About FCT: What’s in a Design?

First, a couple of preliminaries:

On 6-9 October, there is a seminar in Field Control Therapy (FCT) taking place in NY, USA – details here. We will be there, and recommend it also to anyone with an interest in FCT, autism, ADHD, Lyme Disease or bioresonance testing – or health in general.

Savely Yurkovsky, M.D., creator of FCT, who is teaching the seminar, kindly contributed a blog for us earlier this week on the subject of autism, the subject of this seminar and also of his upcoming book. If you haven’t already, read his autism blog here. It’s a free article in which he shares many profound insights about autism and medicine in general. Next week, he will be following it up with a blog on complexity and medicine.

For subscribers – don’t forget also to add Dr Yurkovsky’s blog email address to your “Contacts” list in your email account alongside ours, to ensure you receive his future blogs: dryurkovsky@systemsrevolution.com.

Now, my main topic of today – What’s in a design?

An idea struck me as I was cycling my bike. . . and there on the roadside yesterday I planned a new blog in which I’m going to link bicycles, engineers, exercise and medicine!

For a while now, I’ve been pondering how best to write an introduction to FCT for this webpage. For now, I’ve decided instead to write first about why I and others I know like it. After all, by way of parallel, there are probably even more books out there about why people loved the Beatles, than those about their music. So this seems as good a starting place as any! At the same time, I’ll be discussing why FCT is so popular with engineers; and I’ll be taking a brief look at the role of exercise in a healthy lifestyle – and the main reason many people don’t get enough: cars. . . I’ll also be analyzing some of the primary shortcomings of conventional medicine and lab testing with examples. So let’s aim for several birds with one stone. . .

The basic theme I have in mind is one of design. I’m a person who basically respects things which are well-made. I have always been like this.

When I see someone doing something with great skill, or something which has been designed impeccably, it invites my fascination and admiration. This is why I like to seek out and support creativity and even genius, in various fields. When I encounter it, it becomes a centre of gravity in my life, I love it so much.

And this is one of the primary reasons why, when I years ago met Savely Yurkovsky, M.D., I felt drawn to his work and increasingly wanted to learn more about it, and eventually to learn how to practise and teach it.

As I grew acquainted with his clinical work, I saw a man of great skill, and found occasions to observe this repeatedly in action. The way he responded to each unique clinical situation would frequently surprise and amaze me, and the more I learned, the more I saw the underlying reasons too – a sound methodology driving it.

Engineers and FCT

Now, looking back, I can think of an inordinate number of engineers who have taken up the study of FCT. I have often wondered why. I have studied many other alternative therapies and medical disciplines, but nowhere else have I seen such a clear-cut percentage of engineers changing careers in order to take up FCT!

I felt sure there must be a reason. I suspect, again, it has to do with the same thing that attracted me to FCT – its design.

It’s all a question of design. Each medical modality has its methods, which depend on its overall design – its grand model of health and disease, and the concepts which drive its diagnostics and therapeutics.

If a carpenter, for example, wants to build a rocking chair, the overall design will be the important starting place, before he starts plotting the positions and angles of individual screws.

No matter how many times this is said, it seems that few people really take this notion on board: that concepts are more important in medicine than details. . . that’s something it took me years to learn myself – from Dr Yurkovsky – but I believe I’ve really “digested” this basic truth. Once you’ve taken on board this notion, it changes a lot of things in your life.

Designers have to grapple with both concepts and details, in order to complete a design. But it is imperative that sound concepts drive the details, and NOT vice versa.

It’s no use perfecting a nice bridge only to find that it doesn’t fit the river! Starting with sound concepts means – taking a look at the whole river and its two shores, and “conceiving” of an overall bridge design to fit it, BEFORE getting down to the nitty-gritty process of nuts, bolts and measurements.

Landscape overview first – toolkit second.

And for anyone learning FCT, too, this may be a motto worth bearing in mind as you take up your studies.

In order to get a thorough view of that river and its shores, while planning the bridge, it will not be sufficient to know about architecture. It will be necessary also to understand something about geography, geology, climate science, materials science, physics, chemistry, population demographics and no doubt other areas of knowledge too which pertain to bridge-building. Let’s call this, after the phrase Dr Yurkovsky coined in his recent article about autism, “Multi Level Scientific Knowledge”. The trouble is, bridge planners know how to do this, and could not get away with not doing it, as they cannot afford to make mistakes in their bridge design – it wouldn’t do for cars to fall into the river while trying to cross the bridge; but in medicine, not only is it not done, but furthermore, this results in constant failures in the treatment of chronic diseases, which everyone gets “used to” living with, to the point that we accept a medical system that is failing us due to poor design and planning, and we think this is “normal”.

