How Modern Symptom-Based Medicine Can Make the Sick, Sicker

By Marie Be

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

The advancement of modern science and technology has allowed for ways of studying the incredibly small and the commensurably big. Technical capabilities for research make possibilities endless, but private funding means that our great scientists work in silos, answering to competitive economic interests. Sadly, the system as a whole has been forgotten.

Modern medicine has roots in the Hippocratic, Newtonian and Cartesian school of thought, also referred to as reductionism. Though this way of relating to the world, philosophers and scientists defined the universe as a great machine; a complex system that is nothing but the sum of its parts, an account of which can be reduced to accounts of its individual constituents (1). Likewise, early physicians began to define the human body as a machine, studying it by breaking it down into independent parts, losing touch with the study of the whole.