The old way of thinking   -  have disease – take pill – kill something

Disease - target – kill comes about from the invention of penicillin. Doctors were able to identify what is bad in your body and then get rid of it.  Since then medicine has been focused on the lock and key thought process of addressing disease.  Bacteria expresses a protein and the antibiotic administered latches onto this and turns it off, much like turning off the ignition in a car. How seductive in the media community this was at the time – it’s easier to design a molecule that can lodge itself into a protein and shut it off, and much harder to create a molecule that can lodge into a molecule and turn on the parts that are not working correctly.  To put this in our terms as therapists, putting a Band-Aid on the symptoms and not addressing the root cause.  Treating the tendonitis and not the biomechanical default that is at the root of the restriction of the mobility.  

This has been the direction of medicine for past 100 years – we have made better and better Band-Aids for years. But not for only infectious diseases, but for chronic diseases such as Diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease.

Of all the transactions in the human body’s cellular universe, what number of reactions can be targeted by the ENTIRE pharmacopeia known to man today?  .025% of all chemical reaction are targetable by the lock and key method of treatment.  To put that number into perspective – think of a person sitting a small shed in the middle of a field in the middle of the United States with one telephone pole and tinkering with 10-15 telephone lines to connect and communicate with the entire country at once.

So what do we do? What if we re-organize this approach. Instead of have disease – take pill – kill something or Disease - target – kill. Instead of pneumonia – bacteria – antibiotic we think of the environment the organism lives in, the cellular/physiological environment the person inhabits, what are the connections between cells that sustain normal physiological interactions in life.

Regenerative medicine, nutritional medicine, preventative medicine fall into these areas of a ground up philosophy of health. A model of creating health from the ground up. In other words, not only targeting the tumor or cancer but targeting the surrounding environment which either foster growth for the tumor or provides healthy and sustainable environment for the cancer cells to become healthy again. Mina Bissel June 2012 TED talk (https://www.ted.com/talks/mina_bissell_experiments_that_point_to_a_new_understanding_of_cancer)
Seed and soil thought process – think of the cancer or disease as the seed and the soil as the environment. For years medicine has treated the or tried to kill the seed, it’s not time to tend to the soil. The most successful therapies for cancer and other diseases are immune therapies. Therapies in which you activate the immune system against the foreign cells. Immune therapies are soil therapies. They are making the environment and microenvironment less hospitable for the cancer or diseased cells to thrive within.

What’s at stake – medicine? Probably not. What is at stake is changing the metaphor in which it’s used.  Instead of creating a drug to kill the great chronic diseases of our time like diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, kidney failure, osteoporosis. Maybe we need to change the metaphor to growing something. This is the key. To reframing out thought process about medicine. Could your medicine be a cell and not a pill? Could your medicine be an environment? How could we allow the micro environment to reassert itself to create a better soil for our internal environment to heal itself.

The invention of Penicillin created such a large perceptual shift at the time that it brought with it the virtues of a ‘brighter medical future’.  It distorted the way we have thought about medicine for the last 100 years. It is time for a new perceptual shift. We need new models to carry us forward in to the future.

Change the environment and you can change the behavior of the dis-ease.