Hospital accidents kill more people than highway accidents. But when people die while they are receiving standard, but irrational and antiscientific treatments and “support,” the deaths aren’t counted as accidents. The numbers are large. Medical training and medical textbooks bear great responsibility for those unnecessary deaths. Most medical research is done under the influence of mistaken assumptions, and so fails to correct the myths of medical training. If the “consumers” or victims of medicine are willing to demand concrete justifications before accepting “standard procedures,” they will create an atmosphere in which medical mythology will be a little harder to sustain.
A sentence taken out of context is likely to be misleading. A chemical equation that is concerned only with the reactants, catalyst, and product, can be misleading, and its industrial application is likely to produce devastation and pollution along with the intended product. In nature and industry, the reactants, products, and energy changes are linked to the ecology and to the economy. In physiological chemistry, events in the organism are linked to the environment so closely that food, water, air, soil, and pollution form a firmly linked functional system. But “medical physiology” has evolved as a separate thing, in which formulas that describe specific situations are linked to each other by fragmentary schemes, terminology, and computer models. This jerrybuilt scheme is even more roughly set into a hypothetical environment of “the origin of life,” “evolution,” “inheritance,” “society,” and a few other perfunctory contextualizations that have no more relevance to the subject than do the literary epigraphs that are often used at the beginning of chapters in medical books, to signify that the author isn’t just a technical hack. This physiological mythology has made possible a practice of medicine in which “genes” and “a virus” are regularly invoked to explain things that can’t be remedied, and in which any fleshy body is described as “well nourished,” and in which malnutrition and poisoning by pollutants are systematically dismissed as explanations for sicknesses, while thousands of different drugs are administered according to instructions given by their salesmen. It is also deeply linked to attitudes that have turned the practice of medicine into the surest way for an individual to get rich and retire early. It creates a sense of confidence that the physician is doing the right thing, because there is a little physiological rationale for everything. When a practice is replaced by its opposite, there is also a rationale for that. In fact, medical textbooks are written to rationalize the highly arbitrary practices of the industry. If, for some reason, perpetual motion machines had been as successful economically as steam engines were, laws of thermodynamics would have been written to describe them, just as thermodynamic laws were invented to describe the theory of steam engines. It was odd and interesting when a vice presidential candidate stepped to the podium several years ago and asked “who am I? What am I doing here?” But those questions are really of the greatest importance and interest, and physiology should be an attempt to understand more fully what we are, what we are doing, and how we are doing it. When we have comprehensive answers to those questions, then we will be in a position to create systematically valid solutions for our problems. For physiology, the equivalent of medicine’s “first do no harm” would be “first, don’t believe unfounded doctrines.” Accepting that principle puts a person into a critical attitude, and experiments can become actually “empirical,” an extension of experience that allows you to perceive new things, rather than “testing hypotheses.” Unless a hypothesis is a generalization from real experience, rather than a deduction from a doctrine, progress is likely to be very slow. A first step in developing a critical attitude is to identify the idols that stand in the way of real understanding. Immunity, intelligence, appetites, tumor growth, aging, the proper development of organs—everything that we think of as the biological foundations of health and sickness—will be misinterpreted if there are fundamental misconceptions about physiology.