Translated to English it means " People want to be deceived; therefore, let them be deceived." How appropriate for all times to come! A glance at what happens in our political arena will bring to mind the eternal truth in the above adage! Although most of us know that most, if not all, of our politicians are there to cheat us, and take us for a ride, what with their sole motive in life being, what is there in it for me; we still go back and reelect them to cheat us again. It is ,therefore, only fair that they deceive us.

I was in Poona recently where I met an old student, who is a professor of surgery. He made an interesting survey of 1000 young college and high school students, who were already smokers, through questionnaire. The study showed that the majority of them started smoking after they were influenced by the cigarette companies financing the sports activities of the young like foot ball, cricket etc. Whereas we all know why the cigarette companies love sports for sponsorship, we maintain in public utterances that it is very good for the younger generation that the multinational companies are stepping in where the government does not have enough funds for sporting activities of the young !

While going for a walk the other day, in Bangalore, I saw an interesting hoarding which went something like this:

" Get your heart a test run while it is still running, it may be too late if you wait for symptoms-Have a check up"

If one keeps himself up to date in the medical field it will be very clear to him that this hoarding is far from the truth in medical science. The doctors working for that hospital might (should ) also be aware of it but, they do not ( or can not ) advise their management to be scientific in their approach to this sort of advertisements. Many "educated" people fall a prey to this kind of advertisement, as the check up promises a secure future for those who come out with a clean chit. The fact is that no one, irrespective of whatever method one may use, can predict the future in a dynamic human body. " Doctors have been predicting the unpredictable," wrote Professor Firth in an elegant article in the December 26th issue 1991, of the British Medical Journal.

Dr. Lewis Thomas , past president of the Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in NewYork, in his book Lives of a Cell said that " there is no evidence, to date, that doctors could modify disease behaviour, or change the outcome ( prognosis) for the better, by trying to detect diseases in their pre-symptomatic stage". A recent issue of the British Medical Journal in February 1997 wrote an editorial on the subject to remind us of the futility of such efforts. In addition we see daily the fall out of the false positive tests which make the victim a psychological wreck. This is the major hazard of those tests.

Be that as it may, let us find out why these tests are done in the first place! Medicine, having become a business these days, it makes sense to target a larger population base for our work. If we target our efforts at the ill population, we may be aiming at a few million at a given time. If, on the other hand, we target the well ( healthy ) population we are hitting the jackpot of billions of people in this world! How do we explain the attitude of the medical profession to this new twist in the medical ethics, contrary to what is taught viz.: primum non nocere ( first do no harm ) ?

In physics we have seen the common phenomenon of atoms changing from one metal to another when kept together for a long time. If gold bars are kept in close proximity to lead bars, after a time some of the atoms from gold will have migrated to the lead bar and vice versa. Based on this theory Flynn O’Brion, the famous Irish novelist, wrote in his celebrated book, The Third Policeman, about the strange phenomenon occurring in the Irish police department of those days. Every Irish policeman was given a bicycle and he normally spent 80% of his duty time on the bicycle. Time came when the bicycle acquired a few of the policemen’s atoms and vice versa. Most Irish policemen used to lean on any wall they see like their bicycle and the cakes and pies used to disappear from the dining room table at nights, if the bicycle was parked in the same room.

This is one of the scientific explanations for the large scale corruption among our politicians these days. Many of them have been honest people before they got there, but soon developed the bad habit. The longer they sit on those chairs, the more corrupt they became. Corrupt politician leaves a few of his bad atoms on the chair and the next incumbent very soon absorbs those and becomes corrupt. May be the cells become very bad after they pass through a series of persons and back to the chairs. That explains why the successive generation of politicians in India, since independence, have been more and more corrupt. Although our politicians are not very well educated in the true sense of the word, they have a very keen sense of the position of the chair and the ways and means to sit on that chair ( Peeta Jnana ). Education was very well described by T.H. Huxley thus: " Education is the instruction of the intellect in the laws of Nature, under which name I include not merely things and their forces, but men and their ways: and the fashioning of the affections and of the will into an earnest and loving desire to move in harmony with those laws."

Check ups to detect diseases in their formative periods run into another big problem of uncertainty about the future events in a dynamic organism like the human body where linear relations have no useful prognostication value at all. Regularity and stability are signs of disease and only chaos, irregularity, is a sign of health. In that scenario the various tests set up for executive check up will lose their value. But the big players in the field keep fooling people. You can fool some people sometimes, but to fool all the people all the time is very difficult. People probably want to be deceived and so the hoarding of the type described in the beginning are only appropriate.