We think it is normal that millions of people develop incurable cancers, neurological diseases or autoimmune illnesses. No one thinks to hold doctors accountable for doing a proper design job before “building the bridge” of any treatment plan. The whole medical system fails to do so, because instead of consulting Multi Level Scientific Knowledge, narrow specialized knowledge is the order of the day. To take four primary examples, most medical specialists have had no training in the following areas, yet such disciplines should be required study for them if we are ever to get well-designed “bridges” out of them:

• The toxicology of heavy metals
• The bio-physics of micro-currents
• General Systems Theory
• Decision science

FCT Design

Unlike many alternative therapies, FCT is one which would appeal to engineers because it bases itself on a process of logic and precision, involves clinical decisions based on step-by-step detective work, and integrates various pertinent sciences that are normally “left out of the equation” in most forms of conventional and alternative medicine – in their efforts to be more specialized and to follow a given “groove” of thought.

In FCT, instead of sticking to a single dog-tired groove of thought, there is a more embracing model combined with a logical method of sorting through it all.

This also makes it complex to introduce FCT, when people ask, “What is it?”

It embraces so much. It isn’t a narrow, specialized “groove”, nor a “technique” of some sort. So perhaps the single most accurate thing we can say about FCT, from the outset, is that it’s a system of medicine which has been designed skilfully.

A great deal of thought, time, energy and evolution has been fed into that skilful design, and it takes time to become acquainted with all its multi-disciplinary facets.

You can take my word for this – as I’m a self-confessed design-aholic, as explained above! Sometimes I seek out the design of things I like, and then I lock myself up with it, like a mole in his hole, scrutinizing everything until I’m satisfied I’ve got to the bottom of things. If the FCT design had not passed the highest test of scrutiny – my own expectations – then I would never have devoted years of my life to pursuing it! Instead, as I dug deeper into the subject of FCT, at each new turn, with every new dig deeper into the soil, I found myself not less but more impressed with newly discovered facets of the design.

And perhaps in some ways, I fit this “engineer-FCT”-type pattern too. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never studied engineering. However, maths and the various sciences came easily to me in my studies at school, and I enjoyed that feeling of precision and logic – to the point that at one time, I flirted with the idea of becoming a mathematician! (Strange to think of it now! I’m happy I didn’t go down that path, though, as I feel that what I’m doing is more useful to society. Instead, all I do now in that regard is indulge my love of logic puzzle books in the evening sometimes to relax after work). I was also at home with non-scientific subjects, and particularly those involving creativity. In the end, I studied mainly languages and literature, with some maths added on, then I taught English, and years later I switched careers when I went back to the drawing board to study naturopathic medicine.

I should hasten to add, too, that although I’ve seen many engineers – and scientifically-minded people – taking up FCT eagerly, because of its logic and design, on the other hand this doesn’t mean it is exclusive to this type of person. In case you, for example, are not an engineer, and don’t have that type of mind, don’t let this put you off the idea of studying FCT. As a multi-disciplinary system, and with a thorough training programme, it has been equally mastered and enjoyed by people with many different types of mind and background.

What is FCT?

I am commonly asked the question, “What is FCT?”

I will give a controversial answer to it that had never occurred to me before today – beautifully simple and to the point, and hitting home all the points I’ve raised above.

In a nutshell, FCT is medicine.

It is what medicine should be, should always have been and aspires to be. It is what medicine is when medicine is really medicine.

Likewise, everything that is medicine, is FCT. If you wrote in a list all of the characteristics that medicine should have, you have just written a list of what FCT is and what FCT incorporates.

Not that FCT is a closed book; it is a platform for the incorporation, sorting and utilization of all pertinent and future medical knowledge – i.e., it is a discipline which, by definition, seeks to be constantly evolving as science evolves, rather than remaining stuck in a groove.

If there is some form of truly pertinent medical or even non-medical knowledge or expertise which you feel deserves a place in medicine, and if you are right, then the likelihood is either that it already enriches FCT or otherwise that you can apply the FCT model to find out where it can be incorporated in the future for the benefit of patients.

In contrast, there are many so-called forms of medicine which don’t quite make the grade, based on my bridge metaphor above. Let’s say that before you call someone a “bridge designer”, you want to know that he has actually done all it takes to design bridges that can actually be built, which actually function, which last and which are not faulty. If he has failed in any of these areas, you will never get a proper bridge out of him, and logically it would then be incorrect to call him a “bridge designer”.

If even one in every thousand vehicles plunged into the sea, killing all those aboard, due to faults in the bridge design, it would not be acceptable – the bridge would be shut down, and the designer would be out of a job. Yet here is a selected list of just a few diseases which are publically listed as “incurable”, representing the casualties falling off modern medicine’s bridge, and these are not one in every thousand diseases but rather, this reads like a shortlist of most of the common (and some rarer) diseases of our times – leading to me ask why the medical bridge designer in this case still gets to keep his job, while no one raises questions of design: autism; Alzheimer’s disease; dementia; ALS; MS; many cancers; asthma; AIDS; diabetes I & II; CFIDS; lupus; Crohn’s disease; infertility; psoriasis; tinnitus; herpes simplex; measles; the common cold; influenza; CJD; Ebola; cystic fibrosis; ADHD; bipolar disorder; schizophrenia. And those are just the most obviously “incurable”. Not really a very impressive C.V. – this is not a bridge designer any employer would re-hire.

And so, aspiring to practise medicine is not the same as actually doing it. The latter, like building a bridge, requires the integration of Multi Level Scientific Knowledge, which is simply not done yet in the current state of both conventional and alternative medicine – at least not as far as chronic diseases are concerned, and in my opinion the medicine that is unable to cure chronic diseases is not really a medicine at all, but a juvenile aspirant of it, a shadow of what it could and should be.

I know this may sound like a radical proposition, but if not for having encountered FCT, I would, based on the above logic, have to conclude that medicine does not actually yet exist in the world. Aspiring systems of medicine, like aspiring bridge designers, yes. Medicine, no. If there are no bridges, then there’s no medicine. Not yet.

I am not putting FCT on a pedestal above any other therapies. Far from it. FCT incorporates many other therapies and methods within it, credits them, utilizes them where relevant, and does not shun or look down on them at all. The point is not about superiority. The point is about what actually constitutes medicine. Medicine does not constitute one therapy or another, one method or another. It constitutes integrating Multi Level Scientific Knowledge to build one’s “bridges”.

Can you name one other therapeutic platform which emphasizes the integration into medicine of all of the following disciplines as important? (and this is only a sample): toxicology, immuno-toxicology, decision science, systems science, general and quantum physics, the materials science of water, the bio-physics of human organs and tissues, biological dentistry, environmental medicine, bio-resonance, the science of information fields, laws of complexity. You won’t be able to name another, because this integration of Multi Level Scientific Knowledge is the unique gift that FCT has brought to the table, alongside (as a part of this) the disciplines which are required to sort through all this knowledge and integrate it intelligently – in other words, Living Systems Medicine, based on general systems theory, which, as the “apricot pit” of FCT, guides the process of integration.

And in so doing, medicine has become possible for the first time, because, as I described above, bridges cannot be built until all the pre-requisite planning and design has first been done! And here I’m not satisfying myself with just occasional foot-bridges (which we could use, perhaps, as a metaphor for emergency medicine and the successful treatment of acute ailments, where conventional medicine has excelled – an extremely useful and important area, but at the same time, a matter of footbridges rather than grand bridges crossing large rivers). If that is all you have been able to build with success, I don’t want to credit you with the title of bridge designer. It will take more than that to impress me.

So, therefore, FCT is medicine, and medicine is FCT, and I can’t think of any better definition right now.

Quit Flying Motorcycles!

My theme today also echoes one which Dr Yurkovsky has used in his teaching, to illustrate a parallel point. He has various times observed that it is more important to have a sound fundamental design, than perfection.

So for example, if you want to fly and you have an aeroplane, it means you are starting with an object which has the correct fundamental design – i.e., it has been designed to successfully fly long distances. Hence, even if not every item on the plane has been perfected – even it has errors of details which have yet to be ironed out – the bottom line is that you’re on the right track with your design: you are using a “flying machine” for what it is intended – flying.

In contrast, he gives the example of someone using a motorcycle to do a dramatic turn in the air – making the appearance of being able to fly, but only momentarily. His point is that if you wanted to fly any distance, you would not choose to do it in a motorcycle, however sexy it looked, and however perfectly finished it was in all the details: it is just not designed for flying.

You can even drape nice-looking balloons all over your motorcycle, and still it will remain the wrong design for flying! (This, sad to say, is what many medical seminars seem to consist of).

Yet most forms of both conventional and alternative medicine are, in his observation, like that “flying motorcycle” – and most “improvements” in medicine are like adjustments to the flying motorcycle to try and keep it airborne for a few seconds longer each time.

In other words, let’s face it – modern medicine as a whole has degenerated into a round of attempted compensations for the gaping hole at its centre – the fact the Emperor is not fully clothed. To his credit, he is not naked. But to say he is fully clothed would be a gross exaggeration.

The Emperor without all his Clothes = The Medicine which fails to focus on Information Fields

This does not mean that everything in modern medicine is ill-conceived; there is much that is good, and which we must continue to utilize.

Nonetheless, when the basic design of the model is not adapted to the medium at hand (i.e., when a vehicle designed for the ground is being used in the air), the successes will be sporadic and will constitute the exceptions rather than the rule. The basic design will be working against overall success. It would be like an empire with a flawed political and legal system, but within which there are, nonetheless, good people trying to live good lives in spite of the flawed system. It does not make the work of those good people bad. But it does mean that they could do much better work if they lived in a different empire with an improved system.

Moving on to specifics, why is it that modern medicine is like a ground-vehicle attempting to move in the air?

Well first of all, we have an approach based primarily on biochemistry, being used to address an organism (the human body) which functions primarily on information fields, and where biochemistry is a matter of secondary concern. The prevailing focus on biochemistry is like saying, “Yes, there are particles in the air, such as smoke, rain, leaves, dust, insects, and so forth. So in order to fly through the air, we must understand these things and focus on them.” Yet this ignores the fact that although these things can all be found in the air, they are not the primary consistency of the air, not its primary characteristics. Likewise, information fields have a primary medical value in both diagnosis and therapy, and since modern medicine almost totally skips over this, it remains like trying to fly though the air with a vehicle designed for the ground.

One cannot ignore the non-visible parts of the air just because one prefers to deal with the “solid-looking” parts. In the true scientific approach, surely we have a duty to humble ourselves to “what is”, rather than trying to make it suit our convenience? Science should follow where nature leads, however uncomfortable for us. . . Yet I feel modern medicine is still standing at the gate in this respect, and has yet to walk down that true scientific path.

But there are other reasons too.

Fragmented Medicine vs. Living Systems Medicine

Another relates to Living Systems Medicine, which is based on systems science, and forms the basis of FCT.

Modern medicine proceeds along traditional scientific methods that lead to reducing variables to focus on in isolation – in other words, it bases its practice largely on fragmented findings, and doctors base their decisions primarily on the numbers game of charting parameters and variables via what the computer displays as the “normal ranges” of those values.

Medicine has in this way degenerated to becoming a bit like a game of bingo – at least a significant part of the time.

Harsh as this may sound, I’ve seen it in action myself – including via a number of recent cases which are fresh in my mind, and are in some ways fuelling me to write this as an exposé. This is not a story about bad people, but about decent people who are doing their best in spite of a flawed system, and therefore end up failing some of their patients.

Medical Bingo

I’ve seen conventional doctors who, after ten years of training, can end up falling into the rut of this “numbers game” in spite of themselves, so they can no longer see the forest for the trees. Let’s look at a few small examples, just to illustrate the point and demonstrate that I’m not inventing stories.

In one case, I saw a doctor fail to spot a finding which was 93% diagnostic of a rare endocrine disease called Cushing’s Syndrome, and the only reason he missed it was that the lab did not possess a listed “normal range” for that value, hence it had not been marked in bold (values in bold = abnormal, for the doctor’s attention), even though it was of pivotal interest to the case presentation. So it had entirely escaped his attention while he skimmed the page looking for the “bits in bold” (which is why I call it a numbers game!)

