy. Come to think of it, the last time you saw a doctor was several years ago, when you needed a physical for your job.

I don’t know about you but, to me, the second situation is very empowering. And it really didn’t take much: a little knowledge, the use of your critical mind, the will to get better and the confidence to know what to do. It sure as heck didn’t cost a penny and endless hours in waiting rooms. And now, you have an opportunity to learn something new: why does chili trigger gas in your body and not in others, how to stop it from happening, how to go back to enjoying it without taking pills and how to keep on feeling good.

“The doctor has been taught to be interested not in health but in disease. What the public is taught is that health is the cure for disease.” Dr.Ashley Montagu, Ph.D.

What are you interested in? Your diseases or your health? How about a short lesson in anatomy? http://www.innerbody.com/htm/body.html And while you are at it, do you want to learn why you may no longer tolerate certain foods? www.drnatura.com Read on and have fun. Who knows, that site might very well be talking about you!

Christine
CBrightlife@aol.com