For the last half century, big crony capitalist government, big science, and medical research have made breathtaking promises of curing the world’s most feared diseases. It was a windfall for funding researchers and for gathering investment dollars for biotech companies. But has it helped improve actual health and longevity?
Not so much.
Back when I was in training in the 1970s, medical research largely abandoned investigating whole organism biology and health ecology (which I was studying) in favor of ever-smaller, molecular, subcellular studies on every little bit, piece and part of a cell.
And since then, they have continued to look at even smaller and smaller aspects of human health — with accordingly small results.
The late Victor McKusick, M.D., of Johns Hopkins University, founded the clinical field of Human Medical Genetics, a very different field from today’s micro-medical research. Twenty five years ago, he told me personally that modern medical research had become nothing more than an exercise in morbid anatomy, dissecting ever smaller components outside of the actual living organism.
My personal experience bears this out…
I ended up having to get a second doctorate, a Ph.D. degree in Anthropology, to be able learn anything about human biology, diet and nutrition — which they no longer taught in medical school. I went into the dual-degree program at Penn, which Nobel laureate Baruch Blumberg (1925 – 2011) helped create. But 9,999 out of 10,000 doctors never got with that program.
More recently, medical schools have shut down the last remaining physiology departments completely. Before they shut down, these departments looked at living, dynamic, whole organ systems.
I am an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University. But around 2010, they shut down their Department of Physiology and Biophysics, where I held my faculty appointment. They transferred the professors to either Biochemistry or Pharmacology. It seems all they want medical students to know about is how drugs affect biochemistry — like we are all one big test tube (with pockets) for big pharma.
Today, mainstream medicine looks at an ever smaller and smaller picture of health, which is the opposite of “alternative” holistic medicine, natural medicine, and mind-body medicine. Holistic medicine takes into account the well-being of the whole person — mind, body and spirit.
In my view, modern medical researchers today know more and more about less and less. It sometimes seems they have reached the point where they know everything about nothing, at least when it comes to actual human health and well being.
Hundreds of billions of tax dollars have been poured into this kind of micro-mini research over the decades, creating legions of careerist research biologists who have never stepped outside a lab, or looked out their windows, away from their microscopes or test tubes, to make a scientific observation about actual life on Earth.
That is what they know, so that is what they teach.
Fortunately, there are educational programs in Conservation Biology — like the one in which my daughter has just completed a graduate degree. These programs teach about whole organisms and communities in natural environments. But little or none of this knowledge gets applied to human health research. (Although I, for one, try in my Daily Dispatch, and in my monthly Insiders’ Cures newsletter.)
Government failing at disease prevention
Every attempt the government has made to cure or prevent certain critical diseases has been a failure.
After two government-sponsored research “Decades of the Brain,” we still do not have a mainstream method to cure or prevent Alzheimer’s disease. Meanwhile natural approaches for reversing dementia have been hiding in plain sight.
The fetal stem cell research frenzy has been a total bust. They use it to justify termination of pregnancies to “harvest” human fetal parts for “research material.”
But, as practicing neurologists know, the only real advances in stem cell medicine have come from using adult stem cells, as I reported last year.
Perhaps the biggest bust of all has been the Human Genome Project. The idea of coding the entire human genome is said to have originated at the National Academy of Sciences back around 1988. But then, smelling more billions of taxpayer dollars, it was grabbed by the big crony capitalist government science agency for medical research, the National Institutes of Health. By 1999, the NIH government director of this project said he envisioned a revolution in medicine from coding the entire human genome. This project was supposed to be the mainstream’s solution to finally delivering “individualized” or “personalized” medicine.
Of course, that revolution never happened. They could have said, “start the revolution without me,” since a key to individualized, personalized medicine is available using a simple pencil, paper, and psychometric “emotional boundary type” survey we developed (see below).
We still don’t have the entire genome mapped from a functional standpoint. And looking at bits and pieces in the gene didn’t result in any kind of “personalized” medicine or any other real advancement for human health.
It did, however, work well for the Director of the Project who went on to head the entire NIH. (Today, I would venture to say, he may be better known for his talents playing the guitar than for these results for the practice of human medicine.)
High-tech medicine continues to fall short
Unfortunately, “gene therapy” continues to ignore what has long been known about classic genetic disorders in human medicine. The results of fetal stem cells, human genome, gene therapy, or “regenerative medicine” don’t provide any useful clinical treatments for real doctors and their real patients. Yet, nothing changes among the Mandarins of Medicine at NIH and their co-dependents.
The government’s slick narrative for high-tech medical research successfully created an army of publicly supported career scientists and an entire wardrobe of new clothes for the Emperor. But their “approach has failed.”
Those are not my words, but the words of Drs. Michael Joyner, Nigel Paneth, and John Ioannidis, who between them have five advanced degrees in medicine, science, and public health. They are each accomplished medical scientists individually, and I have periodically cited their individual research studies for my Daily Dispatch and Insiders’ Cures newsletter.
This triumvirate of scientific talent also just came together to speak out and publish an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, asking what happens when these “poorly performing” (or failing) “big ideas” in medical research become entrenched in the mainstream medical system despite their patent failures?
Nothing much, they conclude.
Nothing much for human health. Nothing much for medical practice.
I’ll keep telling you about the scientific research that does take a natural, holistic approach to your health, including more by these same good doctors, Joyner, Paneth, and Ioannidis.
In the meantime, you can achieve personalized medicine with a pencil and paper…and a few minutes of your time.
There are many non-drug therapies for a dozen different major “incurable” disease of modern times. My colleague Mike Jawer and I developed a short quiz that matches these effective, natural, non-drug therapies with your personality type. You can learn all about these natural approaches to disease in our book Your Emotional Type.
You can also learn more about your personality type by taking this short quiz.
Source:
“What Happens When Underperforming Big Ideas in Research Become Entrenched?” Journal of the American Medical Association (www.jama.jamanetwork.com) 7/28/2016