Sapere aude! Dare to use your own intelligence! This is the battle cry of Enlightenment. Immanuel Kant in 1784
Medical doctors are highly intelligent people with immense abilities to acquire knowledge. Through studies at university, regular reading of medical research and learning from their colleagues, doctors become highly knowledgable. Keeping up to date with new research is a somewhat obsessive-compulsive behaviour among many of them. Although new knowledge does not come with a “best before” date, knowledge that is more than 10 years old is nonetheless often considered to be as outdated as decomposing food. Specialization is therefore the inevitable result, with doctors becoming experts in the application of the intelligence and knowledge of others.
Surprisingly, medical doctors seldom dare to use their own intelligence to develop new hypotheses about the causes of diseases when these causes are still unknown. When they do research, rather than seek new discoveries, they more often apply a “baroque” style of research, which adds intricate detail to basic discoveries.
One example is that numerous medical doctors had for 100 years observed that peptic ulcers were surrounded by bacteria, but no one dared to think that the bacteria could possibly cause peptic ulcers, that is, until Robin Warren dared to think so. When Barry Marshall joined him, they proved that the bacteria Helicobacter pylori actually caused peptic ulcers. However, it was not enough to publish research that proved their discovery – the discovery had to be embraced by the medical eminences as well. Therefore, the medical community needed more than 10 years to acknowledge this discovery and, during that time, their patients waited to be cured of their ulcers. This example illustrates why so-called evidence-based medicine, or EBM, could instead be termed eminence-based medicine.
On the other hand, lay people, who are much less educated and knowledgable than medical doctors, are, in my experience, much more open-minded than medical doctors. Even though knowledge is an invaluable asset, knowledgability much too often seems to be an obstacle to new ideas. Some doctors have such great expertise in a medical speciality and feel so confident that they lack humility and curiosity about major gaps in medical scientific knowledge. Or, in the words of the historian Daniel Boorstin, “The greatest obstacle to knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge.”
Since 2006, I have used my spare time to try to unravel the causes of chronic fatigue syndrome/myalgic encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME) and non-communicable diseases (NCD). I have tried to discuss my hypotheses with medical doctors and specialists, but was prevented from doing so because of their lack of interest and curiosity. My patients, on the other hand, were much more open-minded – as one patient said, “when peptic ulcer can be caused by microbes, I don’t think it is any more strange to think that other diseases might be caused by microbes as well.” Because of the lack of a similar attitude among medical doctors, I worked on my own to collect circumstantial evidence and develop hypotheses. The result of my endeavour was published in December 2014 in the book Parasites of Health: On the Pathophysiology and Mode of Communication of Non-Communicable Diseases. I am now trying to find medical doctors who dare to think that my hypotheses seem reasonable enough to be tested before they are dismissed.
A TED talk by Maheer Sayeed related to this topic: Are you a blind follower or an intelligent thinker?