Your Body Knows

 

But then…   

Man the Unknown is a classic written by a leading French surgeon and biologist in 1935 , highlighting the aspect of how little we really know about the human body.

Science has made huge progress since then but the question remains .. “Do we really know enough about the human body to lay down  binding  rules for the whole world.

Your Body Already Knows is a written in 2025 by a successful  practitioner  of Ayurveda from US. Yes, to be taken seriously one has to speak from Texas rather than Tenkasi.

Recently , the Chief Scientist of Zoho Corporation was in  controversy over his skepticism of a few vaccines like HPV among others . He also suggested that the rise in autism in the United States had something to do with the increase in Vaccine shots administered to infants in US. As always , the critics , who are anything but scientists cried “Anti- Science” , “Science illiterate” and of course “Sanghi at heart”

Since when questioning has become Anti Science ? Science is all about forming a hypothesis , then questioning that hypothesis  and proceeding to prove it one way or the other through experiments.

One Tweet on this issue   is definitely worth pondering over ….

…..To understand why medicine is so complex, let’s make a crude simplifying assumption that there are only 100 biomarkers that are important (in reality there are vastly more). Let’s also crudely assume each marker is allowed only two values. That gives us 2^100 possibilities, which is about 10^30. That is vastly more than humans that ever lived. And this is with the extremely over-simplified model. We face a practical infinity of possibilities. In reality, no two patients are ever really alike. No statistical model can give you very high confidence on how to treat. That is why AI can never treat patients, because human doctors exercise something called “clinical judgment”. That judgment is what enables a doctor to tell us “this is not a serious issue, get good sleep” vs “this definitely needs deeper investigation”. That judgment is hard. Often they cannot even explain why they arrived at this but great doctors have that intuition. The entire Big Medicine is about systematically dismantling clinical judgment and convert doctors to mere “protocol pushers”. Great doctors resist this. 

Who is this “Big Medicine”..  It’s the pharma industry and the insurance industry. Scientists and doctors (yes ,they are different entities, doctors are not scientists and scientists are not doctors and most critics who use science as a shield or neither scientists nor doctors ) are bypassed.

It’s against this backdrop that it makes sense to listen to your body as your body knows something that that doctors, scientists and the Big pharma don’t know.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One thought on “Your Body Knows”

  1. Thanks Murali, whatever be the attractions of non human intelligence, here is a nice one that you would already know. A story about effort vs. skill – a good reminder that in many areas of work/life time and outcome aren’t always aligned; especially in the design & technology space…

    A giant ship’s engine failed. The ship’s owners tried one ‘professional’ after another but none of them could figure out how to fix the broken engine.

    Then they brought in a man who had been fixing ships since he was young.
    He carried a large bag of tools with him and when he arrived immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom.

    Two of the ship’s owners were there watching this man, hoping he would know what to do. After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something. Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He carefully put his hammer away and the engine was fixed!!!

    A week later, the owners received an invoice from the old man for $10,000.

    What?! the owners exclaimed. “He hardly did anything..!!!”.

    So they wrote to the man; “Please send us an itemised invoice.”

    The man sent an invoice that read:

    Tapping with a hammer………………….. $2.00

    Knowing where to tap…………………….. $9,998.00

    Effort is important but experience and knowing where to direct that effort makes all the difference.

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