position papers...
FOH started as an effort to channel the energies and reputations of rather senior scientists and physicians into a small collective effort to bring to the wider public the joint judgment—from the viewpoint of science—of the major defects in the current biochemistry-based, high cost, technology intensive, and personal-human-caring deficient, medical system.
For the first time the collective judgment of a group of physical scientists and engineers could be joined with those of senior physicians able and willing to examine the system as a whole, sitting as a peer committee of scientists. Our judgments have slowly crystallized into a series of tentative conclusions—quite apart from the financial and social deficiencies.
These are presented in a series of position papers on a variety of topics.
The modern medical system is quite unbelievably dangerous. Different calculations of total deaths attributable to the system itself range from a minimum of 300,000 deaths cases per year to 700,000 deaths per year (depending on what is included). Hippocrates “first law”—“First do no harm”—is observed mainly in its breach.
Hippocrates “second law”—“It is more important to know the person who has the disease, than the disease the person has”—is barely known by most physicians, and is violated routinely in ≈100% of the visits by Americans to their doctors. Exquisite, expensive diagnosis is conducted intensively on the disease. Knowledge about the rest of the human person—their mental and spiritual and social conditions—are almost totally ignored. (The existence of the very fine (and rare) exceptions is not questioned here, nor are they being included in this critique.) If the car stands disabled beside the road, it helps little to point out that the radio still plays.
The present medical system is based on a
truncated understanding of what a person is: in medical practice a person is
equated to the body; i.e.
P=B But the vast majority of humans would agree that they are much more than
just a body. Most agree with the expanded equation:
Person = Body + Mind + Spirit
P = B + M + S
The present medical system as a whole, in 100 years, has been transmogrified from one that was devoted to loving care to help other humans, by attracting a specific quality of individuals devoted to altruistic service using both simple devices and pills as aids, into a system which is reductionist in the extreme. It now seeks to attract those who are high academic performers, and that specifically in biochemical sciences, and a large fraction of whom are motivated (albeit, not in any evil way) by the fact that this profession is the easiest way to the highest incomes. The ideal of selfless service to humanity is NEVER measured, commented on, or valued. At every turn in the system, money and monetary concerns weave a strong spider’s web across it. The healing vector of altruistic love has nearly been obliterated (not in some individual humans; but in the “scientific medicine system.”
The ritualistic effort to clothe the system in the language of science with the ad-nauseam appeals to “scientific medicine,” and “evidence-based medicine,” reveals an incredible lack of professional pride and ignorance of the realities of the physical sciences. As Prof. Derek Price of Yale, one of the nation’s great historians of science put it, “Thermodynamics owe more to the steam engine than “vice-versa.” In other words, the technologies applications lead to the science, not the opposite as is always advertised. The product, the results, the careful observations always come first, and whenever carefully executed they last forever. The understanding of the theories comes later, and that is frequently changed. In human healing terms this says outcomes-based research is the first sound route to good medicine.
Having lost the entire spiritual and mental vectors for healing, and having misconstrued the processes of science, a further reductionism also infects the present system. That is: ignoring the vast majority of engineering and all of physics—for a single minded focus on biochemical knowledge. All this in spite of the fact that (at least) in diagnosis and its enormous help to the current medical system, it is engineering and physics (from Rontgen’s x-rays, to the NMR and the CAT scans, to the high resolution ultrasound), which is the most reliable and much appreciated element by public and physicians alike. Yet is seems to elude the grasp of the community that the vectors which sense and diagnose could likely also be used—much more safely and less intrusively—as therapeutic vectors as they are in many WPH practices. Biochemical science alone is a very weak reed upon which to hang, exclusively, a great part of humankinds ability to respond to health needs, when one considers how complex a system the human body is.