Counter Thinking The Medical Industry
By Prof. BM Hegde
28 April, 2016
Bmhegde.com
“To have something different you must do something different. But in order to do something different you must be able to think something different. And before you can think something different you must be willing to believe something different.” - Anon
Every thought is a thing, so say many quantum physicists. Therefore, if you want to get anything you must be able to think first. Today in the world of “science” no body is permitted to think! Even if you write a new sentence in any of your papers, the editor and the so called “peer-reviewer” want a reference to that statement. Logically, that eliminates fresh thinking. “If only I could think, if only I could think!” lamented Albert Einstein many times. Curiously, physics died a natural death with his student, Werner Heisenberg, thinking laterally following some of his mediation sessions on the Mountains in 1925. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle put an end to conventional physics. That was finally sealed by another colleague of Einstein and Heisenberg, Hans Peter Durr, Director of the Max Planck Institute in Munich, who showed that “matter is not made up of matter.” He calls that a-duality, which he himself admits is not as good a concept as Advaitha of ancient Sanathana Dharma in India! Without matter where is physics?
Years ago in 1968, I wrote a paper with the title-Should we be drugging every elevated blood pressure?-which landed me in real trouble in my department. I survived with the skin of my teeth! I have been thinking and researching that ever since. I met a middle aged but young looking man in his early 60s, a retired Dean of an Agricultural University, yesterday after my talk at the International Cocoanut Meet at the CPCRI, Kasargod in Kerala, who wanted my opinion on his cholesterol levels of 600-800 mg per decilitre for decades. He tried drugs for a couple of days and felt miserable and stopped. He was a specimen of perfect health. Health, incidentally, is defined as enthusiasm to work and enthusiasm to be compassionate lately. The concept of organ based disease is long back dead in true science of man. “There is NO science of man”, wrote Dr. Alexis Carrel, Nobel Laureate, in his celebrated book, Man the Unknown.
A silent killer is a new mantra invented by the powerful pharma lobby’s paid scientists to rope in millions to buy drugs for the rest of their lives. Gullible doctors buy that argument whole heartedly which incidentally helps the doctors also if one has read that illuminating editorial in the prestigious JAMA, the official journal of the American Medical Association, entitled Looking the Gift Horse in the Mouth!
Disease inventors is a fascinating book by Professor Jerg Blech that gives a graphic description of this menace called hypertension first started in the “Well Man Clinics” that German companies started there outside Cinema Halls and Shopping Malls, to label apparently healthy people with a disease! That has been extended to raised cholesterol and raised sugar in healthy people as diseases! The Patron Saint of hypertension research in the UK, Professor Sir George Pickering, wrote the real truth after decades of teaching and researching hypertension thus: “More people in this world make a living OFF hypertension than dying OF it.” Same could be said about cholesterol and sugar in healthy people. Studies have shown that drug therapy of asymptomatic high blood pressures and sugars have not benefitted the recipients but, have shown to be harmful! A meta-analysis of seventeen large conventional studies of hypertension and two much touted cholesterol lowering treatment studies, conducted by Uffe Ravnskov showed that there is hardly any difference in the absolute risk reduction (ARR) in the treated groups, although the relative risk reduction, (RRR) a statistical trick sold to doctors, did demonstrate some benefit. Similar is the experience of drugs lowering sugar levels in asymptomatic Impaired Glucose Tolerance (IGT) patients by a Scandinavian group of researchers!
To cite a few examples of this syndrome here seems relevant. Mahatma Gandhi’s blood pressure was always way high which made his physician, Dr. Sushila Nayyar, lose her sleep. Her patient never took drugs and did not die of the consequences of his label. One of the leading neurosurgeons in Bangalore (who has permitted me to disclose this secret) tells me each time we lecture together that his BP has always has been 90/50 or so. Both have had very long lives and the latter is alive at 80 plus! I pray for his century. French nursing home studies have now shown that to be alive at 90 plus one need to have cholesterols in the range of 800 mg plus! One of my dear friends that died last year at 89 had his systolic pressures recorded in 200 ranges ever since he was a student in the 1920s in London. He could not tolerate the treatment and remained hale and healthy all his life without drugs, being a very active management guru of India. A young friend of mine at 89 does not take any pills even now and says he has survived many cardiologists in his long life. He does yoga even now!