I had to contact him about the error, though, after looking it up myself in a journal of endocrinology – because the case presentation had led me to actually “think about” the endocrine values rather than skim over them mindlessly. But why did I need to do his job for him? In my view, it was because he had had the true understanding and practice of medicine beaten out of him by the daily routine of playing “medical bingo” with his patients’ “normal ranges”.

You might suggest that this was just incompetence, or a simple mistake – not indicative of a wider problem in medicine. Yet I disagree. Surely here we’re looking at design issues? I felt it was symptomatic of the general failing – which was that he was not applying a systems analysis to numbers, or to the patient, but instead just reading them like a numbers game. It bothers me, because in my view a good doctor should not turn his or her patients’ lives and health into a superficial numbers game – yet that is now the “standard of practice”.

Let’s be frank about what this means – why beat about the bush? Nowadays, if a patient reports to a doctor with various unexplained symptoms, the average doctor concludes there is “nothing wrong” so long as the “medical bingo” says so.  No matter that existing lab tests are not all-powerful to find out everything there is to know about the body – even if doctors often appear to behave as if they are.

All possible lab tests currently available are probably capable of picking up less than 1% of the medically relevant information that it would be good to know about what’s happening in a patient’s body if only we knew how. This is because the human body is a complex living system, and our diagnostic capabilities are very narrow. In other words, lab testing is like studying a deep ocean by fishing on the shore. At times you will pick up valuable indicators of what lives in the ocean, when you catch a fish. But more times than not, your rod will fail to give a representative picture of the full extent of life in that ocean. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it (lab testing, I mean). It just means we shouldn’t put all our eggs in that basket or treat it as the decisive factor.

Elephant Logic

This exposes the fundamental sophistry, or in other words, faulty logic, underlying much of modern medical practice – which in my view can be summarized (metaphorically) as follows:

1. I know that elephants can hurt people.

2. Here is a patient who says an animal has hurt her.

3. I see no signs or evidence of any elephant involvement.

4. Therefore the patient has not been hurt by an animal.

5. The bruises are therefore of no concern.

“Goodbye, Mrs Jones. There’s nothing to worry about. Did you say Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? No, there is nothing wrong with you, all of your lab tests came back normal.”

I choose the example of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS), here, because it is a classic example – and haven’t we all, as practitioners, heard exactly this “tale of woe” in relation to CFS patients whose “normal” lab tests meant to their doctors that “nothing was wrong”?

(This reminds me of a novel that was called, “Oranges are Not the Only Fruit” – except here, we’d have to write a new novel by the title, “Elephants are Not the Only Animal!”)

I also don’t believe that medicine has always been like this, but suspect this is a trend that has been on the rise as medicine has become increasingly bureaucratized and computerized, marginalizing the human element, and placing numbers and technology on a pedestal where the ridiculous “elephant logic” listed above can reign unchecked.

Also, I should definitely add that in spite of examples such as these, as alternative healthcare practitioners we continue to work closely with conventional doctors in a mutually fruitful and positive relationship. Speaking for myself and my colleagues, we are always on friendly terms and happy to work together, and without any doubt conventional medicine enriches the practice of FCT enormously.

So what I am describing here is not any sort of antagonism. On the contrary, there is an underlying frustration about the misapplied potential, because so much more could be achieved if, well, if the grey matter were exercised more diligently by all concerned. Sometimes my attitude towards conventional medicine is a bit like the one you might have towards a delinquent cousin who has great knowledge and potential to help the family business, but spends too much time at the casino. . . !

Misuse of tools doesn’t make the tools bad. I want to be clear about the message I’m putting out here. Conventional medicine has many useful tools to contribute. The underlying problem relates to the design of the system or model within which they are used or interpreted, especially when “elephant logic” is applied. . .

As these cases show, there is often a difference in perspective, yet in his FCT approach Dr Yurkovsky has shown us a model to reconcile these differences and potentially integrate the various practices into a new unified way of practising medicine for the future of our healthcare system. I long for the day.

Example of an Interesting Interpretation of the WBC Value

To give another example, Dr Yurkovsky recently asked a patient with symptoms of chronic infection to attend her local doctor to request a blood count in order to assess her white blood cells (WBCs), as well as a chemistry profile as he wanted to check her kidney function. After completing the assessment, the otherwise friendly and helpful local doctor declared in a letter (and this was the full extent of the letter, besides hello and goodbye), “Your results are entirely satisfactory.”

