Dr. Richard Smith in his remarkably outspoken blog has rightly said that ‘Medicine needs to feel defeat’. I suggest that it would be more correct to say that ‘Modern medicine needs to feel defeat’. In his blog he has listed some queries ‘for which there are no answers’:

“Why are we using more and more resources to achieve less and less? Have we gone beyond “flat of the curve medicine” to the point where more inputs produces harm rather than benefit? Is our relationship with death all wrong? What should be our aims and priorities? How do we feel about medicine when huge resources may be spent keeping tiny babies alive while millions die for lack of clean water? Have we medicalised too much of life? Is our relationship with patients all wrong, too infantilising? Have we promised too much?”

I prefer to use the term ‘modern medicine’ because the alternative systems of medicine that include mind-body-spirit systems like Ayurveda do not face such questions. They have their priorities right, which is to care for the patient as a whole including his/her spiritual well-being. They emphasize on health of the spirit, which in turn would take care of the health of the mind and the body.

Modern medicine is incapacitated by limiting itself to a biomedical view of health. The fact that health is the outcome of harmony between mind, body and the spirit is ignored. Having understood the facts of physics, chemistry, biology & psychology that pertain to the body and the mind, it theorizes that health can be sustained or regained by making use of these facts.

This state of affairs stems from the fact that modern medicine predominantly uses the logical mind, which is incapable of conceptualizing the spirit. The simple intuition of a child can grasp the spirit. But modern education systematically teaches us to view everything logically to the exclusion of the intuitive mind. Technology makes use of this predilection to logical thinking and commercial interests exploit such technology.

It is no wonder that Health for all seems to be still a distant dream when modern medicine is entrapped within a mindset of its own making. Medical education needs to recognize the philosophy of mind-body-spirit medicine to overcome this limitation.