Avoiding An Ill For Every Pill – Go East Young Man
Barely a day passes in the West without mention of the increasingly unaffordable health spend, rising in sync with the number of patients suffering multiple chronic illnesses while taking multiple interacting medications. Yet each med was only ever trialled individually, in someone who wasn’t you. Dr. B.M. Hegde – was featured last year in a TED video and is a proponent of Ayurveda Medicine. The Sanskrit word Ayurveda translating as “the wisdom of life / the knowledge of longevity”. It views health as much more than the absence of disease: wellness is simply happiness within the human system and health is enthusiasm.
The body is a fully interrelated system, but the West sees it like a car of individual components, the engine, the gearbox, the software and of course the airbag if something goes wrong. But how much better if we consciously drive so that we don’t need to deploy the airbag. Health is like that too, with greater care we could hit less crash barriers – but maybe we’re dozing off at the wheel. With the US spending 20x more per patient than Cuba, but with worse outcomes – maybe it’s more than just something in the water.
Dr. Belle Monappa Hegde (often abbreviated as B. M. Hegde) originally trained in cardiology at Harvard Medical School. He is an unusual mix: appreciating Western advances while his favoured philosophy is rooted in the East, with a mantra not so much as “a pill for every ill”, but an “ill from every pill”. No human being is ‘truly’ independent, but interrelated, as we have 10x more germ cells inside us than exist in our human tissue cells. We are in reality more bacterial than human, all constantly working together seeking balance, seeking homeostasis.
We start life as one single nucleated cell, the zygote, then the zygote divides, and divides, and divides until eventually you are 120 trillion cells (give or take, one assumes, depending…). Each cell IS a human being, each talking to another, each capable of doing all that you do. Every cell can breathe, digest, and eliminate waste, each can heal when damaged, and die appropriately when it is time. Then the cycle starts all over again, better if we give it a helping hand.
Why does that matter? well, it matters to Dr Hegde “as the leading cause of death in the West, is not cancer or heart disease, but ADR’s, (Adverse Drug Reactions) from multiple medical interactions. Every single pain killer, each NSAID, (Non Steroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug) can give you a heart attack up to five years later and may result in the need for kidney failure dialysis. With cancer, we take a biopsy, then smear the cells on a ‘glass plate’, by which time they’re all distorted, then we stain it, which poisons the cell, then we put it under a microscope to view the distorted cell, so you can’t know what that cell is, because a normal cell and a cancer cell work alike: unless you know the quantum view of medicine. There are things which you can’t fully grasp, so you can’t manage an illness, as ‘treatment’ is a narrow reductionist view. You must know the environment in which a patient operates. In Germany, Belgium and London they are looking at Ayurvedic medicine, they know we can’t afford the current model. But intensive care is only 2% of the daily workload of the hospital. We should have a judicious mix of emergency and Ayurvedic, in short, meta medicine”.
To learn more about Dr Hegde, who asks “if science doesn’t change, it’s a religion”, please see: