REASON2LIVE: MEDICINE - science and/or faith

MEDICINE: SCIENCE AND/OR FAITH © Charles Njue 2009 (Approx. Reading Time: 19 mins) Angels live right amongst us; have you met one? I can unflinchingly say I have; my dear late auntie Jane. She had lived a hale and hearty vastly rewarded life, despite the common constant ups and downs.  She had just been recently estranged from her husband; she had just moved back to grandmas; something entirely non-conformist in our still conservative society. Her fortitude was just indissoluble. She seemed to have the facility to effortlessly glide through life's privations.  She really was a remarkable human being, nothing could ever hold her down, and no hole was ever too deep for her to crawl out. She had the most resilient construction I ever came across.  She had the uncanny aptitude to rebound from a fall with utter defiance, and the harder she plunged the higher she bounced back,.  She had not known much of a smooth sailing in her adult life, her marriage had seemed wretched right from as far as I can remember. her husband was a pitiable drunkard haggard mess most of the time that he had once been suspended from work two years in a row; and that's from a civil service job -  you never get suspended there; dead people remain on the government payroll for an extra ten years. her teen son was doing his best at being an adolescent,  But auntie jane was beyond public disdain; sHe said what she meant, meant what she said and backed it up with her actions, Say what you may, do what you wish, that was up to you. Life was not entirely hard knock for her though; her first born son, who was in his final year at a communications college at the time was a young man with a dazzling future, and her ten year old daughter was a cherub. we all adored her, Auntie Jane seems to have overcome death itself she continues to teach vital lessons to date, I cannot help but wonder whether she stirs in her grave.  I dedicate this piece to her. lately, I have come across a really interesting career concept- a life coach.  The idea is gaining a lot of recognition in the developed world; celebrities are paying millions of dollars to this so called life coaches  Just to be told how to perk up that lives, how to live happier, to feel good about themselves, to loose weight, to eat better foods and the list goes on. I have nothing against the so called 'life coaches', nor against the thousands of authors and publishers that are raking in millions by telling people how to lead their lives;  They all have to earn a living and there is nothing wrong with helping others while you are at it.  As a matter fact, it is my believe that one's pursuit to improve their lives is a journey that we should all invest in at whatever cost -  It can be most gratifying.  But it is also my conviction that life's most vital lessons are for ever and a day in our midst; we just dont bother to be keen enough – angels do really live amongst us. We stand to learn most not from our celebrity heroes who rigorously sift what gets to us, but from run of the mill everyday people we mingle with in our day to day life.  You would be tempted to covet a movie or music personality, or a politician based on what you see in Music videos, a larry king interview, in the autobiography he wrote, but do you truthfully believe that is how their life really is?  Let us not strive so much to look very far, because life coaches are right in our midst;  Our families and kins, our friends and even foes, our spouses and even our children, and even that stranger who may not even be aware that you  are always watching him as he hands out slices of bread to street urchins every morning – and even more important, Let us make every effort to lead our lives in a way that we are other peoples' life coaches in as many instances as is possible.  You may think people don't notice, you would be dead wrong;  Just think of the many good and bad acts you notice In a single day, or just stand at a pavement and watch people pass by for just ten minutes you will be surprised how many things you notice. All my life I did not have to look very far for these important lessons in life; our most important source is of course our immediate family, particularly our parents.  This has been used to explain a wide range of behavioral traits from alcoholism to spousal abuse. First, it was thought to be genetically inherent; we now know better - you do not inherit alcoholism, or wife battering, but if you watched your dad do it, you are predisposed to doing it yourself.  A child molester was most likely molested as a child.  The implications of these annotations are wide reaching;  We can forestall a rape for example, we can save a child from molestation beforehand.  Now I am digressing - I intended just to mention a remarkable person in my life – my Aunt Jane; God rest her soul in eternal peace. I watched her drastic change from a seemingly completely healthy person, to laboured walk, to full paralysis, to aided breathing in just twelve hours and the next morning she was gone.  No one could believe it; she left home healthy, she came back in a casket, and it wasn't an accident; it makes one question their lack of believe or believe in witchcraft. Anyway, as it turned out, Doctors at the provincial general hospital and later at Kenyatta National hospital had been treating her for over a year for the wrong ailment; They had been treating a flaking skin rush that just wouldn't go away while that had just been a symptom of a much more serious life threatening infection.  This is not an exclusive or isolated incidence; incorrect or delayed and sometimes even needless diagnosis almost certainly cause more deaths than our 'learned colleagues' are willing to disclose. Stories like this are far more common than they should be, people are made to feel like hypochondriacs as they are subjected to test after test and nothing amiss is detected, and continue to suffer from potentially fatal yet treatable diseases and disorders that sometimes develop slowly presenting no obvious warning signals or they may exhibit symptoms so vague that doctors might miss them.  Those of us that are left with nothing but mourning and fond memories of our departed ones try to apportion blame; in the United States, someone would definitely have had thier behind hauled to court. But in our society, that is extremely improbable; we are a forgiving society! – how wise that is? That's another day's debate.  I have never really gotten over that vengeful emotion; I still feel that Aunt Jane's demise could have been avoided. I would so love just to hear someone own up that they made a error, that they overlooked something; that feeling is intensified by the fact that all it had taken me to make the correlation between that rush and her hasty paralysis was just a few clicks of the mouse at a local public heath information bureau called WIRED that aims at disseminating information on health issues especially HIV/AIDS and also runs a voluntary counseling and testing facility.  I dug out that information and handed it over to the physician who was attending to Aunt Jane when we rushed her to the ER at the Embu General Hospital the night she passed away.  If I could figure it out that first why hadn't all those specialists over such a long? Well all the finger pointing won't bring dear Aunt Jane back to us now, but that particular incident made me reassess the current dependence and trust we lay on our medical system.  It is no doubt that advancements in the medical field are at echelon never seen before.  Now doctors are capable of pulling out the most vital of organs from a human being, like the heart, replace it and nurture the patient back to full health;  It is nothing short of bringing the dead back to life.  New surgical operations, new technologies, new drugs are doled out by the day.  Drug companies are investing billions of dollars in research and development of new drugs that they proclaim can do wonders – drugs to increase sexual vigor, to cut body fat, to lower cholesterol, to end depression, to calm your children;  They are drugs for just about everything.  Social and ethical problems are now being addressed as medical conditions;  Panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, menopausal disorder, obesity disorder, anorexia, erectile dysfunction, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, hypertension, irritable bowel disorder, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, etc.  More 'disorders' are being diagnosed than ever before.  As matter of fact, if a disease for our problems has not been made out yet, no sweat, it sure is coming soon.  There is an escalating tendency to highlight a rare disease, proclaim that it affects large numbers of the population and than prescribe medication for it. In this age, every grievance or tendency one might possibly have becomes a symptom of a disease and medics are quick to proposition solutions to conditions you may not have even realized were medical problems.  This trend can only be referred to as selling sickness.  A good example of this is the success story that Viagra turned into;  Viagra has become so part of life for the common person that the tyrant regime of North Korea, faced with economic sanctions and embargos for being an 'axis of evil' is counterfeiting Viagra as a way of making easy billions to supplement their national budget - It is easier to make dollars by making Viagra than counterfeiting the green bulk itself; Another way that the North Koreans have attempted. Another disorder that is strongly or entirely related to lifestyle choices, and that all of us are likely to be suffering from is what is now being referred to as Intermittent Explosion Disorder (IED). who can say that that they never suffer from occasional bursts of fury.  IED is said to be characterized by recurring outbursts of extreme anger and violence as seen in cases involving road rage or spousal abuse. sound familiar? is someone you know suffering from these symptoms? Probably a teenager, or a drunken husband going through a mid-life crisis, or an anxious or depressed inmate who exhibits symptoms of verbal outbursts followed by a bang on the table during interrogation by wardens.  So you think it is a medical condition?  Well, there is a pill for it anyway.  So if your teenage daughter yells or smashes the mirror next time you deny her the consent to go out with a suspicious young man don't bother sitting down with her to explain yourself, just pass by the chemist the next day; it is easier and less time consuming after all.  