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Medicine: An Imperfect Science

One of the most damaging aspects of modern life is the idea that medical science has all the answers, or at least it has the potential to have all the answers.

I am not a doctor and I have never had any formal training in medicine, but I have worked my butt off to understand all concepts of medicine over several years.

On one hand, I became aware of the enormous value of medicine, but on the other hand, I gained so much reluctance to accept the entitlement of medicine to claim that every single physical, mental, and emotional health or well-being issue has its solution in medicine or at least should be dealt with using the scientific medical approach. In a way, just restricting oneself to the medical approach could be harmful. For example, in the last 20 years, the idea that we need to fix every mood disorder by studying how to balance brain chemicals has gained a lot of popularity, and the idea that everything we think of is somehow merely a series of operations happening in the brain has become the truth for most scientists. No one can explain how consciousness arises from a bunch of cells operating in an extremely complex way, but everyone assumes that must be the absolute truth. People have started to rely on brain scans to understand their mood disorders rather than seeking a psychologist who would help them process their painful memories and heal themselves in a meaningful way. We are almost entering an era where people want to believe that everything should be solved using a pill to manipulate our brains.

If you are savvier and more realistic, you would be aware that the complexity of our physiology is infinite and that a narrow perspective in treating every mood disorder by chemically manipulating the brain is like a big experiment humanity is going through. One hundred years later, people might be horrified at the way medicine is dealing with our mental and emotional well-being. History has plenty of examples of how such an experiment could go awry. For example, back in the 1950s, lobotomy was once considered to be a magical treatment for mental disorders. I am sure that any doctor who would perform a lobotomy today would end up in jail for a long time and would never be allowed to practice medicine ever again.

FUN FACT – Heroin was once the most celebrated cough medicine and then it turned out to be extremely addictive and harmful. Any doctor prescribing heroin today would end up in jail for life.

Of course, medicine has saved billions of lives over the years using antibiotics, vaccinations, and amazing surgeries, but this does not make it perfect for dealing with every health, mental and emotional problem. Medicine will always have its deficiencies no matter how many scientific advances humanity achieves, and this is the way life is designed from a spiritual perspective.

There is a lot about medicine that I love. For instance, there is nothing more beautiful than getting the right medical attention after having an injury to your body. It is a great blessing that we live in this modern era and that we have access to emergency surgeries when we know for a fact that without surgery we might be living in excruciating pain and physical disability for the rest of our lives. Nothing is more valuable than medicine in those cases. On the other hand, there is a lot about medicine that I hate. Oftentimes, doctors give you some sort of a death sentence by telling you that there is no cure and that you should not even search for a cure because science knows it all and your doctor just assumes that if the answer is not found in the thick medical books then no one has found an answer.

From my personal experience, I know that I have healed myself from so many “incurable diseases.” Diabetes II might be the perfect example of a common health condition that doctors treat badly. I know many people who figured out how to heal their diabetes by changing their diet. It is not simple or easy, but it is possible. One day in the future, science will start acknowledging that. But in general, whatever went wrong in medicine in the past is rarely talked about or discussed and an apology is rarely ever made in connection to what was a standard treatment in the past but is now considered to be just a horrible idea.

The Covid-19 pandemic was a revelation to many. Of course, for the non-savvy, it became a matter of pride to argue against vaccination, and most arguments out there are just based on ego, biases, and bigotry. I believe that medical science has lost some of its perfection in the eyes of most people and that is not a dreadful thing since it gave us more space to think creatively and most importantly to start taking our health into our own hands. It was like humanity needed this pandemic to increase the awareness of how much we should rely on medicine and how much we could rely on our own experience to heal.

We are somehow more aware of the limitations of medicine and that is a good thing!

Life, health, well-being and happiness are firsthand experiences that we learn and benefit from. We should use all the information available to us, but also make our own judgments and decisions. As the saying goes, “The best teacher is experience.” Medicine is great, but with all its greatness, it is far from being perfect. However, your healing process is perfect! It is your unique experience of learning and progressing as a soul. And it is all yours. No one else can get your experience. It is the gift of this life to you. And “Every cloud has a silver lining.”