Guest Editorial
WHY DOES ONE GET ILL?
PROFESSOR BM HEGDE*
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do."
The question "why" does not have an
answer in the all powerful science today. Science
did not have the answer to that question in the
past either. Charles Sherrington, a Nobel Laureate
physiologist, said in 1899 that "positive sciences
do not and cannot answer the question
'why'."They can, at best, answer "how" or "how
much" but not "why". Peter Medawar, another
Nobel Laureate physician, in his book, "Limits of
Science" also felt that the ultimate questions
cannot be answered by science because science, as
it is today, is not designed to answer such questions!1
Naturally, questions like why, existence of God
etc are not filtered in the scientific "fish net
hypothesis" of Sir Arthur Stanley Eddigton.2
Now that quantum physics has broken the
scientific shackles of reductionism, we might be
able to answer such questions, if not right now;
but certainly in the very near future. Werner
Heisenberg's Gedanken experiments opened up
*Cardiologist, MD, FRCP (London), FRCP (Edinburgh),
FRCP (Glasgow), FRCP (Dublin), FACC (USA), FAMS.
III Retired Vice Chancellor, Manipal Academy of
Higher Education (Deemed University) Manipal.
Recipient of Padmabhushan (2010), Pride of India
Award from Federation of Indian Associations of
Northern California(2003), Dr B C Roy National Award
(1999) in the category of "Eminent Medical Teacher",
Jagdish Chander Bose Award in Life Sciences(1999),
Distinguished Physician of India Award (1995) etc.
Email: hegdebm@gmail.com
- Ralph Waldo Emerson.
the latest laboratory, the human mind, to try and
formulate answers to such ultimate questions.
Richard Feynman tries to describe these attempts
thus: "We choose to examine a phenomenon
which is impossible, absolutely impossible, to
explain in any classical way, and which has in it
the heart of quantum mechanics. In reality, it
contains only mystery." Physics was trying to
grapple with this wave-particle duality over several
decades with very little final understanding.
They had Young's double-slit experiment,
complementarily, Einstein's recoiling slit,
Heisenberg's microscope and also Feynman's
light microscope. Most of them got their Nobel's
anyway but, we were where we were at the end of
3
the day with the mystery deepening.
Hans Peter Durr's "a-duality" hypothesis
which has shown the way forward in that matter
is but the other face of energy like the advaita
4
philosophy of Sankhya School. Therefore, human
body, in reality, is only an illusion of the human
mind. Consequently, there will be nothing called
mind and body. It is mind-body as one. This puts
an end to reductionism, which is the bane of
modern medical statistical science. There will
no more be psychosomatic diseases; all diseases are
in the human mind. Human body, therefore, becomes
immaterial-mental and spiritual. Spirituality is
defined as sharing and caring. Health could now
J MGIMS, March 2013, Vol 18, No (i), 1 - 5
Why does one get ill?

be defined as "enthusiasm to work and enthusiasm were abdicating their functions for the joy of
to be compassionate." feeling themselves at one with the herd."
We can now put Rene Descartes to rest - Bertrand Russell.
finally and move on for the good of mankind.
Res Cogitans and Res Extensa now become one "Theories cannot be derived from facts.
and only Res Cogitans, the thinking part. Let us The demand to admit only those theories which
allow our students also to think for a change. follow from facts leaves us without any theory.
We have never allowed that to happen so far lest Hence, science as we know it can exist only if we
our scientific fort should be invaded by a thinking drop the demand and revise our methodology."