The basis for this rather odd statement (odd because it was sent to a chronic invalid) was – you guessed it – Medical Bingo. Yep, her results fell within the “normal ranges”!

But what interested me greatly was Dr Yurkovsky’s very different (and in my view more medically intelligent and insightful) interpretation of the same figures.

I believe this example is not only interesting for the general public, as an example of how FCT works, but is also educational for experienced FCT practitioners.

He agreed that the chemistry profile didn’t show up anything of concern taking place in the kidneys. As far as it went, this was good news. Of course, this wasn’t confirmatory of optimal kidney function, either. Many patients, like this one, do have kidney function which is significantly sub-par, but not at the level of kidney disease which would show up in a conventional chemistry profile.

He noticed that her WBC count fell near the bottom end of the “normal range”, whereas in a patient with symptoms of chronic infection, he observed, the WBC count ought to be high. It made perfect sense to me as he went through his train of logic.

And there was more. The fact it wasn’t high explained why the infection was chronic and had not been overcome. After all, if the immune system had been capable of mounting a stronger response (including more WBCs available on the attack), then the infection might not be lingering. So the main question in his mind was, “Why isn’t the WBC value higher than this?”

This, incidentally, is a classic example of a systems analysis, because the significance does not lie in the relation of the WBC value to the lab’s stated “normal range”, but instead, in relating it to what else is going on in the body, i.e., placing it in context.

He then went further and considered this finding to be therefore positively diagnostic of a bone marrow problem, since if the bone marrow were functioning optimally, it would have responded to the infectious situation by manufacturing more WBCs – yet it hadn’t. So he determined on this basis that toxicity in her bone marrow, suppressing blood cell production, was most likely the true root reason for the chronic infection.

He proceeded to analyze her bone marrow for toxins using bioresonance testing, and treat those he found there (which was primarily mercury), using a combined bone marrow and mercury treatment, after which she improved dramatically.

FCT – the Thinking Doctor’s Medicine

As I hope the above examples demonstrate, FCT is about aspiring to practise medicine as it should be, and should always have been – call it the “thinking man’s medicine”, if you like!

It is not that modern medicine can be replaced with FCT. Nor is there any conflict in tools. Rather, FCT sets an example for what modern medicine should evolve into, and aspire to, and FCT seeks to incorporate (among much else) the methods of modern medicine, e.g. as we saw above where a blood count (a standard medical test used in orthodox medicine) was being used in FCT but with a different, more sophisticated method of interpretation.

In the last example, we can see links being drawn between a number of different variables – the blood, the bone marrow, bioaccumulation of toxicity, symptoms of chronic infection, immune capacity. . . and through piecing together these factors, even based on limited lab testing, many intelligent and relevant deductions can be made, based on a systems analysis, which hold a high likelihood of helping the patient.

And indeed, the patient was helped.

How much better this was than a chronically ill individual receiving a meaningless letter from a doctor stating, “Your results are entirely satisfactory”. Satisfactory to whom? Surely only to bingo enthusiasts. . . !

Given the patient’s recovery following a systems analysis and Living Systems Medicine treatment, is it any wonder that thinking back to the wording of that doctor’s letter frustrates me? Would you feel any different in my shoes?

In fragmented medicine, which is the “state of the art” in orthodox modern medicine, such links are rarely made, as instead doctors are taught to scan pages looking for highlighted numbers that are “outside of normal levels”. And those, in essence, are the casino rules.

And even when values do fall outside the normal ranges, links may not be made, as in the next example. Here we are moving from one embarrassing scenario to another, but all in a good cause – namely, my aim here is not to humiliate anyone, but just to expose a common thread of fragmentation in modern medicine which reveals what needs to be done: we need to move from fragmentation to systems science, in order to better help our patients.

Example of Low Vitamin B12

In another case, a doctor found a level of vitamin B12 below the “normal range.” According to his training, he decided to re-test it at the next visit, to check it was not a fluke reading. Logical as that sounds, he did not think to ask his patient about it (perhaps he was too busy playing Medical Bingo to think of asking questions “outside of the box”?) If he had, he would quickly have discovered that there was a prior history of similar values, from another medical practice. There was no documentation, but the patient could have told him.

