In our society the way doctors treat patient is very similar to the way mechanics fix a broken car. When your car is broken down, a mechanic opens the hood and connects to a computer or checks by himself. Ouch, problem is found. Then he either fixes the problem or simply replaces the bad one. Since Sir Isaac Newton our living body is simply regarded as a physical and chemical process. The disease is treated as a problem of dysfunctional molecules or proteins. For cancer it is a problem of mutation being a culprit. That is why scientists and doctors have spent billion dollars to pinpoint those pretended ultimate causes.
After forty years and more than $200 billion the results now set in: there is no such pinpoint you can deal with. Someone insists that we need to spend even much more funds and resources to widen the hunting in every patient and every kind of cancers.
It is time to turn around and think a totally different approach. It is time to ask a daunting question: is anything fundamentally wrong in the way we deal with cancer and do the related research and development, and did we rely on too much on analytic thinking meanwhile we have badly ignored a more important part of a effective solution: the holistic approach?
From the very beginning the students were taught how to solve a problem by tearing it apart and get a answer piece by piece. It is widely believed that there is no effective way the holistic thinking can be taught in school. As a result the scientists are thinking generation by generation in a lopsided way, relying on analytic approach and only on analytic approach.
Of course, in the past decades scientific knowledge is accumulated in an accelerated speed, and enormous volume of literatures have been generated by this strategy. The more we accumulate the more we confuse: why all those brightest scientists are failed. The answer may be quite simple: we need a brand new mindset and new approach.
The new approach is to combine the strengths of holistic and analytic methods.
If we don’t have tool to help and learn holistic thinking before, now there are more and more tools just on our finger tips that is ready to serve us. The terabyte scale of information data is calling us to deploy a holistic view to interpret its meaning. The cancer patients dying daily are badly needed we think in a novel way so that we can face and overcome such most difficult challenges.
Indeed, some of human societies on this planet have already applied holistic thinking for several thousand years. In such a society our body is not seen as a physical process, but is considered to constantly interacts with environment in a mutual and dynamic fashion. The medicine developed based on such theory and belief has successfully served the medical need for several thousand years. It is time to use all those tools such as supercomputer and algorithm, as well as large scale screening and molecular methods to invent new treatment regimens for cancer and other diseases.
(This article is the first of a series of “the Brand New Mindset for Cancer” essays. It was published on 8/29/2011.)
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