Medicine in a New Key

Conventional medicine is dying ultimately because it is based on an obsolete dominant mechanistic model that does not recognize the coherence of the organism Dr. Mae-Wan Ho explores how a science of the organism could underpin a new organic medicine that would best serve the nation.

Death of medicine

Demand for healthcare has put national health services under increasingly severe strain as the rise in cost of medicine is escalating. The situation is worst in countries without national health that depend on health insurance. In the United States , employer-sponsored health insurance premiums more than doubled between 1996 and 2006, 4 times the increase in wage [1]; and more and more people find themselves uninsured.

The US spent $2.2 trillion on healthcare in 2007; averaging $7 421 per person, 16.2 percent of GDP, and nearly twice the average of other developed nations. Yet this most advanced and costly medical system in the world is the leading cause of death and injury to its citizens. Each year, some 2.2 million suffer from adverse drug reaction, 7.5 million undergo unnecessary medical and surgical procedures, and 8.9 million are unnecessarily hospitalised. In 2001, the medical system killed 783 936, when 699 697 died from heart disease and 553 251 from cancer [2].

The healthcare system is failing the world over [3, 4] ( The Depressing Side of Medical Science , Why the Planet is Sick , SiS 39). Health journalist and author Nick Regush summed it up starkly [5]: “Medicine as we know it, is dying…The disease is caused by conflict of interest, tainted research, greed for big bucks, pretentious doctors and scientists, lying, cheating, invasion by the morally bankrupt marketing automatons of the drug industry, derelict politicians and federal and state regulators….As a journalist, it has become very plain to see how little anything the medical Establishment does these days can be trusted or taken at face value. Press conferences, journal articles, symposia – all are geared to spike and obfuscate the truth, to hide red flags from the public and to bulk up the shares of investors in the companies that are promoting the science and the researchers.”

Domo did it

Regush and others have correctly identified the proximate causes conspiring in the death of medicine. But those are all symptomatic of a deeper cause, the obsolete model that dominates not just medicine, but the whole of our lives. Let's call it Domo for short.

Domo runs our economy, our industries; it lurks behind our political, social, and educational institutions, its tendrils woven into the fabric of our lives. We accept it unthinkingly, mistaking it for the ineluctable ultimate reality. Whenever something goes wrong, we look for someone, something else to blame; leaving Domo looming larger and stronger than ever before.

Public debates on the causes and cures for AIDs [6] ( Unraveling AIDS , ISIS publication), GM foods [7] (see for example GM is Dangerous and Futile , SiS 40), mobile phones [8] (see for example Drowning in a Sea of Microwaves , SiS 34), pesticides [9] (see Picking Cotton Carefully , SiS 34), and more, are all in the service of Domo, because we leave it untouched in the process of destroying ourselves.

Isn't it time we blow the cover on Domo?

Science of death vs science of life, mechanism vs organism

Domo is a seductively powerful view of the world as machine that can be taken apart, analysed, controlled, and re-tooled to serve our every want, wish, and whim. It had ushered in the industrial revolution and shaped the subsequent history of our planet right up to the present multiple crises in the throes of climate change.

Scientific enquiry has its own momentum, however, and the mechanistic science of Domo was already becoming obsolete at the turn of the past century when the science of the organism emerged. I have outlined how Domo's economy of infinite unsustainable growth that depends on competition and profligate dissipation should be replaced with nature's own closed loop economy that minimises wastes and thrives on reciprocity and co-operation [10] Science in a New Key ( SiS 43)..This organic circular model applies especially to sustainable agroecological systems that can mitigate climate change while providing food and fuel security for all [11] ( Food Futures Now: *Organic *Sustainable *Fossil Fuel Free , ISIS Publication).

Here, I shall sketch out how the science of the organism can replace Domo biology and revolutionise our understanding of health, and healthcare.

Domo's influence in biology has been the most profound and persistent. It presents the organism as a junkyard of molecular nuts and bolts subject to mechanistic principles of lock and key, push and pull, random collision, linear causation, controller versus controlled, etc .Diseases are largely viewed as ‘defects' in specific molecular mechanisms, and defined as such. This is the kind of thinking behind the human genome project that has all the signs of having run aground after decades of sequencing and dissecting genomes, and trying to identify the genetic defects that predispose individuals to different diseases (see [12] From Genomics to Epigenomics , SiS 41). Together with the physical laws of equilibrium thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, Domo biology is essentially a science of death that has virtually nothing to say about life.

