Science and medicine

Science and technology have generated many innovations that have profoundly changed the way people live; these changes have accelerated substantially over the past three centuries since, and largely as the result of, the Industrial Revolution.

The consequences of these changes have not always been beneficial; many have been positively detrimental. One of the main consequences has been the almost total obeisance to ‘science’ in the belief that it is the only method through which ‘knowledge’ can be obtained. Dr Mendelsohn’s simile that modern medicine is like a religion can be extrapolated to apply to ‘science’, in which ‘scientists’ have assumed the mantle of ‘authority’ and become a new kind of priesthood.

This situation is highly problematic; real science is a process of discovery, but the discipline of ‘science’ has become largely authoritarian because its teachings are: that scientific knowledge is the sole repository of ‘truth’; that only those who accept the ‘consensus’ view are the genuine scientists; and that any dissenting views are to be vilified and described in terms such as ‘unscientific’ and ‘pseudoscience’ or with other similarly disparaging labels.

The field of knowledge that has suffered the greatest harm from this dogmatic approach is that of ‘health’, in which dissenters are labelled as ‘quacks’. But the use of insults has no place in a genuine scientific debate. The greatest error of ‘scientists’ in this field, which is often referred to as ‘medical science’, originates from a false perception of the human body as essentially a ‘machine’ of separate parts that are fundamentally chemical in nature; meaning that a malfunction in each part can be ‘fixed’ by altering its chemical nature. This error has been compounded by the equally erroneous idea that ‘diseases’ are the result of an ‘attack’ on the body, mainly, but not exclusively, by ‘germs’.

Furthermore, most ‘scientists’ in the field of ‘medicine’ regard the living human body as if it were inert; they effectively deny that it has a role of any significance in the production of illness or in the restoration of health. To add insult to injury, the medical establishment maintains the stance that it is only their healthcare system, which operates from the basis of these ideas, that is capable of correctly addressing matters pertaining to health.

Yet again, nothing could be further from the truth.

From: What Really Makes You Ill? Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Disease is Wrong

Dawn Lester & David Parker