And when a teenager opens fire on his school mates, it is not his or anyone's fault, it's an illness. Why should we even bother taking a lot of time teaching our kids how to lever situations. Bottom line is: there is indeed plentiful faith on the earth today – there is a kind of collective devotion, an ironic accord given the cancerous ravages of our human nature, an immunity against the endemic evil that plagues every aspect of human endeavor, be it international relations, in business and finance, in government, in civil society, and even in religion – humans just never concur.  But not so in modern medicine; there is more faith finding its way into our hospital hallways than into the almost empty churches , mosques and temples, aisles, arenas and altars.  The pertinent questions are, does modern medicine merit our devotion?  Is it a case of misplaced faith? Can the science of modern medicine stand as tall without the trust we bestow in it? The general assumption in the world today is that people with more health care live longer, happier and healthier lives.the Americans spend nine times more on health care than the second highest spender. Are Americans the healthiest lot in the world? The stack naked truth is that Americans have worse health and lower life expectancies than people in other industrialized nations like Greece, France, Germany and Spain.  General health continues to deteriorate even as the world continues to spend more money than ever before to become healthy.  The prevalence rate for all types of cancer in Africa was extremely low two decades ago; a rather worrying trend is now emerging - not only have the incidences of breast cancer grown exponentially in Africa, but younger men in the ages of below 45 are being diagnosed with it more than any other part of the world.  This is a really perturbing trend; any medic will tell you that breast cancer was most likely to afflict only older women. Despite all the new drugs and treatments, degenerative illness are at epidemic levels the world over; cancer, heart disease and stroke kill more people than HIV/AIDS, and malaria combined.  Sharp increases in these illnesses have been noted in young adults, a segment of the population usually thought as being healthy.  It is no longer unusual to hear a thirty five year old die of a heart attack.  even our children are not spared by this anomalous health trends; type two diabetes, a condition normally only found in adults, is on the rise in children.  Weight related illnesses are also becoming quite prevalent in children.  And then there is of course the emergence of new strange diseases that will take years, may be even generations to develop effective ways of combating them; HIV AIDS, bird flu, Ebola, e.t.c.  HIV/AIDS is now the principal threat to African Economies.  These massive health crises continue to grow even as use of drugs and medical treatments advance by the day.  In the old days, if you had the misfortune of becoming ill, chances are you would have had one of the most common treatments of the day.  If you were in Europe, you would have your blood sucked out by leeches  If in Africa, you would have some herbal potion from a witch doctor, in Native America it would be a chant from an Indian chief with a feathery hair do, in japan you would have had pins stuck in your body.  Did these things work? I have no idea.  But they were scrapped With the coming of such avant-garde proceedings as the discovery of penicillin. Treatment shifted to purely scientific based procedures, pegged only on scientific proof. Somewhere along that road, something must have gone horribly wrong. Today, medicine is often a non science based industry. There is little or no evidence at all that many extensively used treatment and procedures actually work.  There is a silent consensus within the industry that majority of drugs and surgery administered for symptom relief is only effective because of the placebo effect and that sometimes they actually have a significant potential of harming the patient.  In all probability, it is your faith  that does the actual healing.  Maybe the very same reason why the leeches, the chants and the acupuncture of old times worked.  But unlike those old time remedies, modern medicine either introduces, Chemicals in the case of drugs, or removes something in surgical cases  from your system both with potential advance effects. Despite lots of evidence of this, much of the medical establishment is either ignorant and apathetic or it willfully refuses to accept that its guesswork has been shot down. Don't get me wrong; am not saying that modern medicine causes the problems, but it certainly is not solving them. You would be sickened if you knew how many treatments have no scientific proof that they actually help patients. A point in reference is a survey carried out by an American; Dr. David Eddie, a heart surgeon turned health care economist (business week May 29).  That found out that only 15% of physicians' decisions are supported by solid evidence. paraphrased; you must take 85% of any medications, surgeries or treatment your doctor recommends on faith alone; There is no solid proof showing their effectiveness.  Dr. Eddie cites for example that the common practice of preventing women from giving birth vaginally if they had a previous cesarean was the recommendation of just one doctor and is almost certainly baseless.  Did you know that the annual chest x-ray that many in the industry insist on actually shows nothing helpful;  can someone please tell this to the local universities who insist that brings one with him on registration day.  In-fact, most drugs have definite negative side effects, if they don't make your drowsy, they definitely irritate your bowels. Some of the treatments prescribed may actually harm you in other ways or possibly more seriously.  So, if doctors aren't writing these prescriptions based on solid scientific evidence, what do they base their decisions on? In today's medical practice, like back in the old days, medicine makes decision with an entirely different method from what we would call rational; Doctors decide how to treat patients based upon inherited traditions, using their best human judgments and a host of other complex factors as opposed to proven scientific evidence. The scary truth is that medical establishments are not necessarily always right. Why Complex factors? The medical industry today is plagued by complexities  that woefully outmatch doctors' judgments.  All you need to do to comprehend this is to look at the varying treatments that doctors prescribe for the same illness, and you will right away appreciate how many cherished beliefs are uncertain. It gets even more complicated if the said illness is one of the rare types, like what Aunt Jane had, or like lupus, Coelic disease or Anxyrysm; our learned friends may not even agree on diagnosis and even in cases where they do, the treatment will differ widely.  Take cancer for instance; a surgeon will most likely advocate for surgery to remove the tumor, a hospital that is participating in research trials for a chemotherapy treatment, funded of course by the pharmaceutical companies, is predisposed to suggest chemotherapt treatment while another hospital that is among the few to boast of a state of the art proton beam machine will unwittingly recommend proton beam therapy. which of these procedures works best?  Even the doctors have no idea.  They only suggest it because of a myriad conflicting interests; availability, geographical location and many other reasons that have nothing to do with medicine. once a hospital installs a shiny new computerized dialysis lab for example it has a powerful incentive to refer more patients for that particular procedure. And then there is of course the ultimate motivator; GREED!  The fact is that hospitals, drug manufacturers, medical device makers, doctors all have their prime allegiance to the shareholders.  The bottom-line is that these are first and foremost businesses. You might argue that this doesn't apply in a third world  set up where private hospitals are almost non existent; the government funds the entire health system. that would be absolute naivety. with Government, macroeconomic considerations come into play, plus the more inappropriate and more often than not perilous political considerations. even more startling are the backhanders pharmaceutical companies dole out to policy makers, Drug inspectorate and regulatory bodies, and government procurement bodies.  In 2005, the pharmaceutical industry spent 60 Billion dollars on drug promotions;  Free samples, lavish gifts, trips for doctors and lawmakers on the guise of promoting better products or furthering education, which Reuters reported was nearly double what was spent on research and development. Governments and hospitals that benefit from these medical offerings obviously feel indebted to recommend these products.  Even the legislature is not impervious to  these enticements; the so called special interest groups hold lawmakers at ransom; threatening job cuts, relocation and closures, and other adverse economic inferences in order to squash competitors, unfavorable studies that may proof that their products and treatments have errors, and or to introduce disputed products into the market.  A current debate in Kenya on whether to re-introduce DDT as a way of combating Malaria by controlling mosquitoes is a good example.  DDT was banned in Kenya and many other countries the world over including the USA for its residual effect and adverse environmental degradation plus unverified effects on humans.  It is no secret that house committees on various issues often have their budgets targeted by self-interest groups to influence policy decisions.  A good example is the length of time it took for the government to avail cheap generic ARVs to masses, just because the multinational patent holders had lobbied against it. The journal of the American Medial Association once reported that (July 2005) nearly a third of all clinical research produces conclusions that are later disputed and rejected.  But by the time the rejection comes through, several unfortunate people will already have underground the treatment – talk about guinea pigs. Why are so many treatments not based on proven facts? The answer, to a very large extent, is economics. generating research information takes a lot of time and money.  Clinical trials can take years and cost multiples of millions of dollars.  Who wants to run the risk of not recouping on their investment were the study to be found less relevant, say by more advanced solutions, or worse still, the outcome be a total failure. Bottom line: More and more diagnosis and treatment options are based on factors outside medical considerations. Those of us that are bit older perhaps remember having a small tongue like organ at the base of the mouth removed, that particular procedure has been proved to bring absolutely no benefit.  