Bringing Medicine out of the Egyptian Dark Ages

How we have confused regression and advancement

The frog was worshipped in Ancient Egypt

“Dark Ages?” you may ask. “How can you use Dark Ages to describe modern medicine?”

It is a valid question. After all, we have nice and shiny hospitals, gleaming and computerized MRI and CT scan machines, robotic surgeries, rapid manufacture of medicines, hundreds of tests, thousands of diagnostic tools, and probably tons of treatments. Research centers and Medical Colleges are studying everything at the atomic or molecular DNA level, discovering a million new things every day. Many are awaiting artificial intelligence in medicine with bated breath. All evidence seems to point to a bright, almost miraculous, future for medicine.

But, there is a catch, a big one.

This entire wave of medicine has forgotten one thing: it has forgotten to think.

Let me explain what I mean with a little history. In Ancient Egypt, people thought that frogs were born out of the mud directly. They were hence worshipped as symbols of life. This feeling continued throughout the centuries – as late as 1600’s, the famous scientist van Helmont thought that all you needed to create mice was to leave out some dirty rags and wheat in the open for three weeks. It was with great difficulty and a lot of experiments that people were able to establish that life comes from life, not from mud. They had to think things through clearly, and show why there is always a sign of life everywhere – and understand how leaving out rotting things is simply a way for those living things to start growing. It does not mean that non-living things gave rise to living things.

If we imagine the achievement of knowledge as a hard trek up a mountain - they managed to climb up quite a distance up the mountain in their understanding.

Side by side with this, doctors also began to pay special attention to this living principle. Two famous examples are Paracelsus (1492 – 1541) and Hahnemann (1755 – 1843). Paracelsus’ discoveries throbbed with life as he gathered them from every corner of society – from old wives’ tales and legends and hidden remedies to chemicals – and he taught systematically about how the living principle works. He called it the Archeon. Hahnemann, on the other hand, focused on understanding how substances can aid the living process through dilution and oscillation. After all, our body is predominantly made of pulsating fluids, and bringing solid substances to a fluid state was hence the skill that Hahnemann found worthy of development.

And then came the age of machines and atoms. Doctors got swept away with the advances in these fields – and started focusing on the non-living once again. Either they would learn from dissecting corpses, or by assuming that the body works like a machine: brain is a telephone circuit, nerves are wires, stomach is a chemical factory, heart is a pump, etc. On the other hand, in terms of treatments, the atoms and molecules conquered medicine – physics and chemistry became the rule, and the living principle was lost.

As a result, they lost the critical advance made over several centuries in trying to understand life as such and simply forgot about it.

They slid back on that mountainside of knowledge, and slid down all the way back to Ancient Egypt once again.

Development in Medicine began to simply piggy-back on physics and chemistry, like a reverse case where Vikram piggy-backs on Betal (in the old stories, Betal piggy-backed on Vikram, pestering him with questions. Today, doctors are piggy-backing on the Betal called physics-chemistry, and they rarely ask him questions). Scientists discovered the telescope to discover the stars? Well, we will turn it downward and make it a microscope to observe cells. Oh, they discovered X-rays? Let’s scan the body with it. The chemists identified the molecular forms of hormones using X-rays? Come, let us fiddle with them and make medicines. Oh they discovered titanium? Let us make artificial bones with them. Oh they could detect atoms and molecules? Let us throw out homeopathy then. They found glow-in-the-dark radioactive materials? Let's use it to scan the body. They discovered robots, computers and AI? Let us hand over all of medicine to a robot in that case, it will be so much better. And so on and so forth.

Imagine the opposite: Betal carrying Vikram

They didn’t realize, that by making medicine a field that dealt with all these instruments and non-living things, their thinking was exactly at the level of the Egyptians. Some modern scientists in the 1950’s – Urey and Miller – also made an experiment with where they deluded themselves into thinking that life is created this way, by striking an electric spark at a bunch of chemicals in a flask. Frogs from the mud – all over again.

Stanley Miller watching his concoction

We have to realize that all the pomp and glory attributed to modern medicine is nothing but the reflection of the shine of physics, chemistry and technology. It is no closer to understanding life, and in fact has moved even farther away, and continues to slide down. We are surprised when we watch a tiny cut on our finger getting healed - even the best surgeons in the world are equally surprised because they know almost nothing more than us about that healing process. They just know that the healing happens, so they cut, stitch and patch by just trusting this unknown. Most of the time, the exact action of drugs is also unknown to the doctors, they leave that to the chemists (or worse, to the pharmaceutical reps). They may know next to nothing about what X-ray radiation really is. They are not physicists or chemists, after all...

This means we have to realize that medicine that has an identity crisis and thinks it is the science of non-living matter, can actually harm life. It may give mechanical support, but end up deteriorating quality of life, mental health, human capacities, etc. We need to understand life, as life, once again. This means finding those paths where this knowledge was still cultivated, even if ignored by the vast majority. There are various streams of this kind – such as Ayurveda, homeopathy, Unani, Chinese medicine, Anthroposophic medicine, which will be summarized next time.