Why Your Doctor is Guessing When He Tells You What’s Wrong: The Two-Sided Coin part 1

Ever try and pay for something with a one-sided coin?  Tossed a “heads”-only quarter in the air to make a decision?  Sounds a little silly, doesn’t it?

Actually, the questions are nonsense because I can’t even imagine what a coin with only one side would look like.  I suppose it would look like heads from the top, but when the coin was flipped over, it would dissappear.  No tails, just the palm of your hand.  In other words, once a coin loses one of it’s sides, it is no longer a coin.  It becomes an impossibility.  It cannot exist. 

The human body and health is kind of like the coin.  Without both aspects of wisdom-based health care, we couldn’t exist.  Without both the objective knowledge that we get from studying and measuring the human body, and the more mysterious innate intelligence within the body that keeps it in balance on a daily basis, we could not be human.

Let me explain…

Medicine grew from our capacity for self-reflection.  Our ability to look at ourselves objectively as a species led to the disciplines of psychology (the examination of the mind) and medicine (the examination of the body).  We are able to dissect and measure many different aspects of ourselves and then accumulate what we find into our collective body of “knowledge.” 

This knowledge that we’ve accumulated has grown to tremendous proportions in this century.  It used to be that a doctor could hope to know virtually everything there was to know about the human body.  This idea is laughable now.  We’ve got geneticists, nephrologists, neurologists, naturopaths, biochemists, sociologists, psychiatrists, acupuncturists, and a hundred others.  They certainly overlap in some areas, but our knowledge about the human body is so vast that it surpasses the working memory capacity of a single mind.

So, our ability to self-reflect has led to knowledge.  And it is this knowledge that drives 99.9% of medical care today.  When you go to a doctor, she reflects on what she has learned since medical school about your condition and makes a decision.  In other words, the doctor’s knowledge is directly responsible for the medical decision.

And here’s my point:  the 99.9% of medical care that is based on knowledge is but one side of the coin.  Going to the doctor in today’s world is about as useful as trying to decide who goes first with a quarter that doesn’t have a “tails;” pretty predictable and only marginally effective.

I would point to the general health of our society as evidence.  Autoimmune and inflammatory chronic diseases are very poorly healed by drugs and surgery.  They are also poorly healed by most alternative medicine.  Billions and billions of dollars have been spent every year for the past 10 years on alternative medicine without a lot of progress. 

With chronic pain, lupus, arthritis, diabetes, dementia, heart disease- management of symptoms is generally the goal.  When basing a medical treatment on knowledge alone, the expectations are muted and successes are “miracles.”

Fortunately, it is possible to do better.  In part 2, I’ll help us examine what I believe is the forgotten side of the coin; a side that is so basic to our everday lives that it gets overlooked.  And in part 3, I’ll bring together the two sides to show you the power of the wisdom-based approach. 

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