Editorial

The incredible progress produced in different fields of science forces us to reflect. Health technology has played a major role on most of the fundamental advances in medicine, in the last 30 years. Scientific advances applied to health have increased the survival of people and have improved the quality of life. New medical technologies, interventions, innovative medical devices, advances in biochemistry, biomedical engineering and medical informatics, and drugs for acute and chronic diseases are being developed and introduced with unprecedented speed, and it is virtually guaranteed that biomedical science and engineering will become even more important in the future [1,2].

But health systems have not been adapted, or organized or reflected about this phenomenon. It is expect high-tech solutions for all problems, and that rapid advances in knowledge are translated as quickly as possible into medical practice. Medicine is one of the few areas of technical innovation, where new products are almost always much more expensive, more sophisticated, more difficult to use and more likely to malfunction. Further, some technological procedures offer reasonable doubts about their efficacy, safety, effectiveness, and they have ethical issues, in addition to deepening the gaps between more and less developed countries [3-5].

There is an epidemic of diagnoses and treatments. The prevalence of disease is growing rapidly in societies with hightech medicine and it is not because of its increased morbidity, which is in fact being reduced. The reason is that they are creating diseases by medicalization of daily life and the bias towards over-diagnoses and over-treatments, as well as the nonindicated use of new drugs [6,7]. So, can science provide a “Theory of everything” [8], one that would truly explain not just the world of insentient matter addressed by physics, but the emotional, mental, and spiritual realms as well? - A theory of everything as a final explanation of the nature of the universe? Is science our sole source of knowledge? [9].

The first that in the twentieth century began to doubt science were the own physicists and mathematicians, so that when a doctor uses all kinds of technology that is completely unknown for him, almost using it with superstition, the pioneers of advances already tend to be more cautious and they have doubts. The central defect of all current medicine comes from the naive philosophical basis of the separation between the soul and the body, from the sincere materialism that tends to seek all diseases in the somatic. But, the disease is the breaking of this balance between the soul and the body [10]. What to do? How should the scientist and the practical physician act to avoid this imbalance? The doctor, in order to improve his ability to use new discoveries and rationalizing clinical decision-making, must learn from the way of working of the Gothic cathedrals builders: they reused the stones of the previous building and introduced them into the foundations of the new one. They did not neglect anything, and so, the previous periods are united with the most recent expression of the building.

The biomedical scientist and practical physician as the builders of the Gothic cathedrals have to learn from the material, the techniques and the history; they have to have sensitivity to nature to constitute a coherent society. They also need to perceive the mysteries of life, using instruments of reflection on the Universe and on oneself that unite reason and intuition. They must achieve a proportion or harmony between the parts and the whole, a "sense of the essential". They have to achieve a type of knowledge so slender, as powerful, and as serene as a Gothic cathedral. The Gothic cathedral represents the union between heaven and earth. The doctor must seek to unite body and mind [11,12].

References

1. Loxterkamp D (2013) What do you expect from a doctor? Six habits for healthier patient encounters. Ann Fam Med 11: 574-576.
2. Turabian JL (2017) Metaphors to think about technological tools and patients care in family medicine. Res Med Eng Sci 2: 4.
3. Cobos LP (2004) Virtue and virtuosity of new technologies in primary care. SEMERGEN 30: 114-119.
4. Kwarteng KB (2000) Ethical considerations for biomedical scientists and engineers: Issues for the rank and file. Crit Rev Biomed Eng 28: 517-521.
5. Norero VC (2000) Medicine and science: An indispensable relationship. Rev Chil Pediatr 71: 2.
6. Welch HG, Schwartz L, Woloshin S (2007) What’s making us sick is an epidemic of diagnoses. The New York Times, USA.
7. Prescrire Editorial Staff (2017) Drugs to avoid. Prescrire Int 26: 108-111.
8. Wilber K (2001) A theory of everything. An integral vision for business, politics, science and spirituality. Shambala, Boston, UK.
9. Trigg R (1993) Rationality and Science. Can science explain everything? Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, UK.
10. Sabato E (1983) Men and gears. Heterodoxia. Alianza Editorial, Madrid, Spain.
11. Turabian JL, Franco B (2016) The family doctors: Images and metaphors of the family doctor to learn family medicine. Nova Publishers, New York, USA.
12. Cassell E (1991) The nature of suffering and the goals of medicine. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK.