Lancet report reveals 26% rise in cancer; Prof. Hegde slams modern medicine
Amidst the Sabarimala Lord Ayyappa (scam) and controversies associated with religious conversion, we missed an elephant in the room. The venerated magazine LANCET, in a peer-reviewed article, discloses that cancer cases in India increased by 26 percent and deaths by 21 percent since 1990.
The medical research journal states that the incidence of cancer in India as of 1990 was 84.8 percent per one lakh population. But by 2023, the figure shot up to 107.2 percent per one lakh population. The number of persons dying due to cancer increased by 21 percent in India. But the numbers have come down considerably in countries like the US and China in the last 33 years. This is something which we should take seriously, as the instances of cancer were rare in India way back in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite claims by medical researchers that they have developed drugs to cure this deadly disease, the number of cancer cases are going northwards in the sub-continent.
It is at this juncture that “Journal of Science of Healing Outcomes”, an Indian scientific journal which is held in high esteem by the medical fraternity, published an editorial “Medicine: Evidence-based or Evidence-burdened?” authored by its chief editor Prof B M Hegde, former visiting professor of cardiology, University of London and former vice chancellor of Manipal University, Mangalore. (www.thejsho.com).
Professor Hegde, known as a cardiologist with a big heart, has been honored with Padma Vibhushan by the President of India in 2021, has three FRCPs (Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians), a FRCPI (Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland- an international benchmark of professional excellence, reserved for doctors who have made substantial contributions to their specialty and whose published works and attainments meet the high expectations of the College), is a medical researcher and teacher with a difference. His book “What Doctors Don’t Get to Study in Medical School” is one of the most sought-after textbooks in global medical education. A person known for his no-nonsense approach to life, Prof Hegde is highly critical of modern medicine. He says that medical doctors should not wear blinkers and focus only on what they are taught in classrooms. He is also against the concept of lifestyle diseases and the degeneration of health care service into the health care industry.
In the above-mentioned editorial, which has been published in the July 2025 issue of the journal, Prof Hegde comes down heavily on modern medicine for following outdated linear mathematics. “The human body is dynamic and is never linear. The body only follows non-linear rules.. Normality, defining normal human beings, is another imprecise exercise in present-day medicine,” writes Prof Hegde. He points out that the statistical definition of normal is the mean 2 standard deviations in a Gaussian distribution.
For those who are uninitiated into the world of statistics, the professor simplifies his argument: “Let us look at the total body scanner that measures up to five hundred body parameters at a given time. When we check one hundred normal people using the total body scanner, 2,500 abnormalities would be detected in those one hundred normal people, even without their having any illness whatsoever. This would make us all abnormal in some sense or the other. There will be no well human beings at all if one follows the modern medical evidence. A well man would be one who does not see a doctor. When he goes to see a doctor to get investigated, he becomes a patient. Rarely ever does he have a chance to become well again,” writes Prof Hegde.
The Padma Vibhushan awardee has made it clear time and again that it is time the Western model of modern medicine is rewritten. “Modern science, including physics, has reached a stage where it needs to be rewritten with the discovery of human consciousness as the basis to try to understand nature.. Almost all our studies in medicine, therefore, so far have been flawed. At this stage, we need to go back to the age-old wisdom of holism, followed both by the West before René Descartes and by Indian and Chinese sciences for thousands of years. Deterministic predictability is a myth,” says the professor.
He further states that the human body works as a whole. The various organs do not function independently. They are all connected together and are under the influence of the most dominant rhythm of breathing known as mode-locking in physics. “Heart rate varies according to the phases of respiration – heart rate variability. The cardiac rhythm probably originates in the brain and not in the heart, as was thought in the past. What happens to a given man, days, months, or years later, depends only on the total knowledge of that man initially. Modern medicine today is not in a position to assess a man completely, as man is only 30 percent phenotype, another 30 percent depends on his genes, and the remaining 40 percent depends on the mind (consciousness). We may be able to assess only a small fraction of the phenotype at the present state of knowledge. Hence, doctors have been predicting the unpredictable future of mankind all through the history of modern medicine,” says Dr Hegde.
He points out that there are basic flaws in the way medical research is done. No two individuals are alike, even twins have their variations. All our drug studies that we swear by have major errors. Since public exchequer funds for medical research have dried up, pharma companies have jumped onto the bandwagon, and their financial aids come with strings attached. Many drugs developed with corporate financial packages are swindling patients. This writer remembers an incident when Prof Hegde and late Dr C V Krishnaswamy of Chennai wrote to the British Medical Journal’s editor, alerting him about the danger of prescribing statin drugs for diabetes. The drug will bring down the diabetes, no doubt, but the consequence is that it will lead to more complications, which are worse than the disease. Those administered with an anti-diabetes drug became kidney patients, the drug for which makes them cardio-vascular patients. This is a chakravyuh from which the patients do not have any possibility of a way to come out.
Those who were born before 1960 may remember the concept of a family doctor and neighborhood clinics. (Please do not get confused with Mohalla clinics of Arvind Kejriwal). We had a great doctor by the name Dr Damodaran Pillai in our little town of Perumbavoor. Though the government-run hospital was worse than hell, Dr Pillai’s kind-hearted approach drew hundreds to this hospital. After retirement from government service, Dr Pillai set up a small clinic which turned out to be an instant hit. He was the true follower of Hippocrates’ dictum, “Cure Rarely, Comfort Mostly, But Console Always”. Over a period of time, the neighborhood clinics and physicians like Dr Damodaran Pillai disappeared altogether to be replaced with high-end hospitals, which squeeze out the last drop of blood from the patients. Health care got changed from a service to an industry as the proprietors laughed all their way to the banks. There are hundreds of medical schools charging Rs one crore and above for an MBBS seat.
The private medical colleges are known as self-financing colleges, and these institutions are powerful enough to collect whatever money they need under various labels. The obsession with the MBBS course is only because of the cash returns once you get qualified as a doctor. If you go to the corporate/ private hospitals with a common cold or fever, you will be asked to undergo a series of tests costing thousands of rupees. The patient will be at the mercy of a cartel of specialists who vie with one another in diagnosing the patient for that rare disease/ ailment. The lifestyle diseases should be designated as physicians’ ailments for which there are no medicines available anywhere in the world. This is a technique to keep the patient in disease mode in perpetuity. The cabal of physicians-hospital owners, politicians-owners of pharma companies, are the ones that determine the longevity of the patients!
If you want to know more about the owners of pharmaceutical companies, the best choice is to read PHARMA (Greed, Lies and The Poisoning of America), authored by award-winning US journalist Gerald Posner. The book hit the shelves sometime in 2020, and that too at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Posner tells the viewers the adventurous exploration he made through the corridors of power, as well as the boardrooms and laboratories of multinational pharma companies, which manufacture diseases and then develop the antidote for the same.
In an excellent and adventurous mission, Posner explored the history and evolution of some of the famous pharmaceutical companies, and he was forced to label them as the Poison Squad. The pharma companies that are featured in Posner’s work were institutions whose names evoked admiration and respect in society. Those were the years when chemistry and pharmacy graduates considered it a status symbol to work in these companies.
“Some of today’s largest drug companies got their start selling the legal heroin, morphine, cannabis, and cocaine-based medications that returned staggering profits”, writes Pozer in the opening chapter itself. He says that the drug business has turned America into a medicated society.
The degeneration of human health commenced on the day the concept of family doctors came to an end. The specialists took over the health care industry with state-of-the-art equipment that monitors the parameters, “controlling” the wellness. The world was a much better place without the specialists and their gadgets. Healthcare has become a major industry guaranteeing wellness. The day is not far off when our hospitals will be renamed as “Caveat Emptor”.
Many of us are ignorant of the fate of the Cold Research Centre that functioned in London. Immediately after the Spanish Influenza of 1918, which claimed 80 million lives, massive research missions commenced in the developed world to find a vaccine for the flu. The Cold Research Centre, which was opened in London in 1948, functioned for 50 years and published hundreds of research papers, but the vaccine for flu or influenza remained elusive. Finally, after spending 500 million pounds sterling of taxpayers’ money, the Cold Research Laboratory wound up its operations in 1999. But before the laboratory was shut down, the scientists were magnanimous enough to tell the world that they failed in their mission, but the drug for the flu would come from India, from the traditional Indian system of knowledge. The medicine the scientists were mentioning was made out of Indian spices like pepper, turmeric, and green chillis, which find mention in Ayurveda, an ancient system of medicine immortalized by Charaka and Susrutha.
What eminent teachers like Prof Hegde and Krishnaswamy suggest is a holistic approach to medicine – encompassing modern medicine, Ayurveda, homeopathy, and traditional medicine made out of plants and herbs.
The happenings from the world of modern medicine remind us of the opening lines from Mario Puzo’s best-selling novel The Godfather. Puzo begins the novel with a quote from Balzac: “Behind every great fortune, there is a crime”.
Note:
1. Text in Blue points to additional data on the topic.
2. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of PGurus.
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