Be that as it may, at the next visit the patient then showed up with a “normal” level of B12. Again, had the doctor thought to ask, he might have discovered the truth – the patient had (as patients are wont to do – since they are not inanimate objects but Dynamic living systems!) gone off and taken a B12 supplement in between the two visits, on hearing about it at the first visit – therefore this most likely explained the change in the reading! In other words, the sum total of this doctor’s conclusions at both visits were flawed from start to finish, and all due to failing to make (or even attempt to make) sensible links and connections beyond his numbers-game mode of thinking.

Yet what if the doctor had felt he could confirm the B12 reading a second time, according to his books?

Well, his next step would probably have been to suggest B12 supplementation, and/or possibly give a B12 injection, and in absence of any other “abnormal” readings on his computer screen, he may not have done anything more. No thought as to causation, relevance or what link it may have to anything else going on in the body. Instead, we have yet another case of isolated, fragmented findings, and doctors who have not been trained to make connections between things, in all these sorts of ways – not even about patient behaviour between visits!

In their defence, yes doctors have been trained to make connections when it comes to patterns of findings indicative of certain diseases or disorders. And this can certainly be useful – a silver lining to the cloud.

Yet even then, it’s a case of hitting a “jackpot” in the numbers game, leading to a disease label and. . . a specialist.

Next begins a new round of fragmentation, because from this point on, your “specialist” has a narrowed vision to focus on this “entity”, and is not trained to link it to other things going on in the body. So even when a diagnosis is made, and the specialist is brought on board, this does not end the numbers games, and at the same time increases the over-specialized narrow focus. So now we go from small fragments to even tinier sub-fragments. At no stage has anyone moved beyond numbers to do a complete living systems analysis. You can bet your bottom dollar that your new “specialist” on the case has not studied toxicology, decision science, quantum physics or systems theory. Same old, same old. . . So now we have moved from a palette of dark blue to a highly specific shade of marine blue, and as to reds and yellows that may be prime culprits – forget about them as that is data outside of the realm of this specialized area of knowledge.

You would imagine that there is no one better than a specialist to help with a special type of health problem. Yet the reverse is often true, for these reasons – and because when it comes to living systems, no body compartment functions in isolation; everything is interconnected in both health and disease. As Dr Yurkovsky has often alerted people: “Beware of specialists!”

My examples have all been little ones, and deliberately so. I view these as like the fault-lines which can lead to earthquakes: but I want to highlight the nature of the problem with simple scenarios, rather than turning to the many possible scenarios that are more dramatic. From here, we have patients being sent home today being told they’re “fine”, according to the Medical Bingo, and then developing cancer next year and Alzheimer’s Disease the year after that, and all for “unexplained” reasons – since not only did the numbers game not predict these events, and were never designed to do so, but they also would have been incapable of explaining their origin. When you take a step back, it’s just not possible to call such an approach a “good design”, as in spite of showing some flair here and there, it fails the “good design test” in so many respects.

The common thread is that it’s fine riding motorcycles on the road, but if you want to fly through the air, it’s time to re-design your vehicle from scratch. You may retain some of the same raw materials, and some of the same parts, but the overall design will need to be rehauled. The overall medical model needs to be that of Living Systems Medicine, incorporating information fields, and striving to avoid fragmentation rather than making it your bread and butter.

Design, Design, Design. . .

Design. Model. Concepts. Links.

As I hope these random examples show clearly, medical practice has become (with definite exceptions) frequently impoverished by fragmented thinking, and that’s why I agree with Dr Yurkovsky when he describes modern medicine as primarily fragmented, versus the FCT approach which applies systems science to seek to achieve the opposite: to piece things together, make links, and highlight the most pertinent information through understanding the relations between things.

So, in summary – Give up trying to improve the motorcycle, he proposes! Instead, build an aeroplane!

And so everything, as you can see, depends on a good design. . .

If FCT did not have a good design, I would never have felt drawn to it, and nor would my many colleagues who came to it from engineering.

And now, to the second part of this blog – what has any of this got to do with bicycles? Ah, well, I guess this is enough for today, so I’ll turn to this in my next blog, “In Praise of Bicycles”. . . In the meantime, the phrases “Elephant Logic” and “Medical Bingo” are ones I coined for the first time for this article, and just in case they ring true for any readers, you are welcome to make use of them, and/or to share your own stories! Note that all of the lab examples I have detailed are true.