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Ali M, Editorial A Soulless Science
J Integrative Medicine 1997;1:1-6
Majid Ali, M.D.

A Soulless Science

Science has no soul of its own.
                President Bill Clinton¹

Science wants to know the mechanism of the
universe, religion the meaning. The two cannot be separated.
                Charles Townes²
                Inventor of laser, Nobelist

    President Clinton is not a scientist. Neither, apparently, are his scientific advisors. Clinton's error may be overlooked; that made by his advisors is regrettable.

    Science is purity of observation—and that purity is as essential to the human condition as it is to the physical phenomena observed in any test-tube experiment. Medical science is a set of observations concerning matter and energy that affect the health- dis-ease- disease continuum. And so is the soul, for the soul also concerns perceptions of the human condition. Even in a theological sense, all knowledge comes to us—or is revealed to us—through our perceptions and observations. Separating science from the soul beheads science. This is not a question of metaphysics; rather, it is about the intuition that scientists develop through their work.

    President Clinton's words come to mind as I write this editorial for the inaugural issue of the Journal. I have been a student of medicine for forty years. As I reflect on the state of what Western medicine has become during those four decades, it is a medical science that has no soul of its own. Western medicine has become a soulless science—a pseudoscience—that many in and out of medicine mistake for true science. This pseudoscience is also a lost science which seems to have forgotten that its purpose is to relieve and prevent suffering caused by illness. Thus, Western medicine has a distorted sense of what true science really is and what it isn't. This soulless science has an agenda of its own: to celebrate its great edifices and its statistics, regardless of how much and how long it afflicts the very people it claims to serve. Each month, the medical establishment touts landmark’ research findings that announce breakthrough’ advances in drug medicine and surgery while it glibly dismisses incontrovertible evidence of its global failures. It consistently fails to see the deteriorating whole as it becomes infatuated with its individual parts. This soulless science exists in servitude to the money men of medicine. The power brokers of medicine distort reality—with controlled and blinded studies which they dub as rigors of science’—to buttress the financial and political goals of paymasters. And, of course, there is always some professor of this or that medical school to testify to its wonders—for an appropriate gratuity. Since I left medical school, I have read thousands of reports of breakthrough advances that were purported to cure heart disease, cancer, asthma and other chronic disorders. Now, in 1997, consider the following quotes from recent issues of The New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA:

Cancer: "In 1986, we concluded that some 35 years of intense effort focused largely on improving treatment must be judged a qualified failure.’ Now, with 12 more years of data and experience, we see little reason to change that conclusion."³

Heart: "[E]lderly patients in the United States underwent coronary angiography 5.2 times as often, percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty 7.7 times as often, and bypass surgery 7.8 times as often as older patients in Ontario. Despite these differences, the one-year mortality rates in the U.S. and Ontario cohorts were virtually identical....In a fee-for-service system, cardiac procedures generated billions of dollars of revenues each year."⁴

Cholesterol: In 1992, Ravnskov⁵ evaluated 22 large, controlled cholesterol-lowering trials published in prestigious journals and concluded, "Lowering serum cholesterol does not reduce mortality...Methods subject to bias, such as open trials or the use of drugs with characteristic side effects, or stratification instead of random allocation of participants, probably explain the overall 0.32% reduction recorded in non-fatal coronary heart disease."
Asthma: "Drugs have worked miracles....In some patients it's like manna from heaven."⁶

"From 1982 to 1992, the prevalence of asthma increased by 42% and the average annual death rate by 40%, with the rate consistently higher for blacks than for whites."⁷
Hormonal Therapies: "On average, mortality among women who use postmenopausal hormones is lower than among nonusers...[however, there was] a 43 percent increase in death due to breast cancer [among hormone users]."⁸

Chronic Illness: "The first National Health Survey conducted in 1935 found that 22% of the population had a chronic illness...with 100 million Americans [40% in 1995] with one or more chronic conditions, nearly every family is affected....[C]hronic conditions will increase to 148 million [estimated 50%] by 2030."⁹

    One can cite such dismal quotes concerning almost all chronic disease categories. How does one explain such pathetic performance of American medicine in the management of dominant chronic health disorders? What kind of science is it that wastes hundreds of billions of dollars to produce such abysmal results? What happened to all those landmark "scientific" breakthroughs? Where did the celebrated scientific cures of cancer, heart disease, asthma, arthritis and other chronic disorders go? What became of Nixon's science that launched its War on Cancer? It was supposed to have eradicated cancer by 1990. Now The New England Journal of Medicine advises us that that war has been a failure. It informs us that the outcome is virtually identical whether one Canadian undergoes a coronary bypass operation or eight Americans do. This year, that journal also advised us that the rate of restenosis within six months of angioplasty in some studies is more than forty percent.¹⁰ JAMA advises us that two out of every five Americans now suffer from a chronic illness. When I read that I wonder where the healthy 60% of Americans might be hiding. Why don't I see them?

    Is the poisoning individual patients with chemotherapy drugs a valid science when we know such drugs do not work in the larger picture? For decades, licensing boards in the U.S. suppressed integrated nondrug therapies for cancer and revoked licenses of holistic practitioners who defied them. How knowledgeable about those therapies were the doctors who controlled those boards? Was that good science? Is coronary bypass surgery justified when we know the outcome is virtually identical whether surgery is performed or not? Is it good science when we know that surgical mortality ranges from 4 to 6 percent and brain dysfunction occurs in up to 78 percent of cases?¹¹ Is the use of steroids and other immune suppressant therapies for asthma scientifically justified when we know that such therapies do not address the underlying causes and when effective nutritional and herbal therapies for asthma exist?: Consider the point that we recognize that asthma mortality continues to climb with drug use? Is it good science to promote the use of synthetic hormones for prevention of heart disease when we find that the rate of death from breast cancer in women taking hormones increases by 43%?

