You might expect that the natural history that the Greeks developed over two millennia ago would first have been finished and then been rendered obsolete by industry and technology. Nothing could be farther from the truth. For some ailments, the natural history has been constructed as etiogenic (causal) models of early phenomena; this is particularly the case with some perennial infectious diseases. However, most perennial diseases are being investigated at the molecular level with no clinical guidance or correlation.
What could go wrong with that approach? Just about everything. Overly complex, centralized, top-down, squeezed systems essentially provide old products over and over while the institutions look out for themselves, and any feedback that might reveal an ailment’s actual nature is excluded. Clinical and quantitative and intuitive skills are all lost in a maze of junk science and administration. Doctors who do not own the profession look to please those above them and are rushed through algorithms as quickly as possible. Not only do they lack abilities essential to the art of medicine, they are losing more and more of the agency they once possessed and becoming less and less connected to reality—especially medical reality. Meanwhile, the entire biotech industry is presently operating on the premise that precision can substitute for lack of clinical gold standards.
In the absence of clinical acumen, contextual care, careful longitudinal observation, and learning by problem solving, biotech success stories base themselves on the illusion that while medicine is imprecise, they are precise. While true, they are also irrelevant, playing the wrong ballgame in the wrong ballpark while outdoing doctors in futile workaholism. How good is the market at solving problems? It’s better than ignoring them, but how can biotech start-ups address problems that they can’t even construct?
You could put that budding industry—and non-profits like the Arch Mission Foundation—on firm footing by doing the Hippocratic phenomenology that yields clinical gold standards which can ensure accuracy and validity.
When doctors lose the ability to learn directly from patients in the phenomenological tradition of Hippocrates, and to delineate models that indicate opportunities for treatment, everybody loses. Errors of omission don’t show up in the databases; the present thoughtless system can do great harm: it is like beating patients with rubber hoses.
The patient has to be the boss of the doctor; when doctors don’t work for patients, bad things happen. Take your pick of which. A heartbreaking one is that the once-taken-for-granted and now degraded maternal microbiome may be, along with fetal and neonatal exposure to toxins, accountable for the rising incidence of autism. At the other end of life, neurodegenerative diseases, especially Parkinson’s and ALS, have been linked to toxics even by the too-little, too-late, too-invalid modern methodology.
What is not known is whether chronic ambient poisoning is literally devolving human DNA or causing transmissible epigenetic effects. In other words, whether the species may have devolved to a greater extent than can be cured. Why not just catch chronic illness and reverse it before it becomes permanent?
The art of medicine is irreplaceable. Its loss is likely to magnify modern doctors’ harm to life, missing more in the future than it has missed by allowing—even catalyzing—the spread of chronic ambient poisoning throughout the body of life since WWII. Even with the breakthrough definition of chronic ambient poisoning, which may enable humans to retire modern ways and co-create a living future, Homo sapiens must always expect to encounter the new and to roll back the unknown. Doctors of life who expand the art of medicine will always be needed. Let go the busy nothings of midcentury processual medicine. Choose life. Loss of personal wealth is gain of freedom from lawsuits. It is the opportunity to live a creative people-rich life in a community that needs little portable wealth.
Remember that Hippocrates, who taught emergent parameters like contextualization, recognition of the key role of agricultural methods in health, and the need to track epidemics, left us with aphorisms still true today, like: “Ars longa, vita brevis.” Return to wisdom creation, and make evolved life your central care.