Disease

In the previous chapter forty  CA were injured and their health estimated. Since injury causes disease, were all of them ill?  Or only a few? How to tell?  Health is a continuum . Some were healthier and other less.  What is then the link between health and disease?

Normal and abnormal

Medicine regards health and disease as complementary. One is either healthy or sick. There is one state of health, and not a continuum Physicians do not know how healthy one is  since they lack a health measure like that described in the previous chapter.  Any change of structure , is regarded as  disease.  This requires  a definition of a normal reference state or non-disease. Any deviation from the normal  is therefore abnormal, or diseased.

There are two ways to define what normal is, . aesthetic,  and  scientific.  Ancient Greek statues, depict normal individuals. Abnormal individuals were generally left out. According to the scientific approach, given a distribution of structure, the mean structure, is normal , and  structures which deviate more than two standard deviations from the mean are abnormal, or sick. Prefixes, like normo-,  hypo-, or hyper- indicate who is normal. Like in blood pressure. Normo-tension  is normal and hypo-tension, and hyper-tension are not.

Uro-genital  diseases

Disease is thus an arbitrary construct unrelated to health. Let's apply the medical reasoning to  our injured CA set. The isolated CA-2 is our normal reference, and we note  its esthetic appeal. Being experienced CA-urologists we note also the penis changes in  four CA. Each  such aberration (disease)  deserves a medical name. The numbers on top of the CA are their injury times, and the numbers in brackets, are their health.  Two CA marked by  t =9, and  t =33, are similar to the normal CA but healthier.

This example illustrates, that there is no correlation between CA health and what CA-urologists  define as disease. Which is  also the main stumbling block of medicine. The Polish-Israeli philosopher Ludwick Fleck  concluded:  that  diseases do not exist in nature but are constructed by physicians for didactic reasons. "It is easier to find one's way in a forest than in botany. It is easier to cure a patient than really to know what his disease is".

'The Normal and Pathological' 

Is an important treatise  by the French philosopher Georges Canguilhem. Normal and Pathological are arbitrary definitions by physicians, which ought to be avoided. There is a continuum of structural changes, neither of which may be regarded as abnormal. Our organism operates amidst a host of challenges,  or injuries, not  all of them may  cause  disease. Yet all initiate a creative response (solution) by WOB. In order to find out which change is a diseases, we have to ask the patient how he feels. If he feels 'dis-eased' he is ill and requires treatment. After all this is how the term disease was conceived.  Unfortunately this important wisdom is ignored by medicine which treats structure and ignores health.

Set up
injuryrange=1; injurytime = *; effect[1,2, 1.6, sa[[1]]], effect[2,1, 1.9, sa[[2]]]


Further reading:

Medicine of Homo Faber
How to treat Cancer?

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