Chapter 5 On Witchcraft in Medicine

Medicine has always been under pressure to provide explanations for the diseases it deals with.And concocting some all-encompassing, unified theory is the oldest and most willing priority of the profession.Initially, the evil spirits to be exorcised were the main source of disease, and the shaman's job was simply to develop and improve the technique of drawing symbols and reciting spells.Later, especially in the West, a new idea became popular again.The idea is that the distribution of body fluids among the various organs determines the course of disease.So, with nowhere to go, we intervened as best we could for centuries with bloodletting, cupping, sweating, and catharsis.At the beginning of this century, the theory of self-intoxication was born again, so most treatments pointed to emptying the large intestine and keeping it empty.Then, the concept of focal infection became popular all over the world, and with it came the idea of ​​hypothetical sensitization to microbial pathogens.God knows how many teeth were pulled out, and how many tonsils, gallbladders and appendixes were removed in those years.As a result, by the 1930s, the idea of ​​treating physical illness and mind appeared, and then, this idea seemed to sweep the medical profession again.

Gradually, one by one, some of our deadliest diseases were singled out from these near-sorcery systems by identifying their causes beyond dispute and treating them symptomatically.Tuberculosis is an example.It is the most stubborn and irresistible progressive disease of human beings, and it can actually invade all organs of the human body.Theories arose, involving the general climate in general, and especially the night air and lack of light, and as a result, the thermal baths became a kind of medical institution.It was not until modern times, with the development of effective chemotherapy, that it was understood that the disease had a single dominant, central cause.Once you get rid of the TB bacillus, you get rid of that disease.

But, that was a thing of the past again.Today, the idea that complex diseases can have a single cause is a thing of the past.Those microbial infections that can be successfully tackled by antibiotics are considered the lucky exceptions.The emerging theory is that most human diseases today, with the exception of infectious diseases, are multifactorial in nature, arising from two broad families of pathogenic mechanisms.First, the influence of environmental factors; second, personal lifestyle.For medicine to be effective against these diseases, it has been recognized that the environment must change, as must the individual's lifestyle, radically.

These things may prove to be true.However, obtaining the necessary evidence will take time.At the same time, the field is still wide open to witchcraft. One of the difficulties in getting a straightforward answer is that there are so many diseases to be dealt with, the course of which is unpredictable, and some of which have a tendency to subside automatically.For rheumatoid arthritis, for example, there are so many different treatments that have nothing in common.Wearing a copper bracelet, moving to Arizona, eating a low-sugar, low-salt, low-meat diet, and even the patients accepted a book on inspiration, which is said to be good.The trouble with the assessment, then, is that about thirty-five percent of patients so diagnosed are destined to recover no matter what is done.But if you do get rheumatoid arthritis, or schizophrenia, let's say, and get better, or, if you're a doctor, and see what happened, you're going to have to believe that it's not you who got better It is difficult to do something.So you need a lot of cases, a long time, and a cool head.

No, witchcraft is at it again, and it's coming back with ferocity. Laetrile almond milk for cancer, acupuncture for deafness and low back pain, vitamins for all ailments, meditation, yoga, dancing, biofeedback, shouting at each other in a crowded room on weekends, one over the other: these effects on people Health has special effects.Running is already a good thing, and now it has medical value, which used to be an attribute of some rare herbs from Indonesia. There is a recurring ad from the Blue Cross in the opinion and editorial pages of the New York Times.The ad urges you to use science to change your living habits, suggesting that if you do so and adopt seven easy-to-do lifestyle habits, you can add eleven years to your life.The case is that the average age of men and women among us is about seventy-two today, which means that we will have to live until then, at least until eighty-three.It is claimed that such amazing things can be done by eating breakfast, exercising regularly, maintaining a normal weight, not smoking, drinking less alcohol, sleeping eight hours a night, and not eating snacks.

The learning that led to this enlightenment was the result of a study by several epidemiologists in California, based on a questionnaire distributed to some seven thousand people.Five years after the questionnaire was sent out, county-level death certificates were searched for statistics on the number of deaths.Three hundred and seventy-one people died during this period.Check their life expectancy with their answers on the questionnaire that year.Undoubtedly, more people die among heavy smokers and drinkers, as you might expect from the known facts, the incidence of lung cancer is higher among smokers, and among Among drinkers, mortality from liver cirrhosis and traffic accidents is higher.However, those who said they did not eat breakfast also had a higher mortality rate, and those who did not exercise had an even higher mortality rate. Some of these people had no physical activity at all, and they did not even drive to the countryside for picnics on weekends.Surprisingly, being 20 percent overweight isn't so bad, but being underweight is clearly linked to higher mortality.

