Those predictions in the name of "Science" are more dangerous than astrology

 

 B.M. Hegde

Angelina Jolie had her ovaries removed recently, to counter a possible 50 per cent chance of getting cancer in that part of her body. A few years ago she had had her breasts removed for the same reason. Sooner than later she may have more of her organs removed, and possibly replaced by artificial ones!

Not surprising if you believe these doctors, who could be called cancerologists. There is a 50 per cent chance of any human being contracting any disease. Does that warrant getting our organs removed to remain safe from cancer? If it is that easy, a lot more people will be coughing up money to get their organs removed. I remember my student-days when we used to advise parents to have their children’s tonsils, even appendix, removed lest they cause problems. Now we think that was foolish. Science has advanced by leaps and bounds.

With the latest science many conclusions could be drawn that seem to be true today.

The future is not there. It is yet to be born. The past is dead. The human body is not a machine put together by joining organs. It is a bundle of energy and a colony of 129 trillion human cells, each of which can have an independent existence in isolation. We also are home to ten times that number of germ cells at a ratio of 1:10. The human body works as one whole and not in bits and pieces.

Healing has to be Whole Person Healing (WPH). This is now scientifically accepted by the IOM in the U.S., thanks to Professor Rustum Roy’s efforts. Organs cannot be treated in isolation. In a dynamic system, prediction is impossible unless we know the total initial state of the organism. Writing in the British Medical Journal, Professor W.J. Firth, the physicist, shows how foolish it is for doctors to predict the unpredictable future of their patients. (BMJ 1991; 303: 1565)

Pray, how could anyone advise a patient to have her organs removed for fear of getting cancer there with 50:50 chances? That said, I must hasten to add that this is very sensible medical business. Cancer is a $1.72-trillion industry and growing by leaps and bounds.

The drugs are expensive and are not being tested properly. We have been able to conquer cancer. Money seems to be the only driving force in this business.

Scientists and rationalists condemn our poor astrologers for seeking to predict human future. I agree with them there. But the same people do not condemn this kind of quackery? Why are there such double standards? In fact, the latter is more dangerous as it is done in the name of “Science”.

What is science? I was sure Dolly would die a premature death due to old age diseases as she was created from her mother’s cell.

That happened. Eric Drexler, a young PhD from MIT, started a company, called, if I remember right, Furutistic Inc. He claimed to produce custom-built human beings without mother and father (self-replicating nanobots). He collected billions of dollars from venture capitalists.

His own teacher, the Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley, had to warn the world this is an impossibility. The company closed down, declaring Chapter 11! This is how one makes money through science.

All that is fine with our thinkers, but they are allergic to astrologers. Weather predictions do not come true correctly. Edward Lorenz then had a new hypothesis of the “Butterfly Effect”. In the human body which is non-linear and holistic things happen due to butterfly effect every minute. No one, not even the best scientist, can predict the human future using the present science.

Poor Angelina Jolie, she has been taken for a ride. At this rate what will be left of her body? I wonder how this business thrives in today’s world where the media should keep a watch. On the contrary, the media are helping them by advertising their work. Look at the news of Angelina’s ovaries. They make headline news all over the world. How her removed ovaries are making so much sense to the lay reader?

(Professor Hegde is a Padma Bhushan Awardee 2010, a cardiologist and former Vice-Chancellor of Manipal University. drbmhegde@gmail.com )

Source -The Hindu 

What need to be done about Health Care System

Unless the govt. regulates the expansion of the non-public sector and makes it responsible, the worn-down public health infrastructure can't be revived

The absence of a well thought out policy framework for strengthening the health system is that the most significant issue facing the health sector in India. within the government, there's no clarity on what the nation’s health system ought to be ten years thence. ought to it's a public sector dominated system like Brazil or China; or a regulated private-led just like the U.S.; or one wherever each sectors perform however have only 1 money handler as within the U.K.? In Japan, delivery is non-public however the govt. sets the costs. every possibility has its prices, benefits, tradeoffs and systems to make sure management on prices and quality.

Unregulated

India could be a distinctive school of thought model with a personal sector-led health system that's unregulated and has no rules of the sport wheat out, not while nominal as those set down for gap a liquor look. And so, one will got wind of a rest home in an exceedingly residential colony; throw infectious waste anyplace, charge any quantity that the market permits and don't have any systems of oversight to assure quality. The non-public sector is additional incentivised by excise duty waivers, subsidized loans for establishing hospitals, tax breaks and a liberalised insurance market with tax exemptions for the premium.

