Linear Thinking Part I

This blog is about the linear cause and effect thinking that seems embedded in conventional medicine. This type of thinking goes, well, a lot of the time when we see symptom A, we also find B, therefore B must be the CAUSE of A.For example, from a recent TV drug ad: "The root cause of gout is high uric acid." No, it's not. Yes, gout is associated with high uric acid levels, and we know that it's those uric acid crystals precipitating in the joints that are the source of the joint pain of gout. But high uric acid does not cause gout. It is one of the syndrome of symptoms that, grouped together, we call gout.
What's the cause, then? We don't know.
Whatever it is that made your body start to form uric acid crystals and allow them to aggregate and precipitate. Chances are, like a lot of other diseases, one day some scientist will find a DNA change that appears sometimes in people with gout, and that will then be touted as the "cause" of gout.
OK, what makes your DNA do funky things? We don't know.
A big reason behind the "we don't know" is because modern medicine has a heck of a time dealing with multifactorialism. With the type of experimentation that is done, only one hypothesis can be tested at a time, and all other variables must be eliminated or reduced to inconsequentiality. In other words, we can only ask one question at a time. We can't ask "what causes this?" We can only ask, "is pollution associated with this?" "Is it dietary?" "Is it the DNA?" "Is it traumatic?" If the answers end up being yes to all of these, then they get to duke it out and try to choose one "root cause." Usually DNA wins, because we believe that DNA is the primary code of our bodies and is unchanging and beyond influence by factors like vaccines or the electromagnetic fields of power lines.
Wouldn't it be great if life actually worked that way?
Things would be a lot simpler. "Why did Jimmy drop out of school?" "He's stupid." "Oh, OK."