“Your Health Matters”
THE FORK IN THE ROAD - A model for medicine Dr. Derrick Lonsdale, Strongsville OH
Looking at the history of the development of medical thinking, there are many different models. A model represents an idea, a structural format that fits for the cause and treatment of disease, a word defined in Webster as “any departure from normal health, an illness.” For example the model that is used today in the West is completely different from that used by the ancient Chinese and it would seem to be pertinent to look at how our Western model was developed in the first place. Until the internal structures of the body and their functions were defined it was totally impossible to understand any principles of why we get sick. Throughout medieval history there was in fact no model. Very early concepts blamed demons and evil spirits and for several centuries, bleeding the patient seems to have been the only treatment offered. These ideas were developed out of ignorance. Our present model was derived from the discovery of organisms that were so small that they could not be seen without a microscope. This idea, however, was born even before the development of the microscope. Semmelweiss was a 19th century Hungarian physician. He had observed that physicians would enter the delivery room directly from the morgue to deliver mothers of their infants. Since the puerperal “childbed” fever had a mortality rate of 10 to 35%, but germs had not yet been discovered, Semmelweiss concluded that the physicians were “bringing something in on their hands”. He made them wash their hands before delivering any of their patients. Childbed fever virtually disappeared, as we would now expect. Even with this practical evidence that the current medical model was wrong, Semmelweiss was persecuted and derided by the medical profession because his concept was “out-of-the-box.” It infringed on the philosophy that governed medical thinking at that time, an unforgivable sin in the eyes of his medical compatriots who were ultimately shown to be themselves wrong. Well, as we all know, the germ theory was finally accepted and it provided the very first idea for the cause 48 dialogue
WINTER 2018-19, VOL. 32, NO. 2
of disease. The foundation of this model is that an attacking agent is “the enemy.” The direction that took place was to kill “the enemy.” The philosophy was “kill the bacterium, kill the virus, kill the cancer cell” and medical science has spent years and is still trying to develop compounds and treatments that would kill the “enemy” without killing the patient. You can be sure that they killed a lot of patients (and still do) in their attempts, until the dramatic discovery of penicillin that opened the so-called antibiotic era. Antibiotic resistance is now a new threat conjured up by the “enemy.” The fork in the road I like to think imaginatively that medicine was “walking down a long rough road.” It came to a fork with the road leading to the right that carried a signpost. The signpost said “Kill the enemy.” The road leading to the left had no signpost so the right fork was the obvious one to travel. Kill the bacteria; kill the virus; kill the cancer cell. Be aggressive; don’t let the disease take over the show. The rest of this article deals with what the left fork may have yielded. I suggest that the signpost would have said “Help the defense.” Copy Hippocrates; don’t do any harm; above all, avoid a noisy mechanical hospital so that the patient can assist himself by proper rest while listening to gentle music. Make sure that his nutrition is appropriate so that “food becomes his medicine.” The body as a fortress I now call into effect the reader’s imagination. Think of the body as like an old-fashioned fortress. An attack would demand a defense orchestrated by a commander. To watch for an attack there would always have to be guards or sentries posted on the battlements. Sighting a would-be attack by a guard would involve sending a messenger to the commander so that he could organize the defense. The body works like that. White cells are just like the imagined soldiers as they “go into battle”. All the other phenomena that we call “an infection” are really generated as part of a complex defensive system. The brain body concept The human brain, complex as it is, consists of two www.dialogue.ca