Many cultures have had 'medicine men' who claim to know what disease is and how it works. Modern medicine has been spectacularly successful. But can we really claim to now understand disease and health?
Studies published in the British Medical Journal show over half of all diagnoses are wrong, while 350 million people each year develop a disease medical professionals are unable to understand. Even when we do get a diagnosis, the true nature of disease, and how to treat it, is often fundamentally unknown. 1 in 4 symptoms go unexplained, every person responds to every disease differently, and scientists from the University of Oxford have admitted that even with drugs we take regularly, like paracetamol, we "still don’t really know how they work".
Should we reject the idea that we can ever really know what is wrong with us? Should we find new ways of understanding illness that are more holistic and include things like lifestyle, mental and spiritual health? Or must we double down on modern medicine, even if we're not entirely sure how it works?