It’s an interesting fact that
we often don’t appreciate something until we begin to lose it. I notice this
phenomenon more as I get older. Last month, one of my eyes decided not to look
to the right, so I saw two of everything on my right side. It caused me to
remember that with only one eye you have no depth perception. If you reach for
a door nob or try to catch something you reach too far or not far enough. I found myself ignoring my right side, which
caused me to run into things, and in the car I constantly had to remind myself
to turn my head to the right to avoid driving into something. Fortunately it
cleared up after a month or so, but it was scary. The doctor was reassuring.
She said, “It was just a small stroke.”
There are many other
examples. I no longer can put off going to the bathroom. A sudden urge is an
emergency, and standing up to go makes it even more urgent. I can no longer
understand people when they talk to me, and, you may not have noticed, but the
closed captioning on TV is often just jibberish. My wife gets tired of
repeating herself, and she can’t understand why I can’t just “turn up your
hearing aides.” I’m not as strong. I can’t balance without a cane. My joints
hurt, and my neck and back. I can’t remember names or words to express myself.
I can’t sleep well without a breathing machine which attaches to my face with a
tight uncomfortable mask. I don’t get thirsty anymore, so I have to remember to
drink. I choke when I swallow so my meals are punctuated by fits of coughing.
My eye’s get dry and burn, so I have to carry a bottle of eye drops in my
pocket.
The latest experience that
made me appreciate my body, at least the way it used to be, is constipation.
I’ve never had constipation, or headaches, for that matter. Oh gosh. I hope
that doesn’t jinx me. Anyway, I now have to balance Metamucil and Miralax, eat
lots of fiber, and drink plenty of water, even if it means getting up four
times during the night to empty my bladder instead of three. I have to pay
attention to the consistency of my stool. Is it too hard to push out, too
sticky to clean off? Fortunately I don’t worry about how it smells. I lost my
sense of smell years ago. This is almost too disgusting to talk about, but I am
coming to a point, slowly as it may seem.
What this brought to mind was
how remarkable it is that we’re able to digest all the stuff we eat: from tough
meat and fish, to all sorts of vegetables and grain. We do though, and it’s all
converted into a solid brown cylindrical mass, uniform, digested, with all the
nutrients removed. If you think about it, it’s truly amazing. If I gave you an
average meal and asked you to digest it, not just that but remove the nutrients
for use, I’ll bet you couldn’t do it, even if you had a complete chemical lab
to use, yet our body does it every day, while we’re going about our usual
routine, unaware of the miracle we’re witnessing.
How does our body accomplish
this remarkable feat? We now understand, through centuries of scientific
research, that the digestive system has acid, strong enough to burn your skin,
enzymes, often specific for a certain chemicals. It is full of bacteria which
would kill you if they were released into the blood stream, but somehow the
intestine shields us somehow from these dangerous substances. Even people with
damage to their digestive systems: bleeding ulcers, raw and scarred intestines,
almost always manage to digest their food and extract the nutrients they need.
And all this made me think – why
are you not surprised? – of my wise cousin, Steve. He used to say:
“everything is chemistry.” From astronomy to geology – Steve is a geochemist –
to agriculture, to engineering, to physics, to human physiology -as in
digestion- even to psychology. Everything is made of chemicals or produced by
the interaction of chemicals. Just think about it. It’s true. But what
difference does it make? It seems like an oversimplification.
If you take what he said
seriously though, and think about how every substance, every process, can be
broken down into elemental particles or reactions, that is, chemistry- I’m
almost there- it makes you humble.
When I studied medicine, I
was amazed at the complexity of the human body: the nerves and blood vessels,
the bony structure and how it works to enable us to move in and manipulate our
environment. I learned about the complex interaction of hormones, genes,
enzymes, about the digestive system, as I mentioned above. And now, almost
sixty years later, science has made huge advances. It boggles the mind.
The more I think about it the more overwhelming it is. You really have to
specialize in order to understand just a small area of medicine, and every area
of science is the same: Physics, chemistry, engineering, computer science.
And how do scientists identify
and understand the chemicals that make up each little area of science. By the
scientific method. First, a scientist, usually an expert in a small area of
science that he or she has studied for years, has an idea. Then he, along with
a group of his colleagues, fashions an experiment to test his idea or ‘hypothesis.’
The experiment requires time,
money, special equipment, often government approval. If it involves humans, it may
have to be performed first on animals, and then approved by an ethics committee
before it’s actually performed on humans. If the experiment gets over all these hurdles
the results are submitted to the review board of a scientific journal and if
approved, it is published. Then the report is often accompanied by a critical editorial
written by a recognized authority in the field, analyzing its strengths,
weaknesses, significance, and recommendations for further research. At this point
the scientist is just getting started. Other scientists, experts in the same
area, often from different countries, publish their own critiques of the study.
Others try to repeat the same study to see if they achieve the same results. The
process goes on for years and most often the whole idea is discarded. A scientist will consider him or herself fortunate if he makes one
significant discovery during his lifetime.
And that brings me to my
point – I’m almost there. Science is so complex; scientific knowledge is so advanced,
that the average person, even the exceptional person, can only understand a
part of it, and that only if he or she spends years of study. That is why it
irritates me when I hear someone discounting the value of immunization, say, or
questioning the judgement of a doctor and scientist like Anthony Fauci, one of
the most knowledgeable epidemiologists in the world.
Like my cousin Steve says, everything
is chemistry. Everything can be broken down into finer and finer elements and
processes, using the scientific method. No one is smart enough to second guess
this process. No one is smart enough to disregard the accumulated knowledge of
the past. The universe is so complex that even the incredible knowledge we have
accumulated over history is still tentative, still being reexamined, questioned
by scientists around the world.