Science should learn from nature; neither from the laboratory alone nor try to teach nature a lesson or two. Nature tells us that health is man’s birth right and any deviation from the normal (which is the rule rather than exception, called healthy chaos in science) is being managed by the human immune system. The range of change in blood pressure, sugar, cholesterol or any other of the millions of chemical molecules that humans have ( a single human cell cytoplasm has 10,000 protein molecules: there are one hundred thousand billion cells in all) all been managed properly by the immune mechanism. We have recent increase in diseases now, thanks to our messing up with our life styles and environment. A good scientist will dismiss all these as anecdotal, a fashionable word to dismiss unwanted truths. When their rules fail they label it as “exceptions only prove the rule”-strange logic indeed!
Diseases are only exceptions and accidents. Even diseases, in their incipient stages, are managed by the immune mechanism built in to the human physiology. It is only in the unlikely event that the latter can not afford to correct the deviation does the body show signs of distress-the symptoms of any disease. It is only under those rare occasions that doctors are needed to help patients “to cure rarely, comfort mostly but to console always.” Every one needs a humane family doctor to assist him/her in times of need. No one should be his/her own doctor and self medicate even for silly symptom like a headache.
To claim that one will be able to catch diseases in their early phase to radically cure them etc, the daily advertisements that we see extolling the virtues of regular health check ups and screening for this or that deadly diseases, is plain rubbish and not based on any science. “Routine screening of apparently healthy people is the most dangerous activity” avers a leading article in the famous British Medical Journal followed by a devastating editorial by the then editor, Richard Smith, entitled the “Screening Industry”, which it surely is. “Modern Medicine has become a corporate monstrosity,” writes Ruth Richardson, a British medical historian. That was precisely the reason why Thomas Wakely started a new journal in 1823, The Lancet, which he claimed could open the large abscess containing foul smelling pus that medicine at that time had become, using his surgical lancet. The Journal has survived to this day with the abscess now becoming a corporate monstrosity according to Ruth Richardson in spite of Wakely’s lancet! Thomas Wakely (1795-1862) was a physician, a demagogue and a young radical Member of the House of Commons. Little did he realise, young as he was, that it is folly to be wise in the world of the blind.
“You can bend it and twist it... You can misuse and abuse it... But even God cannot change the Truth.”--- Michael Levy
Belle Monappa Hegde often abbreviated as B. M. Hegde (born 18 August 1938) is an Indian medical scientist, educationist and author. He is a retired Vice Chancellor of the Manipal University and the head of the Mangalore Chapter of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. He has authored several books on medical practice and ethics. He was Professor of Cardiology [Visiting] London University since 1982. He was Emeritus International Advisor to The Royal College of Physicians of London and Edinburgh. He was First Indian examiner for MRCP [UK] examination in the UK from 1988 to 1998. He was MRCPI examiner in Dublin since 2000 till 2009. He served as President of World Academy of Authentic Healing Sciences, Mangalore. He has been a Non Executive & Independent Director of Zydus Wellness Limited since July 29, 2009. Dr. Hegde has 47 years of teaching experience to undergraduates and postgraduates. He has been a professor of Medicine since 1973. Dr. Hegde, an elected fellow of the National Academy of Medical Sciences, has won Dr. B. C. Roy National Award in the category of an Eminent Medical Teacher, Dr. J. C. Bose Award for Life Sciences Research, PRIDE OF INDIA Award from the Pacific Association of Indians in California and many more. Dr. Hegde is Padma Bhushan awardee 2010. He is MBBS, Ph. D. [Hon. Causa], MD, FRCP [London], FRCP [Edinburgh], FRCP [Glasgow], FRCPI [Dublin], FACC [USA] and FAMS[10]He is also the Editor in Chief of the medical journal, Journal of the Science of Healing Outcomes. He was awarded the Dr. B. C. Roy Award in 1999. In 2010 He was honoured with a Padma Bhushan, one of India's highest civilian awards. Hegde is visiting faculty at many universities. Email: [email protected]