There is now a tendency to have ear tubes implanted on children to drain fluid  from the brain as a way of curbing a myriad of brain related ailments and hearing problems. Data shows however that ear tubes do not actually help reduce the fluid in ears. Medicine has reverted to the old age propensity of pure guesswork.  They call it alternative medicine. perhaps that should explain why those old practices are gradually creeping back;  Blood letting by leeches is gaining popularity, it's now known that leeches inject a blood thinning compound that aids patients with blood clot problems, hemorrhoids and high blood pressure.  Acupuncture is also gaining a lot of popularity, while all you need as proof of how herbal the world has turned is just a stroll down a supermarket aisle; herbal toothpaste, natural juices, herbal soap, the world has gone all herbal - coming soon will he a herbal beer and herbal tissue paper.  Aloe Vera is now being used as an external beauty product and as an ingestible medicinal plant; the shrub is almost extinct in the African Sahara where it once grew wildly.  The new Anti-malaria therapy adopted by the Government – atemecillin – is herbal based. The government is now registering traditional herbalists and promoting it as an alternative medical option for the population.  Medicine has categorically gone full cycle - from guesswork to guesswork.  All along, it is really people's faith that has been healing them.  Even the doctors know that they stand no chance without that faith.  They rely on our faith to keep doing what they do, and we naively and gladly pay them handsomely for what? For our own faith – what an absurdity?  And people say that the miracle age is long gone – miracles happen in our hospitals everyday.  Doctors often cite incidences that beat the logics of science; people waking back from flat lines, inexplicable recoveries that the doctors know pretty well they had no part in – these things happen in our hospitals everyday; incidents that could only be described as miracles. Well, if the description of a miracle is 'healed by faith and faith alone' then a miracle happens somewhere in a hospital every single second. As for the doctors, its Purely trial and error, and our faith does the rest for them.  What does that mean? That you can go and get what you get from the hospital, and almost certainly a great deal more good and less bad, from any other source, so long as you take your faith with you. Do you think miraculous  healings are a sham? Think again. Do the primitive methods work? If anything, modern hospitals are what we should all avoid like plagues, for they really are just that, plague hot spots.  Do you know what kills as many Americans as AIDS, cancer and motor accidents combined?  Not a super bug, not bird flu, but lethal infections contracted by otherwise healthy individuals while hospitalized for even routine procedures or just visiting.  It has been reported that about one person dies every five minutes through an infection contracted in the one place they should feel safest -  a hospital – and that's in America, the world's only superpower, I wonder what the numbers would be in Kenya. So is the world really left defenseless against ailments? Not exactly; in the first place, what we should be stressing are alternative medical or non medical solutions to ailments, and foremost It should be the prevention of these ailments.  It is no secret that poor lifestyle choices are largely to blame for the health crisis facing the world today.  Our bodies are adequately equipped to fight disease when working under optimal conditions, but those conditions are seldom obtainable because we are smokers, we are obese, we don't exercise, we have a deficit of a certain element or too much of another etc.  People must abide by the physical laws by which our bodies function correctly.  Following these physical laws allows the body to self heal, to treat the effects of disease and sickness through its immune and defense systems, and more importantly to eliminate the causes of disease through its cleansing system .  These laws are simple: regulate what and how much you eat and drink, uphold cleanliness and hygiene, get plenty of sunshine and air, sleep and rest the right amounts, avoid bodily injury and maintain a good mental balance and attitude. Did you know, for instance, that eating less is the only known deliberate life prolonging technique that really works?  It was first discovered in lab mice;  those that were given smaller rations were noted to live longer; That vegetarians are known to have peak brain performance and concentration; That the lymphatic system that cleans our tissues is three times in volume as compared to blood, and yet has no pumping organ breathing motions are it's sole pumping mechanism; That proper supply of oxygen to cells inhibits malignant growth - breathing well reduces risk of cancer. That over 90% of our cellular structure is water - Water is the greatest solvent ever known.  If I were to turn back the hands of time to those days when I would rush from St. Michael Primary School to a hurried lunch at Aunt Jane's in blue valley, I would probably tell her to watch her weight, to drink lots of water and to exercise a lot. I don't know whether the inevitable would still have happened, but I would tell her anyway. And yes! to divorce that no good husband of hers early enough.   Share Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Awesome Inc. theme. Powered by Blogger.