To say that the present biomedical healthcare and medicine system is in a crisis is to utter a platitude. The world is helplessly witnessing an astronomical increase in healthcare costs over the past few decades despite ongoing claims of technological advances and scientific excellence by the biomedical allopathic profession.

Ironically, the quality of human health has not improved proportionately to such far reaching claims. This is the paradox in the present healthcare system created by the progenitors and proponents of the biomedical healthcare.

Where has it gone wrong? This is a perplexing question that is now challenging the healthcare leaders and tormenting the general public who are burdened with such high costs for medical service that is currently being provided by medical centers. Money has usurped the primacy of our noble healing science, the initial compelling compassion for the ill and the injured which gave rise to this science, has ebbed and seems to have disappeared into oblivion. Such is the pathetic state of the art of medicine today.

The problem in the current biomedical system is basically a crisis of perception, resulting in a confusion that is inseparably connected to the entire human society. The source of this problem can be traced back to the outmoded Cartesian - Newtonian philosophical framework of the universe, which formed the scientific basis upon which the biomedical scientific principles were founded and constructed.

This model of the Universe, emanated from two great minds of science, that is Descartes and Isaac Newton, whose knowledge at that time was considered the ultimate truth, just like, how at one time, the notion that the earth was flat was considered as an unchallengable truth. This Cartesian - Newtonian worldview dominated all schools of scientific thought including medicine and surgery.

All these schools of thought accepted the mechanistic view of classical physics as the correct description of reality, and the knowledge paradigm which emerged from this incomplete truth gave rise to a science that is now flawed and shattered by a more accurate and expanded worldview of quantum physics and the theory of relativity unravelled by Albert Einstein and his co-workers in the early part of the twentieth century.

This proven theory clearly revealed and expounded the limitations of the mechanistic worldview of the Cartesian-Newtonian imagery, antiquated its validity and brought into light the organic and cosmic ecological conception of reality.

Limited understanding

Fritjof Capra explicitly explains this crisis of perception:

"This crisis of medicine, then, is essentially a crisis of perception, and hence it is inextricably linked to a much larger social and cultural crisis, a complex multidimensional crisis whose facets touch every aspect of our lives. All these can be seen as different aspects of one and the same crisis, which derives from the fact that we are trying to apply the concepts of an outmoded worldview - the mechanistic worldview of Cartesian-Newtonian science, to a reality that can no longer be understood in terms of this concepts.

To describe this world appropriately we need an ecological perspective, which the Cartesian-Newtonian worldview does not offer. In biomedical science, the Cartesian view of living organisms as machines constructed from separate parts, still provides the conceptual framework. The principal characteristics of modern medical theory, as well as many aspects of current medical practice, can be traced back to the Cartesian imagery.

Following the Cartesian approach, medical science has limited itself to attempts of understanding, biological mechanisms involved in injuries to various parts of the body and, in doing so, often loses sight of the patient as a human being. It has concentrated on smaller and smaller fragments of the body, shifting its perspective from study of bodily organs and their functions to that of cells and finally to molecules. In the twentieth century physics, the universe is no longer perceived as a machine, made of multitude of separate objects, but appears as a harmonious indivisible whole; a web of dynamic relationship that include the human observer and his or her consiousness in an essential way."

Therefore, the present allopathic biomedical system is flawed right from its first principle, similar to the antiquated humoral theory of disease causation expounded by Hippocrates and Galen. Careful and fairminded observation of the outcome of the practice itself will reveal the myriad of iatrogenic diseases, those diseases caused by the treatment of the practitioner himself , that has emerged overtime in the history of the medical practice. This negative harmful effects of the treatment modality bears irrefutable testimony to the defective nature of the science, its instruments, protocols , methods of investigation diagnosis and treatment.

Protocols such as single blind studies, double blind studies and randomised studies, while attempting to uphold truth in the name of scientific method, has proven its limitations by the creation of large occurrence of iatrogenic diseases. In this light, this seemingly scientific medical tool requires critical rexamination using a more expanded and accurate worldview of reality and nature. This must include the organic - cosmic ecological worldview of human life form and health. This is the neglected dimension of human healthcare and medicine where the primacy of human consiousness dominates.

In many ways the plethora of iatrogenic diseases created by biomedical science and practice, has been to a significant extent selectively concealed from the lay public by its overwhelming reigning dominance in the healthcare and disease management industry. One can recognise and observe professional autocracy in the biomedical world, its towering global controlling position, created and supported by the giants drug companies, has made it professionally parochial , jealously defensive, indifferent to its weaknes and its details deliberately obscured from the layman's view by the use of cryptic Greco- Latin terminologies in their language of documentation and practice.

Reform needed

Unless reformed, the present biomedical system will continue to suffer gradual degradation largely due to the explosion of iatrogenic diseases associated with the practice of the system. Greater public knowledge of the weakness of the system , its limitations and escalating costs will drive people to search for safer and affordable alternative medicine. If this compromised biomedical system does not have the magnanimity to acknowledge its own weakness, accept its shortcomings, it will suffer the same fate as outmoded systems , which have been relagted into the limbo of obsolescence through the power of truth and the progress of knowledge .

The general public must become aware of iatrogenic diseases. The first systematic study on iatrogenic diseases was conducted by Dr Lucian L Leape, one of the founding members of the National Patient Safety Foundation of the United States. His findings was documented and published in Journal

of the American Medical Association

(Jama) in 1994. In a 1995 report in Jama , it was stated that "over a million patients are injured in US hospitals each year, and approximately 280,000 die annually as a result of these injuries. Therefore , the iatrogenic death rate dwarfs the annual automobile accident mortality rate of 45,000 and accounts for more deaths than all accidents combined."

These alarming figures paint a pathetic picture of modern day medicine, although it shines with a galaxy of medical discoveries, its iatrogenic weakness taints both its past, present and perhaps its future. If left unchecked, its glory will be defiled gradually by suspicion and skepticism from the community of people who have ventured to look at it more closely.

Therefore a conceptual much warranted renovation is long overdue in healthcare and medicine. One can safely say that much of the present inhumane, cold and impersonal qualities of the present healthcare system, is largely the result of depending on a science that is basically antiquated indifferent, less caring and mechanistic in nature. We cannot continue practising and pursuing a scientific yet unfeeling modern medicine, what we need so desperately is a technologically advanced system not tainted by dehumanization or despair but by hopefulness, brightness and joy of life.

It is the earnest cry of the people, to see a genuine reformation in the healthcare system, a system that will not be protectively inward looking and rigidly confined, instead open to new knowledge systems such as natural and integrated medicine and other potentially effective and safe systems, which dances in unison with nature and the cosmic worldview of existence itself.

Prof Dr ANANTHA KRISHNAN is a pharmacist, a senior professor in Natural Medicine and head of Canada-based Alternative Medicine Research Institute's Center for Asia .