After paying due obeisance to his medical education in Lucknow, and as a postgraduate in England, Professor Hegde expresses a concern, not in itself unique, that specialisation and the reductionist approach to health and disease are preventing perception of important aspects of the human condition. His book, entitled "Holistic Living", recognises a combination of integration and of randomness, which he prefers to term 'chaos' in determining what happens to our health. The subsequent discussion deals sensibly with many of the factors which influence our state of health social, nutritional and behavioural. This is not an area in which "Consensus rules O.K.?"; and those who start the day with a bowl of muesli, damped down with skimmed milk, may not warm to the suggestion that breakfast should be 'the biggest meal' as well as 'the most important a suggestion backed up by the 'wise old saying™ Eat your breakfast like a king, the lunch like a commoner. and the supper like a pauper". That is but one example to illuminate his writing, thus bringing nostalgia to those who served there in times past. Another example. again tinged with the shock of unfamiliarity in these days when all the talk is of 'outcomes', is the 'Eastern philosophy' of "do your duty without concern for the fruits of your labour". This comes in a chapter on 'Crisis management', and is probably good advice when practicable. It must be quite difficult to write anything on holistic medicine which is both original and interesting. In my view, Professor Hedge has managed it' and I hope his book will have the success which it deserves.
"The sciences do not try to explain they hardly even try to interpret they mainly make models -mathematical constructs which are expected to work" said John Von Neumann. How true even in medical sciences!!
With the advent of specialisation in medicine, the Each real wisdom has disappeared from the scene. specialist tries to prefect his tool and practises his trade through these tools. Knowledge depends on conventional models of cohort or case control studies and the analysis of these data is done through the Dalton-Fisher regression models. The Gaussian distribution of all human characteristics are used to predict outcomes.
"Prediction is difficult, especially of the future" was the correct judgement of Neils Bohr. In spite of all these, doctors even today predict the outcomes of intervention, either medical or surgical, with great confidence. Truth is that these predictions are as fallacious as astrological predictions based on the time of one's birth. The patient is made to believe that these predictions are scientific, however.
Newton's illusion of absolute space and time was demolished by Einstein's theory of relativity. Quantum physics put an end to Newtonian ideas of contributable measures. Conventional science has its limitations. I feel science, as it is now, is heading for a crisis because of specialisation.
Mathematicians do not understand the language of the physicists and the latter find it difficult to coexist with chemists. Physicians work under the illusion that biological sciences obey the conventional scientific laws.
However there is a new science emerging in the distant horizon, called the science of chaos (not used in the dictionary sense). Classical science ends where chaos begins. Chaos reverses the mad race for specialisation. It looks at the whole.
Chaos fits into human biology most admirably. Linear mathematics of the Euclidean school is used now in all calculations in medicine. The human system does not follow the linear mathematics. In the linear system small causes have small effects and minor inaccuracies in starting data should only have small errors in their final outcome. These assumptions have now been proved to be totally fallacious in human biology.
In Human body works as a whole. There is very close liaison between the working of the different systems in the body. To give a concrete example, the heart rate is enslaved to the breathing rhythm which, in turn, is locked on to brain function and so on. short, every part of the body is "enslaved" to other parts. Order, rhythm and equilibrium have no meaning in human health at all. Health is a state of chaos in the true sense. It is resilient and arrhythmic and consequently robust. Death is static and non-chaotic.
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