Erwin Schrödinger's book, What is Life? [13] was one of the first critiques of the mechanistic representation of life. It is widely acclaimed for having predicted the genetic material DNA. Much less known and more significantly, it also predicted the molecular coherence of organisms discovered in my laboratory in 1992; which too, has been largely ignored.

Living organisms have such a high degree of molecular coherence that they appear as dynamic liquid crystal displays under the polarising microscope geologists use for identifying crystals. See the images on the cover of The Rainbow and the Worm, The Physics of Organisms now in its third edition [14], the first book about organisms that really tries to tell you what it is to be alive.

The science of the organism is predicated on a radical wholeness or coherence of the living system, which profoundly transforms our view of health and disease.

Quantum coherent liquid crystalline organism works by intercommunication

The wholeness of the organism transcends the age-old opposition between ‘top-down' and ‘bottom-up' explanations, or holist versus the reductionist approach in Domo biology. Instead, every single level is working together simultaneously, right down to individual molecules whose motions are so correlated in the tissues and cells that they make living organisms look like liquid crystal displays. Watch the videos of live organisms set to music in the Quantum Jazz DVD [15], and notice how the most active organisms and the most active parts of organisms give the brightest most brilliant colours because they are also the most coherent.

In the healthy coherent organism, each single molecule is intercommunicating with every other; and each is as much in control as it is sensitive and responsive. There is no need for push and pull, because coherent energy is stored throughout the system, ready to be mobilized. This coherence explains why organisms are sensitive to the weak electromagnetic fields of the mobile phone and wireless networks saturating our environment [8], especially because the organism uses electromagnetic fields and electric currents for intercommunication (see below).

A convenient description for the wholeness of the organism is ‘quantum coherence' extending over all modes of living activities, from very slow circadian or circa-annual rhythms to the ultrafast femto-second energy transfers between molecules; from the extremely local to the global. This hive of exquisitely coordinated activities is a ‘quantum jazz' [16] ( Quantum Jazz, The Tao of Biology , SiS 34) performed over a musical range of 70 octaves, in which every player is improvising spontaneously and freely, yet keeping in tune and in step with the whole.

The most accessible evidence of the body-wide coherence of biological rhythms comes from the fractal and multifractal variations of the healthy heartbeat, which reflect an intricate phase correlation among all rhythms as the heart's own beat intermeshes and syncopates in symphony with the rest [17] ( The Heartbeat of Health , SiS 35). In contrast, the diseased heart that's no longer communicating with the body falls back on its intrinsic rhythm and becomes much more regular. This has opened up a whole new field of dynamic disease that can be diagnosed by mathematics, and possibly treated non-invasively by biofeedback techniques [18] ( Happiness Is A Heartbeat Away , SiS 35).

The coherent organism is a unity of brain and body, heart and mind, an undivided bundle of intellect and passion, flesh, blood, and sinew that lives life to the full, freely and spontaneously, attuned not just to the immediate environment, but the universe at large. This ideal coherent whole is also the ideal of health.

Water is means, medium, and message

Quantum jazz is possible because organisms are liquid crystalline; the 70 percent by weight of water making up the tissues and cells are an integral, necessary part of the liquid crystalline matrix that enables rapid intercommunication to take place, whereby the organism can function as a coordinated whole.

New research described in the latest edition of my book [14] and [19] ( Water Electric and other articles in the series, SiS 43) show how this special biological water in tissues and cells provide the means, medium and message for intercommunication.

The liquid crystalline water is the ultimate source of protons (H + ) and electrons (e - ), positive and negative charges that zap through cellular compartments, between cells and tissues and the most distant parts of the body, energizing the organism, instantaneously coordinating its metabolism, growth, and other vital functions.

The liquid crystalline water matrix pervades the entire organism from the extracellular connective tissues to the interior of every single cell. Special membrane proteins have water-filled channels that cross the cell membrane, acting as ‘proton wires' to transport protons in and out of the cell [20] ( Positive Electricity Zaps Through Water Chains , SiS 28).. This same matrix transmits the heart's large pulsating electromagnetic field throughout the body, including the brain, which paces and intercommunicates with the myriad local rhythms [18]. Within the cell, it transmits the much higher frequency electromagnetic waves emitted by molecules that depend on specific frequencies to recognize one another and coordinate their actions even at a distance [21] ( The Real Bioinformatics Revolution , SiS 33).

