Do We Even Know the Difference Between a Genius and an Insane Person?
We live in a culture that has a name for every ailment, but a cure for none.
We introduced Volume 1 of this book series (Islam et al., 2015) with the following remark.
A professor of medicine in Canada was asked if there is any cure in modern era of any contemporary disease. After some reflection, he named penicillin as the only medicine that cures a disease. “Why then do physicians routinely ask if a patient has ever taken penicillin in his lifetime?”, he was asked. This time the professor was quick in replying, “Oh, that’s because today’s penicillin is synthetic (artificial)”. Of course, that poses the pointed question of whether there is any medicine today that is not artificial.” The same question was posed five years later, this time to an American professor of medicine. He couldn’t come up with any medicine. When the name penicillin was mentioned to him, he quipped, “Oh, penicillin is the proof that modern era has no medicine that cures; it only delays the symptoms” (p.1). There is a reason that the modern era has no cure for any ailment. It’s because we do not know the cause of any disease. Pragmatism rules supreme as the indisputable dogma that governs our way of thinking, and that pragmatism tells us whatever sells is the truth. So, there is no incentive to finding the cause of a disease. After all, heaven forbid, that might actually cut our drug profit. Of course, often we know the presence of bacteria gives one a certain ailment. But how is a human body overcome with such bacteria, defying all the immune mechanism we have in place? More importantly, how does an ailment persist even after the stimulus has been vanquished? While a cure is settled for a ‘management regimen’, who cares to find the cause when life-long management is far more lucrative?
We live in a culture that has a name for every ailment, but a cure for none.
We introduced Volume 1 of this book series (Islam et al., 2015) with the following remark.
A professor of medicine in Canada was asked if there is any cure in modern era of any contemporary disease. After some reflection, he named penicillin as the only medicine that cures a disease. “Why then do physicians routinely ask if a patient has ever taken penicillin in his lifetime?”, he was asked. This time the professor was quick in replying, “Oh, that’s because today’s penicillin is synthetic (artificial)”. Of course, that poses the pointed question of whether there is any medicine today that is not artificial.” The same question was posed five years later, this time to an American professor of medicine. He couldn’t come up with any medicine. When the name penicillin was mentioned to him, he quipped, “Oh, penicillin is the proof that modern era has no medicine that cures; it only delays the symptoms” (p.1). There is a reason that the modern era has no cure for any ailment. It’s because we do not know the cause of any disease. Pragmatism rules supreme as the indisputable dogma that governs our way of thinking, and that pragmatism tells us whatever sells is the truth. So, there is no incentive to finding the cause of a disease. After all, heaven forbid, that might actually cut our drug profit. Of course, often we know the presence of bacteria gives one a certain ailment. But how is a human body overcome with such bacteria, defying all the immune mechanism we have in place? More importantly, how does an ailment persist even after the stimulus has been vanquished? While a cure is settled for a ‘management regimen’, who cares to find the cause when life-long management is far more lucrative?
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