What Western Medicine is good at - and not so good at

Western medicine has become very good at:
1.  Dealing with trauma injuries.  The bomb blast at the Boston marathon where hundreds of people were injured, but only three died is a good demonstration of how quickly and effectively we deal with trauma injuries.

2.  Attacking specific pathogens - In the last 100 years we have eliminated many diseases that plagued our species by identifying the pathogen, and figuring out how to kill it.

We became good at these aspects of medicine because a lot of smart people whose primary focus was solving specific problems, figured out how to solve a lot of different problems.  The logical parts of our brain that dominate in our culture are ideally organized to attack these sorts of problems.  Classic linear thinking - break the problem down into individual components and then figure out each component.

Western medicine is not so good at general wellness and health.  In large part this is because our general health depends on maintaining a particular chemical balance in our bodies.  But the problem is much more diffuse and complex than focusing on a specific pathogen, or specific type of physical injury.  The "break it down to small components" approach does not work well because:

1.  Every chemical in our body interacts with or is influenced with many other chemicals.

2.  We are not clones, each of us has a slightly different chemical fingerprint.

Right now most of the smart people with access to the money and tools to make headway on understanding this complex interaction are funded by or employed by drug companies.  Drug companies are making billions of dollars with the current approach that develops new drugs that accomplish specific goals (lowering cholesterol for example) without really understanding how the particular drug will interact with all the other chemicals in the bodies chemical balance.  The current system is working for those companies, even if it isn't working in terms of the making really big strides forward in understanding each individual's chemical characteristics.   

Think of the drug advertisements to which we all are constantly exposed.  Airy feel good visuals and music to get you feeling good about the drug, while in the background some guy drones on about all the potentially really bad side effects.  Do the drug companies have any idea how to figure out who might be affected by these really bad side affects?  No.   Do they care - well certainly not in the sense of doing anything that will impact their short term profits. 

It is my opinion the medical profession goes along with this sorry system because we have granted a medical monopoly to the people with the highly developed linear thinking skills that work so well with trauma injuries and pathogens.  They have created a system that requires years of intensive focused linear thinking to become Doctors.  As a result the people that run the medical monopoly distrust non-linear thinking, they think linear thinking is going to solve all medical problems.  They inadvertently stifle non-linear thinking in the medical profession. 

The next big medical advance needs to be a coherent theory of how our bodies chemical systems develop their individual differences, and what that tells us about how the system interacts.  Once we have that theory, linear thinking will probably unravel all the mysteries eventually.  But it is going to be non-linear thinking that produces the initial theory and the medical profession is currently almost incapable of taking a theory that arises out of something other than their linear comfort zone seriously.