More recently, a brand new innovation has emerged referred to as government sponsored insurance schemes (Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana, Arogyashri, Kalaignar, etc.) underneath that governments purchase the insurance on behalf of the people/target cluster for providing cashless services for inmate care, chiefly surgeries. underneath this theme, the suppliers charge on a DRG basis, the insurance firms have assured incomes and also the entire risk is borne by the govt.. whereas such schemes have widened access by creating non-public sector facilities offered, their impact on addressing the 3 important problems with the health sector — equity, quality, and potency — has not been self-addressed. Instead, rating structures area unit distorted and new dimensions of dishonorable and corrupt practices have entered the health sector that continues to register inflation at thirty per cent, with negligible impact on reducing ruinous expenditures, impoverishing millions within the method.

Privatisation of the health sector started in late Eighties, accelerated within the Nineties with the additional withdrawal of the state underneath the backbreaking state of the International Monetary Fund structural adjustment, and got additional bold with the in depth incentives provided. In 2005, the state bounced back with a three-fold increase within the budget to revitalize the agricultural health delivery systems underneath the National Rural Health Mission, running as a parallel track to the non-public eco system. it's this duality and dysfunctional policymaking that's haemorrhaging the arena and needs to be stopped directly. The worn down public health infrastructure can't be revived while not ever-changing the principles of the sport, transferral in legal provisions to manage additional growth of the non-public sector, create it economical and responsible and supply a level-playing field.

Bihar experiment

It is time to recognise the market failures inherent to the current sector and also the role of the economics that's sustaining it, creating it more and more not possible to manage and establish institutional mechanisms with the requisite capabilities to effectively manage the mess. Bihar’s recent experiment of outsourcing medicine to the non-public sector is telling — unqualified persons were utilized at some centres, however no action was taken as a result of political pressure. it's alarming to suppose that variety of innocent individuals might need been given the incorrect designation and placed on unneeded medication. this is often simply alittle example for example the type of mess we tend to area unit in.

The policy confusion is worsened by the push for larger decentralization while not making certain the provision of capacities at those levels to manage such complicated systems. it's against this state of affairs that Chhattisgarh’s recent policy initiative has to be viewed. The policy of acquiring out diagnostic services to non-public sector networks in 379 public facilities for ten years, guaranteeing a minimum patient load and allowing paying patients additionally and costs pegged to those procured underneath the Central Government Health theme (CGHS), monitored and managed by a 3rd party, is fraught with adverse implications for the strengthening of the general public sector and large prices for the govt., ought to it prefer to pay money for them.

Absence of strategy

It is not the outsourcing that's wrong. it's the absence of a technique to draw on the strengths of the general public and personal sectors. If the govt. is unable to recruit workers to determine laboratories in, say, a district like Bastar, it's unclear however the non-public sector are often lured to line up, for example, a radiology unit, there unless Brobdingnagian amounts area unit paid to that to hide the property risks concerned. Likewise, outsourcing is being tried in areas that have already got laboratory facilities. whereas the worth addition isn't clear, it'll beyond question end in the closure of the general public sector services and conjointly entail paying 3 times a lot of to the non-public sector. And it'll be 3 times because the CGHS costs that area unit being taken as a benchmark, supported the common of costs quoted on a young basis. there's no scientific basis for CGHS rate-fixing and such a system can solely end in overpaying the non-public sector in Chhattisgarh wherever the costs of inputs vary from those in urban center or Old Delhi and between Raipur and Bastar. a lot of worrying area unit the qualifying criteria that solely massive non-public sector networks like company hospitals will meet. tiny however glorious not-for-profit hospitals just like the Shahid hospital in Dalli Raja in Durg or the Jan Swasthya Sahayog at Giniari in Bilaspur can each be disqualified.

What has to be done

Knee-jerk solutions and brainless tinkering have had a calamitous result on the health sector in India. the govt. has to explore health system development and place in situ requisite conditions, like AN institutional capability to manage supplier behaviour through well set down national protocols and commonplace in operation procedures, penalties and incentive structures. It ought to explore efficient choices like the intensive use of technology that allows electronic transmission of samples for designation at centralised laboratories, rating of services, develop IT systems to closely monitor not quantitative however qualitative outcomes still, place in situ grievance redress systems, adjustment and insulating the social control systems the least bit levels from political pressures to create people from the ANM to the specialist, the ward boy to the laboratory technician — public or non-public — responsible to outcomes and patients, before gap up partnerships with the non-public sector on such an oversized scale.

What has to be done is understood, however sadly a way to eff isn't. Governments, at the Centre and within the States, have to be compelled to enable individuals with field expertise and sensible information of the health system to contribute their experience. what's conjointly required nowadays quite ever is that the have to be compelled to hear the bottom — as patients, ladies in villages, line employees, the unfortunate doctor within the PHC, all have a distinct story to inform. we tend to cannot afford any longer blundering!

Cuba's free healthcare

In 1995, Nelson Mandela declared with regard to Cuban international solidarity missions to Africa over past decades:

"Cubans came to our region as doctors, teachers, soldiers, agricultural experts, but never as colonisers. They have shared the same trenches with us in the struggle against colonialism, underdevelopment and apartheid."

The US, of course, had offered a less favourable characterisation of Cuban activities on the African continent, and accused the island nation of exporting revolution. Evidence of diabolical Cuban meddling in the internal affairs of sovereign nations included its substantial assistance in defending newly independent Angola against a US-backed South African invasion that - according to Noam Chomsky - ultimately killed a million and a half people in Angola and Mozambique.

As for more subtly packaged revolutionary exports, the New York Times reported in 2009 that, "[i]n the 50 years since the revolution, Cuba has sent more than 185,000 health professionals on medical missions to at least 103 countries".

Elderly Patients should be Prescribed Drugs

Oxford and Birmingham university researchers said older patients were "largely ignored" after looking at prescribing for nearly 37,000 people.
They found for blood pressure-lowering drugs prescribing dropped after the age of 85, while for treatment for high cholesterol the fall started at 75.
But other experts said there could be valid reasons for the findings.
The study, published on the British Medical Journal website, showed that prescribing of both types of drugs increased every five years after the ages of 40 to 44.
But by the age of 75 statin use had peaked at 29%, falling to 23% after that.

Want to lose weight? EAT!

Have you resolved to lose weight? Do you think thin = healthy = not eating? Get real! Eating right can help you knock off those extra pounds.

So have you taken care of your annual donation to the gym knowing that you're never going to step into it? Paying that gym membership makes you think “I'll make it some day”. But let's face it; most of us can barely make the time to draw a deep breath, let alone find a couple of hours, that includes fighting traffic and finding parking space, to work out. Also many have a mental block about the gym and your body will never respond to anything you force it into. So what do you do? You learn to compensate. By eating; only this time correctly.

Go 'figure'

First, study your body; structure, metabolism, hunger pangs, thirst, eating patterns. It's very important to know when you feel hungry, how much and when not; note down the time and contents of your meal for a week so that you realise what you're chomping and what you're missing in terms of essential nutrients. Create a basket that includes all food groups; carbohydrates, proteins, vitamins and even fat. Keeping track of all that you eat is also a foolproof system to put an end to bingeing; once you actually see how much you're putting into your body it'll automatically put your meals into perspective.

One simple rule:your body burns most calories as soon as you wake and then goes into slow mode thereafter. So eat your chocolates, fried food, mithai, cakes when you wake up and make the later mouthfuls healthier as the sun goes down.

Frequency

Do you wake up sluggish to a large cup of coffee/adrakwali chai/green tea? Do you have a couple of bites for breakfast and then wake up ravenous late in the afternoon to bite into whatever you see? That's because you probably eat your big meal — batata wada, dal—roti-chawal — at sunset. Now it's impossible to change habits overnight so start slow. An easy trick is to break your three main meals into eight — or may be six initially. Wake up to the heaviest platter and get through the day in descending order.

The golden cycle

A well guarded secret let out by Rujuta Diwekar is— if you ever want to lose weight; eat! The ‘3 Ws' are the deal breakers— What, When and Where you eat. For e.g. eating dal chawal in a restaurant at midnight can do more damage than a big piece of homemade ladoo/bhaji in the morning. Simply because one, your ability to burn fat at midnight is almost zilch and two even dal (proteins) may have unhealthy ingredients (dalda instead of pure ghee) when made outside whereas the bhaji you fry in good oil at home is absorbed into your system pronto because you're burning most fat in the morning.

Eat with your mind

It's essential to finish with supper at sundown because your fat burning ability vanishes with the sunlight. And since you've had your dinner early, you're guaranteed to wake up with an appetite. If you can't stomach the idea of poha/eggs/thepla that early, start with fruit. High carbs like banana or apple (read roughage) are ideal to kickstart that metabolism and also acts as a buffer to that cup you'll sip on. Never, I mean NEVER, begin your day with caffeine as your body will automatically go into slump mode. Water constitutes 70 per cent of the human body so when gulp some down as much as possible through the day to eliminate toxins.

Quick tip

Every time hunger pangs strike, replace every one out of three meals with water and watch that fat melt away.

The Hindu