Why Modern Medicine is Wrong

Modern medicine fails mainly because it approaches problems in the wrong manner and with the wrong mindset.  The approach of modern medicine is to maximize health by adjusting variables.  The ultimate goal of modern medicine seems to be to producing a pill which would contain all of the essentials for life and which would make eating entirely unnecessary.  It would heal all diseases and provide all necessary nutrients.  In essence the dream of science is to create life or at least the ability to maintain life entirely in a test tube.  The mindset of modern medicine and modern science in general is to disprove “old wives tales.”  Most scientists would like to show how all of the old fables are just a bunch of nonsense and give their own theory instead.

The problem with this goal of creating a perfect meal in a pill is that life and the body is too complex.  There are too many variables changing at all times and interacting in nonlinear ways to convert the body’s operations into a set of mathematical equations.  Furthermore, isolating variables can give misleading results because life variables are not isolated or independent in the body.  Weston Price came up with a method to avoid these troubles.  Instead of isolating variables, Weston Price looked all over the world to find the healthiest groups of people.  By looking at a number of healthy groups common patterns can be found and linked to healthiness.  Looking for good things and then studying and emulating them is the way improve health.  Secondly watching the trends of a whole population instead of small focus groups will lead to more accurate results.  Watching a population as a whole will allow all aspects of life to be taken into account.

Modern medicine’s attempt to discredit more traditional medical practices is an old habit of science.  In America the big break for scientific medicine came with the publication of the Flexner Report in 1910.  The report written by proponents of scientific medicine generated enough public outcry so that the American Medical Association could use the strong arm of government to shut down its competitors.  An alternative scientific mindset that could be more productive would be to investigate ancient techniques and look for ways to optimize, understand, and improve them.  The scientific community builds upon previous work—published papers.  Why should the work of humanity over most of its existence be thrown out?

The modern scientific is that society and humanity are constantly improving and getting better.  We are pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps.  We see ourselves as being the pinnacle of humanity.  This is an incorrect vision.  Everything is cyclic in reality although there is an upward trend.  Are we as successful as we think?  Most of our increase in longevity is due to improvements in child birth not actually living longer.  Secondly the health may be going down while life expectancy is going up.  If someone lives to the age of 90 today but without modern life support systems and surgery would have died at 80, can we say he is healthier than someone who lived until 85 without any modern medical care?

Modern medicine takes too much of its money from the government.  There is no problem so bad that the government cannot make worse.  By taking funding from the government and government sponsored organizations such as modern medical insurance companies, the medical community gets its priorities misplaced.  It does not get its money by pleasing its patients it receives its funding by stroking the egos of those in power.  Furthermore prices are distorted by the allocation direction of government money.  Prices are very important because they indicate where effort should be spent and investments should be made.  Government decisions do not accurately reflect public need.  This can be seen by the modern focus on healing existing diseases instead of preventing sickness from occurring in the first place.  You should run and hide whenever anyone tells you, “I am from the government and I am here to help.”

The goal of life in a pill is fundamentally opposed to health as I understand it.  Modern medicine’s theory boils down to assuming that life and the body are just a mixture of chemicals reacting in predictable ways.  This is not true.  It ignores the soul and the complexity of the body.  In my college biology course I learned that one of the principle ideas of life is that when you create an organism out of a series of organs the result is greater than the sum of the inputs.  Scientific medicine ignores love, the spirit, the soul, and all human desires and emotions.  Eating and exercising are not just necessary body maintenance.  Life cannot be separated into a series of chemical equations.