    The simple answer to the above questions is that for chronic illness, we physicians in the U.S. are hostages of the soulless science of drug medicine. Our ability to care for the sick is controlled by misguided and unenlightened individuals who control licensing and insurance boards and who seem to have little, if any, understanding of human biology. They understand neither science nor health. The concepts of health assessment and reversal of chronic disease with nondrug therapies are alien to them. They do not see the obvious: that injured tissues heal with nutrients—not with drugs. And that drug medicine for chronic disorders is essentially a medicine of blockade. In acute illness, drugs that block cell membrane channels, receptors, enzymes, mediators of inflammation and others are necessary. The principal danger of the soulless medicine that I lament here is that it utterly fails to see the difference between the requirements (for blockade) in acute illness and those for facilitating the healing phenomena in chronic illness. If this were not so—and if those at the FDA who dismiss all empirical evidence for efficacy of nondrug therapies were right—undoubtedly we would have seen real progress in the control of cancer, heart disease, asthma and other chronic ailments.

    True science in medicine is the observation of what is safe and what works—a science of integration. It is purity of empirical observations of the whole. It is a science that rejects as irrelevant distortions created by blinded drug studies conducted for the specific purpose of FDA approval. Integrative medicine is founded on the principle of integration of all that is pertinent to the care of the sick, and it embraces the concept that the patient shares the responsibility of the healing process. Integrative medicine holds sacred two other tenets: (1) the principle of empiricism—using therapies that are known to be effective and safe, regardless of whether we do or do not understand their mechanisms of action; and (2) the principle that the clinician must allow the patient to guide him as he guides the patient.

    In his editorial for Science, President Clinton went on to say, "...we must always remember that science is not God. Our deepest truths remain outside the realm of science." The president is remiss again. God reveals himself through the pure observation. As I began in this editorial, observation is true science and that cannot be separated from spirituality. The president's scientific advisors let him down again.

    There was always a breed of physicians who practiced integrative medicine knowing it worked. Specifically, for chronic nutritional, ecologic, immune and degenerative disorders, integrative medicine worked better than drug blockade medicine. In the past they did their work quietly and in fear of licensing boards. Now I see an evolving integrative medicine in the hands of a new breed of physicians who, at peril of losing their licenses, courageously defy the dogma of the disease doctors of drug medicine. These integrative physicians focus on issues of health assessment, prevention of disease and reversal of chronic illness. They understand the distortions and deceptions created by the double-blind cross-over statistics of drug medicine. They reject presumptions of "scientific validity" and trust their own clinical observations in what is safe and works, and what isn't safe and doesn't work. That, in my view, is the promise of the newly evolving integrative medicine.

References
1. Clinton B. Science in the 21st century. Science 1997;276:1951.
2. Charles Townes. Of laser and prayer. Science 1997;277:891.
3. Bailar JC III, Gornik HL. Cancer undefeated. N Eng J Med 1997;336:1569-74.
4. Krumholz HM. Cardiac procedures, outcomes, and accountability. N Eng J Med 1997;336:1522- 3.
5. Ravnskov U. Cholesterol lowering trials in coronary heart disease: frequency of citation and outcome.BMJ 1992;305:15-19.
6. Vogel G. New clues to asthma therapies Science 1997;276:1643-46.
7.  Marwick, C. Helping city children control asthma. JAMA 1997;277:1503-4.
8.  Grodstein F, Stampfer MJ, Colditz GA, et al. Postmenopausal hormone therapy and mortality. N Eng J Med 1997;336:1769-75.    
9.  Hoffman, C, Rice D, Sung HY. Persons with chronic conditions. Their prevalence and costs. JAMA 1996;276:1473-1479.
10. Bittl J. Advances in coronary angioplasty. N Eng J Med 1996;335:1290-1302.
11. Roach GW, Kanchuger M, Mangano CM, et al. Adverse cerebral outcomes after coronary bypass surgery. N Eng J Med 1996;335:1857-63.

Index of Article Authors
Majid Ali, MD
Omar Ali, MD
Mary Ann Carroll, RN
Alfred Fayemi, MD
C.Grieder-Brandenburger, RN
Judy Juco, MD
Tsuneo Kobayashi MD
Jean A. Monro, MB, BS
(This index is incomplete and will be completed shortly)

Past and
Current Editors
Omar Ali, M.D.
Robert Atkins, M.D.
Robert Bradford, D.Sc
Paul Cheney, M.D., Ph.D.
Steven Davies, M.D.
Alfred O. Fayemi, M.D.
Claus Hanke, M.D.
Doug Hutto, N.D.
Judy Juco, M.D.
Paris Kidd, Ph.D.
Oscar Kruesi, M.D.
Derrick Lonsdale, M.D.
D. Vijen Poleszynski, B.S.
Christine Radulescu, Ph.D.
Ray Russamono, M.D.
Susan Test, Ph.D.
Lowell Weiner, D.D.S.
John C. Williams, M.D.

The Journal of Integrative Medicine shall not be held responsible for statements of the contributing authors. The views and opinions expressed are those of the submitting authors and do not necessarily reflect those of The Journal of Integrative Medicine, The American Academy of Integrative Medicine,
The American Academy of Preventive Medicine, any advertisers or staff members of The Journal of Integrative Medicine
 

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The Journal of Integrative Medicine shall not be held responsible for statements of the contributing authors. The views and opinions expressed are those of the submitting authors and do not necessarily reflect those of The Journal of Integrative Medicine, The American Academy of Integrative Medicine, The American Academy of Preventive Medicine, any advertisers or staff members of The Journal of Integrative Medicine