- David Hume, Scottish philosopher.
student. It is not for nothing that Nobel Laureate
Alexis Carell wrote that "every new born child is
Let me now come to my new hypothesis.
a genius only to be converted into an idiot in
This hypothesis needs the support of Max
school.5"
Planck's strong views on consciousness, which
We have built such a strong compound
medical science ignored for so long for its own
wall around our arrogant science that dissenters
detriment. Planck wrote years ago that "Conscious-
cannot enter inside, thanks to our peer review
ness is fundamental. All matter is derived from
system and our tight control over our cloistered
consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness."
indexed journal system. History teaches us that
Consciousness is the universal wisdom of which
if a King lives only on the advice of his sycophants
human mind is but a small fragment (individual
and does not allow dissenting voices to reach his
consciousness). In the medical field we have lost
ears, that kingdom would not last long! The
ourselves in knowing how one gets ill. We were
kingdom of modern science has started collapsing
very logical in our quest for that question "how."
slowly. Many thinkers feel science needs to change
Time was when our ancestors thought diseases
for good as shown below. One might argue that
were due to bad spirits or wrath of Gods. Malaria
this is selective list of opinions. It has to be, per
was thought to be due to bad air (mal aria). Then
force, selective to drive my point home.
came the era of germs as our enemies; from the
"There is no logic to science. Scientists
time of Joseph Lister and Louis Pasteur. That
create and adhere to scientific theories for what
theory was supported by many in the last hundred
are ultimately subjective and even irrational
years, prominent among them was John Snow.
reasons. It cannot be denied that the chief engine
Thanks to Theobald Smith, an American Physician,
of human destructiveness has been the phenomenal
who in 1915 propounded the Grimm's Law, which
success of science in the 20th century."
states that "while disease might be directly
- Paul Karl Feyerabend ; in his classic
proportionate to the virulence of its cause, it is
“Against Method” 1975.
inversely proportionate to the resistance of the
"Intellectual integrity made it quite host?" Host resistance or immunology came into
impossible for me to accept the myths and dogmas existence then but it took another 70 years for it
of even very great scientists, more particularly of to get wings in 1981 when two white young men
the belligerent and so-called advanced nations. on either side of the Atlantic died of identical
Indeed, those intellectuals who accepted them disease which has become famous now as AIDS.

J MGIMS, March 2013, Vol 18, No (i), 1 - 5


Hippocratic and Galenic medicine
developed a stranglehold on medical innovation that
suffocated progress for over 2000 years. Their
great "therapies" of bloodletting, purges, and
emetics were dangerously ineffectual except in
so far as they stimulated the placebo effect. A
very recent 2011 study led by Professor Bingel of
Oxford did show how the placebo effect is probably
the only good effect of all our efforts to date. 6
Up until the time of the great brains of medicine
mentioned above had their theories, they were not
motivated by any material gains from their studies
or theories. In the last 50-100 years newer theories
of diseases emerged where the therapy was
connected to disease theories in a big way. They
got a great push after the deadly contagious
diseases were apparently defeated thanks to the
discovery of penicillin in the 1940s. That was the
theory of risk factors. Using these theories greedy
pharmaceutical lobby made hay when the sun
was still shining on the risk factors.
The death and disability scenario hardly
changed with this theory also. But everything
under the sun became a risk for illness and the
industry had a ready answer by way of a new pill
or a new device to intervene (go in between with
malice). The divine interventionists, aided and
abetted by the industry, went hammer and tongs
against all human ills. The result has been,
according to a recent audit that the medical
establishment has become the leading cause of
death and disability in the world! Drugs have
been a curse instead of a boon. Curiously now
we use germs, which are a part of us and are our
friends, to cure illnesses. Recent studies at Johns
Hopkins of using human feces (faecal transplant)
with its normal germ content to cure deadly
super-bug infections of the gut by such silly
germs like Clostridium dificile have shown that
BM Hegde
germs ARE our friends in need. We have come
7
one full circle from germs as enemies to germs
as friends. Human meta-genome has just 25,000
human genes while its has trillions of germ genes
making a mockery of our efforts at genetic
engineering and other related efforts, another
strong blow to reductionism in medicine.
Although the risk factor hypothesis has
been shown to be not based on strong foundations
people were not allowed to get to know the truth,
thanks to medical claptrap and the advertisements.
