-- and, as a result of that failure, great pain and unnecessary suffering. And it is important that, as you discover how badly the modern medical paradigm is failing, you take great care not to assign blame wrongly. Yes, there are incompetent doctors whose practices we all abhor, and we wish they could never practice medicine again, but this newsletter is not about them. Neither is it directed at the thousands of faithful health care workers who go about their daily jobs. Specifically, my purpose in this newsletter is to confront the very foundational philosophy and system of the modern medical paradigm -- a philosophy that costs trillions and a system that promises hope, but delivers misery. No one, including many inside the medical community, can help but acknowledge these great failings. Sadly, for all our education and massive expenditures, modern medicine has failed miserably. You may wonder why.
Modern medicine likes to trace its roots to Hippocrates, the patron saint of today's doctors. In truth, its roots rest more comfortably in the Newtonian views of the 17th century when philosophers and scientists defined the universe as a great machine. Physicians of that era were not immune to this influence and likewise began to define the human body as a machine. According to this "new" paradigm, the body could be analyzed, catalogued, adjusted, and repaired as required -- just like any other machine. This viewpoint became firmly established during the 19th century when the "body as machine" concept was taken to its ultimate, absurd extreme. The human body was no longer viewed as a holistic entity, but rather as a grouping of separate parts and pieces. Disease was no longer viewed as a body state, but as a set of symptoms. Ultimately, and so it is today, the province of medicine has become the observation, classification, and management of symptoms. According to this paradigm, disease or illness or injury manifests itself as symptoms entirely separate from the body as a whole (a decidedly non-holistic paradigm). The body is irrelevant. If the symptom can be eliminated (e.g., cholesterol numbers lowered through daily use of statin drugs), you are, by definition, now healthy.
In fact, there are some who would argue that today's medicine has even gone beyond treating the body as a machine -- that today's doctors have taken things to a whole new level of absurdity. They treat the body as a mere set of "numbers." When you go to your doctor now, he or she orders up a series of very expensive tests (blood work, PSA, EEG, etc.), each of which produces a set of numbers. Then, based on where your numbers fall relative to a chart of "normal" numbers, your doctor prescribes a series of drugs to move your numbers up or down so that they fall within the "norm." In this model, even symptoms don't matter -- only the numbers.
As it turns out, the body as machine paradigm works very well in surgical repair. If you break an arm, the doctor works with that part of the machine and repairs your arm. If you are wounded by a bullet, the doctor removes the bullet and repairs all of the separate parts of your body damaged by the bullet -- again, problem solved!
Unfortunately, the paradigm's failures become most evident when we look at the major diseases of our time -- cancer, heart disease, diabetes, Alzheimer's, etc.
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