on Evidence Based Medicine

Medicine or drug? Western? The ideal or your ideal body temperature? Diagnosis = guesses? Below are some of my quick comments on the above.

Ego & rain coat

I attended the talk on 22 Feb, "HINDUISM REDISCOVERED: A Religion in Vogue" by Vivekacharya Pavan Choudary, CEO, Vygon India.

It was interesting during the Q&A session, where he shared his wisdom in answering the questions. I would like to share some of them here.

Wisdoms from a talk by Vivekacharya Pavan Choudary -- Part 3

Someone was telling [or showing off] how he has learned so much from many gurus. He finds them mainly teaching ways to get rid of ego. He was talking for quite long time.

When the speaker finally has the turn to speak, the first statement was roughly saying that all his teachers don't qualified to be gurus. Ego is something that you cannot get rid of. Ego is ... like rain coat, keep it at home, use it only when necessary.

I think this applies to many other things such as anger, unhappiness, desires, etc. How to manage them is the way, while getting rid of them is an illusion.

Similarly, relating to health, we need to learn and be trained to live with and overcome sickness, bacteria, virus, fever, pain, etc. instead of finding ways to live without them. In recent episodes of the drama series Heroes, the cheer leader (what's her name?) with never die capability was complaining that she doesn't feel pain after Syler opened her brain. Then, later, during an eclipse when all lost their special capabilities, she was wounded and later died, not directly from the wound, but from infections. Why? The nurse/doctors asked why she doesn't seem to have any immunity? Don't tell me she hasn't been sicked for her whole life?

Part 2

A plaster on a face means...

A scene from a cartoon show a little kid with a plaster on his face. The character is some kind of heroic type. Thus, by drawing that plaster on his face should mean to suggest that he is rugged.

However, to me, I think otherwise ... . Drawing a cut on his face should suggest rugged, while a plaster suggests he requires care for little wounds.

Knowing the ideal and trying to do achieve it are good. However, ensuring the ideal at all instances may be unwise. After we, humans, learned about germs and bacteria, we know that what seems clean is actually not. Now, we know the ideal of clean is when even these invisible to naked eyes germs and bacteria aren't around.

Then, we behave in more hygienic ways. Keeping clean has quite a different meaning since then. So, we have been trying to achieve the state of clean.

Then, we invented ways to kill all these. By pasting plaster over little cuts so that any germs there can be killed by the chemicals, we achieve the ideal at the wound. That, I think is somehow over doing it.

I think that behind all the sciences is the acknowledgment that all existences are results from design. I trust our designer much more than human inventors and inventions.

Trust nature

In the article, "The 80-year-old Pope said the world needed to care for the environment but not to the point where the welfare of animals and plants was given a greater priority than that of mankind."

On one hand, we cannot not care. On the other hand, have we over cared? Or, will we unfairly care?

I see nature as a very fine piece of designed work, and I trust its robustness.

Just as how much is fever a symptom of illness versus that of a curing process?

Bacteria

Amazing! There are 10 times more baterial cells in us than our own cells!

Finally, scientists are starting to look at health in more than a single dimension and single direction manner. Many ancient concepts of health are about balance, while the modern concepts have been more single ended.

Bacteria may seem bad, but without it is also bad.
Check this out: Hacking Your Body's Bacteria for Better Health

Illness and healing

Recently, I'm reading a book about natural healing. It is very encouraging to me because my beliefs and thoughts all along have been echoed exactly and more by the author. I might have mentioned before, my view on oriental/traditional treatment to illness verses the western medicine is that the formal basically focus on enhancing our body built-in system to recover while the latter treat our body as a dumb biological machine. This is also related to another observation that strategies to achieve seemingly best short-term objectives or I called them greedy algorithms, are usually not the best way and probably one of the worst approaches.

Furthermore, many of the perceived to be illnesses are not illnesses, but signs of our body immune system repairing the damages, such as fever, running nose and non-life-threatening inflammatory such as most cuts. Thus, you may want to re-think about should you force fever away by ice or western medication, retain the stuff in your nose rather than letting them out or applying anti-inflammatory on wounds.