The latter in the eyes of one of the leading
economists, John Kenneth Galbraith is: "those
corporations do not use advertising to inform us
about products that might state our independently
determined desires. Rather, the function of
advertising and marketing is "to bring into being
wants that previously did not exist." Galbraith
calls this "the dependence effect," and goes on
to argue that this is an indictment of the entire
system of capitalistic production, which is no
more defensible than a town doctor routinely
running over pedestrians in order to keep the
8
hospital beds full.
The last example of Galbraith has now
been shown to be true in the medical field where
disease mongering is the rule rather than exception.
Galbraith would not have dreamt of that happening
when he wrote his book Affluent Society in the
1950s. Drugs are now advertised on TV in the
USA! Final blow on the coffin of the risk factor
hypothesis was driven by the long term (25 years)
follow up of the (in) famous MRFIT study which
spent $115 million dollars sanctioned in 1984 by
Richard Nixon who had told the researchers then
that it was big money and he wanted a strongly
positive result. Roger W Sherwin, the lead author
concluded that "In other words, they found that
changing the "risk factors" does not apparently
J MGIMS, March 2013, Vol 18, No (i), 1 - 5
Why does one get ill?
change the risks. This necessarily means that the "risk
factors" are not as important as was thought. Indeed,
it should be concluded that the "risk factors" were no
such thing; at least as far as MRFIT trial is
concerned.9
We need a paradigm shift in our thinking
as to "why" people get sick and not how; in the
background of what quantum physics has taught
us. All diseases, according to Ayurveda, originate
in the mind. The same holds good in quantum
physics today. Our present understanding is that
the human body is bundle of vibrating leptons
which are held in 50-100 trillion individual body
cells. Though the cells in different parts of the body
have different shapes to suit their convenience,
they all work identically. Metaphorically the human
body is colony of 50-100 trillion individual
human beings who lived as independent living
organisms for millions of years before coming
together as a colony. Each cell has its own mind
(in the cell wall) and is capable of all activities
that the whole body is capable of.
One can now track the photon light
emission from each atom in the human cell. This
bio-photon camera of physicist Fritz-Albert Popp
can now photograph the body to show if all the
cells are in sync. If they are not in sync one is ill.10
When they are in sync, one is healthy. Our cells
love one another so much that they work together
for our common good. If, for any reason, we hate
another person (whom our cells love, anyway) the
cells get confused with that "me-you" concept. This
hatred (or greed, jealousy, anger, pride, super ego
etc) might sow the seeds of a new malady in our
system. Every single disease from common cold
to cancer will have this root cause-the "why" of
disease. From then on individual diseases chart
their own course based on the environmental
circumstances and our meta-genetic make up. I
wish to call this aetio-pathogenesis as social
auto-immune disease. Similar is the beginning of
our auto-immune diseases where our own antibody
cells forget to recognize self- our own body cells.
To show how body cells work in tandem,
the example of a non-fatal myocardial infarction
would be ideal. When one gets a silent heart
attack, the first change that occurs is the cell
death at the core of the heart muscle cut off from
its blood supply suddenly. If no one interferes,
the neighbouring cells feel sorry and slip out of
their moorings in the heart muscle wall to take
the place of the dead cells. As soon as a cell slips
out, the collagen skeleton that holds the cell feels
the pinch to produce extra collagen (fibroblastic
proliferation) to help the slipped cell. Now the
healthy cells far away from the dead cells, which
can not slip that far, try to become stronger
(hypertrophy). By this time one gets a strongly
remodelled heart again without outside help!
The sequence of cell death, cell slipping, fibroblastic
proliferation and hypertrophy are all mediated
through our emergency service, the autonomic
nervous system. One wonders at the wisdom of
the human body in having this auto-doctor with
the best healing technique inbuilt into our system.
One wonders how reductionist medical
science lost sight of these auto-healers in the
human system in the first place. May be, outside
intervention was our primary goal in the reductionist
medical science. In the present holistic thinking,
where consciousness holds the reigns of running
the human body under all circumstances of
health and disease, things get better understood.