The article describing these observations has been widely cited, and not exclusively by the Blue Cross.Those seven rules of healthy living habits keep appearing in some popular magazines and some newspaper health columns, and they are always mentioned with the promise of adding eleven years to life. This research result is in line with the new beliefs of ordinary people about disease.You are sick because your lifestyle is not right.If you get cancer, no matter what the cause, it's your own fault.If you're not smoking, drinking, or eating something you shouldn't be, it's because you're allowing your bad temper to go its own way in inappropriate circumstances.If you have a coronary artery blockage, it's because you're running less, or you're too stressed out, or you're not content and restless.Or you put on weight.your fault.

But what is breakfast?It was magic, pure witchcraft. You'd have to read that report carefully to see that there's a more straightforward explanation for those findings.Leaving aside heavy smokers and drinkers, for in both cases the thing is obvious; both are dangerous trades.However, it is hard to imagine that not eating a decent or not decent breakfast for five years can be the real cause of death. That explanation reversed cause and effect.Of the 7,000 people who responded that they skipped breakfast, skipped picnics, were underweight, or had restless sleep, some of them must have been sick when they received the questionnaire.They skip breakfast because they get upset at the sight of it.They lose their appetite, lose weight, are too lazy to move around, and have trouble sleeping.They didn't play tennis, or go on a family picnic because they didn't feel well.Some of these people probably had undetected cancer, maybe pancreatic cancer; others might have high blood pressure, or early kidney failure, or some other organic disease, and from that questionnaire it was There is no way to see it.The study did not clarify the cause of the 371 deaths, and only a few of these unidentified anomalies could have had a statistically significant impact.The authors of the paper were cautious enough to note these possible explanations, but did not point them out emphatically enough.So the general feeling you get when you read it is that as long as you eat breakfast and play tennis, you'll keep going.

The widespread acceptance of the seven formulas for health as the path to immortality reflects something important in public attitudes today, or at least some attitudes in the public psyche, namely attitudes toward disease and death .One always wants to know some simple and understandable reason, and one has to be able to do something about it.If you believe that you can prevent some of the causes of premature death like cancer, heart disease, and stroke—diseases whose causes we don’t really understand—by jogging, looking forward, eating moderately, and having a regular routine. It would be nice to have things believed, even though they may not be true.Medicine has lived through other periods of unified theories constructed to explain all human disease, not always as virtuous as this time might lead to, but medicine has survived .After all, if people could be swayed to quit smoking, stop eating and drinking, and engage in some kind of physical activity, most of them would certainly feel better with more order and regularity in their lives, and , and many are bound to look more refreshed.

No one has anything bad to say about the sheer kindness of keeping a man healthy.However, we still have to be careful about those promises. In this tenet of the seven formulas of health preservation, there is also an attractive ideological double-faced knife, not counting the underlying concept of luck in those two numbers-every seven see eleven (a term in a dice game) — translator).Both the left and the right in politics can get what they want from it.For the right, I heard that the individual, who has always been an independent, self-reliant American citizen, is now responsible for his own health, and he is to blame for what happens because he smokes, drinks, or lives the wrong way (and he will happily admit that you are unlucky), which is quite attractive.Conversely, it would be good for the Left to be told that all our health problems; including deaths, are caused by society because society did not guide its members to live well.If you really want to improve the health of your people, the answer is not scientific research; you should rise up and overthrow the existing society and create a better one.This is called going straight and I win, but going the other way and you lose.

Caught between the left and the right, the medical skeptic has a tough time.Admitting ignorance when it comes to disease mechanisms is far more difficult to convincing than claiming complete understanding.Especially when that purported understanding leads—whether logically or not—to some kind of action, people are more likely to believe it.When serious illness is at stake, the public tends to be skeptical of skeptics and more willing to believe true believers.This is also human nature.This is medicine's oldest dilemma, one that neither fairness nor rhetoric can resolve.What is required is a lot of time and patience, waiting for science to come, as it has in the past, to bring hard facts.