Why Can’t Medicine Cure Disease?*
by
Charlotte Appleton, MD, MBA
Albert Einstein famously quipped, “If I had one hour to save the world, I would spend 55 minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution.”
This book is about the first 55 minutes. Or so I thought.
(*Title subject to change)
Synopsis
We should be able to treat heart disease and cancer as easily as we treat the common cold. However, because we do not understand the nature of disease, that assertion is an impossible fantasy. The only solution is to change the paradigm such that the fantasy becomes a reality.
Why Can’t Medicine Cure Disease? is an intellectual journey of discovering why real healing is currently unattainable, and why humanity clings to beliefs that make an accurate understanding of disease impossible. By understanding the real problems underlying health delivery systems, we can discover a future where today’s fantasy is tomorrow’s reality.
This is a journey into life that draws us through the curious shortcomings of science, theory, and philosophy. It asks and answers provocative questions about why we seem to be fanning the flames of chronic disease, why risk strategies cannot always predict disease in individuals, why healthcare fails and politicians squabble, and why patients feel forgotten and providers burnout. From this emerges a theoretical framework that furnishes fresh intellectual tools, dissolves the conundrum known as the Prevention Paradox, resolves unrecognized perception issues, and reveals that paradigms change the world, not knowledge alone. As barriers to understanding fall away, uncertainty, subjectivity, and complexity spring to life and create opportunities to escape the dismal promises of post-industrial beliefs.
Using logic, creativity and the spirit of scientific inquiry, this work distills a compelling argument that failure to understand disease stems from the beliefs that an objective point of view exists, and experience doesn’t matter. In conclusion, we unearth the intellectual cryptex at the shared root of the healing arts, biology and science. Its configuration not only makes healing impossible, but also makes the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics appear irreconcilable. Tweaking it cracks the door of discovery enough to peek at the Theory of Life unfurling its wings into a Theory of Everything.
It’s time to end the Dark Age of Medicine before it ends us.