It is only in the unlikely event of the body's built-in
healer failing, do symptoms develop. Outside
help might be needed only at this stage to help
the internal machine, the so called placebo effect,
described above. This boils down to Hippocratic
J MGIMS, March 2013, Vol 18, No (i), 1 - 5

affirmation that a doctor "cures rarely, comforts
mostly but, consoles always." It is not surprising,
therefore, that our misguided efforts to intervene
in the pre-symptomatic stages of illnesses have
landed us in a mess.
Time will not be too far when, instead of
going for the drug cupboard to get relief from
an odd headache, we would sit down to meditate
to get to that stage of relaxation where our own
forebrain secrets enough opioids to relieve our
pain. A study published a week ago (November
2012) has clearly shown that meditation would
help most degenerative disease sufferers.11 Modern
gadgets will help us document those events for
the hard boiled scientists to document. We have
come one full circle. Hippocrates wrote that we
should study our patient more than his disease,
quantum physics tells us that the patient is the
only one that we need to concentrate on. This is
called Whole Person Healing (WPH), a neologism
introduced by that great scientist, Late Professor
Rustum Roy of Sol-Gel fame.
Human body being energy which is seen
as vibrations of varying frequency, the future
treatments in the symptomatic stage of illnesses
should logically use energy methods to heal. We
have been working on this for the last decade
under the aegis of our World Academy of Authentic
Healing Sciences where we have a group of world
renowned scientists helping us. Our findings
have been getting published, albeit slowly, thanks
to the peer review rock fort built around science
publications where the peer knows only what is
already known. Sixth sense does not work there.
Hopefully, this concrete wall of (randomized
Controlled Trials) RCTs and peer reviewers will slowly
give way to rational world wide post publication
peer reviewing through the internet where com-
munications have become easier than in the past.
BM Hegde
There seems to be some ray of hope in the dis-
tant horizon. Sir Michel Rawlins, the head of
NICE, the highest clinical body in the UK, was
of the opinion that RCTs, which ruled the roost
for decades, had been, unfortunately, put on an
12
undeservedly high pedestal. This is good news.
May God help mankind to survive despite the
medical establishment of drugs and interventions?
Humane doctors will always be needed as long
as mankind lives on this planet.
"A multitude of causes unknown to former
times are now acting with a combined force to blunt
the discriminating powers of the mind, and unfitting
it for all voluntary exertion to reduce it to a state of
almost savage torpor."
William Wordworth.
References :
1. Peter Medawar. Limits of Science 1984 Oxford
University Press.
2. E d d i n g t o n SA . t o d ay i n s c i . c o m / . . . /
Eddington_Arthur/EddingtonArthur-Quo...
3. Feynman R. Wave-particle duality. quantummechanics.
ucsd.edu/ph130a/130_notes/node68.html
4. Durr HP. Matter is not made out of matter.
www.peterrussell.com/SG/ch4.php
5. Carrel A. Man, the Unknown. www.amazon.com/
Man-Alexis-Carrel/dp/B00085HUFK
6. Bingel U et. al. The effect of treatment expectation
on drug efficacy. Imaging the analgesic effect of
the opioid remifentanil. Sc. Transl. Med. 2011; 3: 7.
February 2011.
7. Yoon, Sonia S, Brandt, Lawrence J. Treatment of
refractory C . difficile infection by stool
transplant. J. Gastroenterology. 2010; 44: 562-566.
8. Galbraith JK. Affluent Society. 1998. Houghton
Miffin Harcourt Publishers.
9. Sherwin R. http://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/
2012/02/08/re-controversies-over-hypertension-
guidelines
10. Popp FA. www.galacticresonance.org/biophotons-
dr-fritz-albert-popp-dna-cells-health-resonanc...
11. www.naturalnews.com/meditation.html
12. Rawlins Sir M. ttp://www.politics.co.uk/opinion-
Fo r m e r s / roya l - c o l l e g e - o f -
physicians/article/royal-colleg...
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