The biased post

I will start off claiming this post is highly biased. Let me see whether that claim can be sustained by the time I reach the end.

This is an exclusive, and in my opinion an exceptionally harsh, criticism of an Open Page article by one Prof. B M Hegde in The Hindu of October 23, 2011. Let me also, in the interest of full disclosure, reveal that I have sent essays (within the world limit prescribed for articles in this forum) countering this gentleman’s points of view expressed in a series of Open Page articles over time, which I find worse than abhorrent. None of those submissions of mine was published. But, it cannot be the case that I am harbouring deep resentment or is disappointed because of these rejections and therefore directing my frustrations towards the writer. It is my hope that the few readers of this post will be convinced of that.

The article is 1,318 words long and occupies space in the Open Page forum that has a limit of 700 words. Therefore, I suspect it is not an Open Page forum article, and it looks more like an invited piece. Or, of course, there is the possibility that someone has put a gun to the head of the editorial team of The Hindu. The reader of this post may legitimately ask me why I have not taken up the matter with the newspaper. I have, and my stinging comments have fallen on deaf ears. If Prof. Hegde can carry on his rant in the public space, I definitely have the right to counter-rant in my private space.

Now to the article, The way to get man back on his feet. Let me put it as succinctly as possible – there is not a single meaningfully and scientifically sustainable sentence in the whole piece. Prof. Hegde places Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle on the same pedestal as “Newtonian Physics”. This is a judgment call and is ipso facto not scientific. There are enough scientific factoids of antediluvian vintage, which will not be considered scientific in any meaningful sense now. Let me offer a few gems: “…new awareness in science of the atom having been made up of smaller sub-atomic elements.” Someone needs to tell the good professor that the more recent hypotheses are tending towards particles as manifestations of vibrations of strings, in common language. “… atoms emit various strange energies such as X-rays and radioactivity.” He does not clarify what is strange about them; probably because they are not strange anymore, being covered by the postulates of Quantum Electro Dynamics (QED) conceived about 50 years ago. By the way, the author does not even say how to characterize some energies as “strange” while leaving the others to be merely “normal”!

Enough names of scientists are dropped in the piece: Fritz-Albert Popp (biophotons, a theory or concept languishing or dead for over 30-40 years – if it gets resurrected, so far so good for Prof. Hegde); Alexis Carrel (Nobel in 1912, a supporter of eugenics, accused of collaborating with the Nazis; a good source of support for retrograde ideas, I would say); Professor Rustom Roy, perhaps the token Indian (a material scientist, extending a chemistry based analysis and advocacy of homoeopathy); Hans Peter Durr (a physicist of high standing and one whom the author could not connect to health. The author claims that Durr showed that matter and energy are two sides of the same coin. Oh, I thought this was what the celebrated Einsteinian equation showed. Silly me! By the way, time and space are also two sides of the same coin and this is why we have the Space-time continuum.) Albert-Szent Gyorgyi (A Nobel laureate, vintage 1930s, “… came to see cancer as being ultimately an electronic problem at the molecular level” – reductionism clearly defined, and the rant against reductionism (“…our old reductionist model”) takes his name. I cannot understand the ways of Prof. Hegde). I Googled all of the above names.

A pie-in-the-sky concept “energy signature” is introduced as the “new science of man”, just by that name and no further. The author informs us that health is now defined as, “[E]nthusiasm to work and enthusiasm to be compassionate.” That is it. Because, that is enough to claim, without any substantiation, parallels with Ayurveda. Ha, now we come to the ulterior motive, promoting Ayurveda in a pseudo-scientific tract and not with any apparent conviction! The whole approach is higgledy-piggledy, mentioning enough scientific phenomena, none explained and each left hanging.

“The human body is nothing but the human mind in an illusory solid shape.” Does this make sense to your illusory brain, perhaps the seat of the real mind? “All organs have their cells and atoms that have their unique energy signature...” “…health as a state where the cells are vibrating in synch with one another; disease is when they fall out of synch!”, quoting Prof. Popp. “[T]he biggest killer today is Adverse Drug Reaction (ADR).” Not AIDS, not malaria, not malnutrition, not road accidents. Good going, Prof. Hegde!

“It is the invisible forces of electromagnetic energy.” As an aside, are there forces that are visible? “…the right frequencies of electromagnetic energy could be used for healing any cell in any organ under any circumstance.” Unfortunately no doctor of mine had honed in on the “right” frequencies to cure my headache (half the time, from reading Prof. Hegde). “…energy healing [add to aroma therapy and other such esoterica] takes only hours to days!” “…even the scalar energy affect our DNA, RNA and protein synthesis.” Physics tells me that energy is a scalar as it does not have a direction. So, how do we find “vector” energy, the counterpart of “scalar” energy?

“Living organisms must receive and interpret environmental signals … through their antennae in the cell wall.” So, again as an aside, we have Martians living within us! “…ideas of energy channels in the human body are now proving to be highly scientific.” “…any drug we give works only because of the faith the patient has got in the doctor (placebo) and the drug has only side effects.” So, if a treatment failed, as it did for my father-in-law, I must blame the doctor as he did not induce sufficient faith in the patient’s mind. The drug did its job, of course.

The point of quoting extensively from the article is to assert, with sample evidence, that as many as 700 words could have been assembled to compile a valid Open Page article. The next question is, why does The Hindu patronize such idiocy?

After typing out the above nearly 1,100 words, I think I can conclude this piece is not biased; it is as objective as objective can be.

Raghuram Ekambaram