The liquid crystalline matrix converts pressure and heat into electricity (and vice versa ), thereby coordinating the perfect movements of both voluntary and involuntary muscles that enable some people to be concert pianists, Olympic athletes, or Kung Fu masters. The thermoelectric and piezoelectric effects, typical of liquid crystals, may underlie the therapeutic effects of massage and other ‘subtle energy medicine' [22] possibly by restoring coherence to the body, as well as a balance of positive and negative charges.

Special water channels in confined spaces aligned by collagen fibres have the potential to serve as superconducting proton cables, being really many proton wires wound together [23] ( Collagen Water Structure Revealed , SiS 32), and may well correspond to the acupuncture meridians of traditional Chinese medicine, as David Knight and I suggested in 1998 [24] ( Liquid Crystalline Meridians ). The anatomical correlates of acupuncture meridians remain unknown to this day [25] ( Acupuncture, Coherent Energy and Liquid Crystalline Meridians , ISIS lecture).

Intriguingly, water next to charged hydrophilic surfaces, which are everywhere within the organism, not only forms ordered liquid crystalline layers, but can also be charged up by light, infrared light at 3 100 nm being the most effective in expanding the ordered layers that become charged up like a battery [19]. This finding reinforces the emerging picture that water is the lead player in bioenergetics [26] ( Water and Fire series, SiS 43). As Nobel Laureate Albert Szent-Gyorgyi remarked, water is “the mother of all life” [27].

Gene medicine based on Domo genetics

‘Biologicals', genetically engineered protein drugs, the first of which was insulin, are now found to cause adverse events and death more frequently than synthetic chemical drugs [28] ( ‘Biologicals', Wonder Drugs with Problems , SiS 42). This comes as no surprise, as genetic engineering is the epitome of Domo genetics that does not recognize the organic coherent whole where all genes and gene products are engaged in quantum jazz. You cannot just throw in an extra and hope it will slot into place like a missing logo piece.

Domo genetics was already superseded by t he genetics of the fluid genome as the first biological was commercialised [29] ( Living with the Fluid Genome , ISIS publication), the fluid genome being part and parcel of the coherent organism perfectly attuned to its environment, constantly intercommunicating with it, altering gene expression and the genes themselves.

. Decades of sequencing and dissecting the human genome in the hope of identifying genes for diseases have only served to confirm that the real causes of ill health are environmental and social [12] ( From Genomics to Epigenomics , SiS 41). It is not the genetic messages encoded in genomic DNA, but environmentally induced epigenetic modifications that overwhelmingly determine people's health and wellbeing. Early nutrition and parental care play a large role in an individual's physical and mental health [30] ( Caring Mothers Strike Fatal Blow against Genetic Determinism , SiS 41), and due attention must be paid to those aspects in delivering primary healthcare.

Domo medicine must go, but basic research needed for the new organic medicine

Domo medicine is obsolete and doing more harm than good. That's why people are turning to complementary therapies, not all based on well-founded knowledge, however.

In May 2009, 67 percent in Switzerland voted in favour of a constitutional article for complementary medicine [31]. The Swiss vote reflects the growing importance of complementary medicine in Europe . Some 65 percent of Europeans report they have used complementary and alternative medicine, with 30-50 percent using it as self-support and 19 to 20 percent having seen a complementary or alternative medical practitioner in the past year.

In contrast to the growth in popularity of complementary medicine, the science of the organism that could underpin it has languished, being valiantly pursued by only a few pioneers such as Jim Oschman [22], formerly a cell biologist.

I have outlined the basic physics of the organism and its potential connections to dynamic diseases and complementary therapies. A new ‘organic medicine' could combine the best in non-invasive, non-destructive approaches from both traditional medical systems and contemporary science that would also revitalize indigenous medicines in all cultures and provide affordable healthcare for all. This project is all the more urgent in view of the increase in disease burden forecast for times of climate change.

Article first published 06/07/09

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References

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