The Patient’s Guide to 21st Century Medicine

Contemporary medicine (CM) is developing at an enormous rate. So why are so many people looking for their treatment in alternative medicine (AM), such as Ayurveda, homeopathy, Chinese medicine, herbal medicine, etc?

For a start, let us look at the facts. CM cannot treat most chronic diseases. Progress is undeniable when it comes to surgery, or the treatment of infectious diseases; but with chronic diseases, the situation is much worse. In this case, CM can already relieve symptoms and help maintain a stable condition in a patient, but, alas, no more than that.

AM supporters (regardless of their preferred AM type) say that this is due to the fact that CM treats the disease, and not the whole person. They emphasize that one cannot treat, say, the stomach – in isolation from other organs. And they are certainly right: in CM, doctors are usually narrowly specialized, and the gastroenterologist, for instance, – even a very good one – seldom has much knowledge beyond the realm of gastroenterology. Therefore, the question is: is it actually a matter of CM or its doctors? If we were to gather a concilium of specialists in different areas – could this concilium in fact treat people more effectively?

Firstly, let us consider one principal difference between CM and Ayurveda (and also all other types of AM). In CM, all drugs are tested based on the principles of evidence-based medicine. This means that a fairly large selection of people with a particular disease (e.g., an ulcer) is found, and they all take a certain medicine, after which the researchers look at the results. The medicine should act on all of the patients in approximately the same way.

This is not the way things get done in Ayurveda. Here, all people are divided according to three constitution types: vatha (air, gases), pitha (fire, bile) and kaptha (water, mucus), as well as their combinations. The original constitution that we possess from birth is called the prakriti. When choosing a medicine, determining the type of the patient’s constitution is essential. There is no task set for the same medicine to work on all people without exception, and an ulcer in people of the pitha constitution will be treated differently than the same in people of other constitutions.

In addition to the prakriti, an Ayurvedic practitioner should also be able to determine the vikriti, or the current state of our constitution. Accordingly, the medicine is selected not only taking into account the prakriti, but also taking into account the vikriti. Which is not at all easy.

This could explain the rather low rate of treatment effectiveness for many homeopaths, Ayurvedic or Chinese medicine specialists. In these medicines much more depends on the doctor than in CM. And there are not many good doctors in any type of medicine.

One fundamental conclusion follows from all this: most Ayurvedic remedies cannot be tested according to the principles of evidence-based medicine. This is because in order for them to work it is necessary to select the “right patients”, those with the corresponding prakriti and vikriti. This is also true for homeopathy. As a result, all studies of homeopathic remedies usually remain at the placebo level, despite the fact that many people speak of their effectiveness. There is no contradiction here – it is just that those who conduct these studies are themselves from the world of CM and do not understand the principles upon which other kinds of medicines are based.

Incidentally, a number of drugs widely used in Russia also cannot pass formal testing. For example, most nootropics (drugs that improve brain activity) and immunomodulators. Accordingly, they are not registered with the US FDA as drugs, and are sold as dietary supplements. European countries occupy a median position, as they have some of these preparations approved for use as medicaments. And these remedies do work – as evidenced by many years of practice – though not always, and not for everybody.

Thus, do we take it that the supporters of AM are right? The answer would be yes, if we had been living in the 20^th century. But we already live in the 21^st! And recently CM has made a huge breakthrough. It has begun to decode the DNA (and to determine the genes and gene mutations responsible for various diseases), and has also begun to understand the role of the nervous system in the formation of chronic illness. And not only illness, but also the whole psycho-type of a person, including their emotions, their mind (the memory, attention and thought process) and even their intuition. It has further begun to learn to determine the state of the nervous system through the analysis of neurotransmitters. In other words, CM introduces its own typology (classification) – and it is much more detailed than the typology of any of the old medicines. I would say that the analysis of genes and mutations is similar to the diagnosis of the prakriti, while the analysis of neurotransmitters would take the place of the diagnosis of the vikriti.

21^st century medicine has begun to understand that our whole body is controlled by a “central computer”, which includes the pituitary-hypothalamic system and a number of other organs. It is failures in the work of this “computer” that lead to those chronic diseases which are so hard to cure. Hormonal imbalances are the indicators of such failures. An attempt to treat illnesses “from the bottom up”, i.e., directly from the affected organs, as it is customary at present, cannot grant us medical success. It is necessary to “repair” the central computer, after which everything will automatically fall into its place.

Of course, this is a two-way street. And besides the central computer, there are also “peripheral computers”, and their failures can also lead to failures of the central computer. Those rare cases when the medicine of the 20^th century has managed to cope with chronic illnesses, relate specifically to such situations.

Personally, my opinion is that such a development of CM is a sentence of doom to absolutely all AMs: they will not survive the 21^st century. All of them are essentially obsolete, including Ayurveda, homeopathy, and Chinese medicine.

Of course, CM is still far from having a complete understanding, and I believe that even one third of the way to it has not yet been passed. BUT – and this is an important point – its development has reached the stage when from the purely theoretical it has turned into the practical, i.e. already a great many things can find their application in medical practice.

This means that a good doctor of 21^st century CM, no matter what his/her specialization is – gastroenterology, urology, ophthalmology, etc., – should understand neurotransmitters and understand the cycle of their biosynthesis and decomposition. Understand how they affect other systems in the body. Know all this by heart and as well as their own 5 fingers. And have knowledge of the most common gene mutations – in the area in which this practitioner specializes.

Unfortunately, most CM doctors live in the 20^th century. They do not know what effect the medications which they prescribe have on neurotransmitters. They do not know which neurotransmitters’ dysfunctions can cause the diseases which they treat. They do not know the signs of neurotransmitter dysfunction. They do not understand gene mutations. A whole generation of physicians shall change before current advanced knowledge becomes part of general medical practice.

And this temporarily saves AM doctors.

So what should we – ordinary patients – do? We could either seek out a 21^st century CM doctor or try to understand it all ourselves. Both paths are difficult. Then again, the Internet is always at our service.