A Start Out for”a Great Theoretical Edifice” in Medicine?

Mikhail Bazanov: “Mot strømmen – en “vrien leges notater” (Against the Current – notes of an unobliging doctor), Centrum Norsk Forlag, 2007.

In our presentation of this book we first reproduce the preface of Jon Bjartnes and then some commentaries by Vilhelm Schjelderup.

Ready for a bet?

You are hereby invited for a bet. But first you have to read this preface.

Early in the 1990’s two Russian doctors, Mikhail Bazanov and Valerij Koucheroak, came to Norway. Both of them were medical doctors wanting to practice new therapies in the West. The first years were problematic getting permissions to stay and work here. While diverse applications slowly moved through the system, more and more Norwegians experienced surprisingly good results from the treatments given by the two physicians. After a while quite a few people were engaged to help them, and in the end all problems were solved and they could both stay and work legally in Norway.

I was one of all those who met Bazanov and Koucherouk – or Misha and Valerij, as I learned to name them – at that time. It is no exaggeration to say that these meetings changed my life. For my part the interest was not only due to the therapeutic results (which in many cases were remarkable in themselves). I was equally fascinated by the ideas the therapy was based on. The two Russians were bubbling over with theories I had never heard of: about reciprocal reactions between the skin and internal organs, about geometrical conditions for the body and its organs, about formal relationships between us – human beings – and what not, including the universe.

The result of this fascination was the book “Jakten på the geometriske menneske, Historien om en idè” (The Hunt for Geometrical Man – The History of an Idea), Forum, Aschehoug 1997. The book was based on many and long interviews with the two doctors and some of their patients. In the introduction I wrote that it “tells about an idea that may be a real challenge both for scientists and philosophers”. That statement is no less true for the book you now have in your hands.

It is now 15 years since Misha came to Norway and 10 years since “Jakten på det geometriske menneske” was published. Since that time Misha and Valerij have chosen to pursue their theories about the human body each for themselves and are now running separate small clinics in Oslo. And in 2006 Misha wrote this book. It was first published in Russian, and now – at last – in Norwegian translation.

In 42 short chapters Misha relates his credo. He writes about his own experiences as a medical doctor through 30 years. He brings criticism both against his fellow medical doctors and alternative therapists, and he formulates ideal qualities for those who claim to treat ill people. But what I believe will be standing is a start out for a great theoretical edifice in medicine.

Misha postulates that concepts from modern physics, like fractals and holograms, are relevant also for biological systems. He adheres to the idea that organisms – bodies like ours – are developed on the basis of formative – morphogenetic – fields. He proceeds further to propose that the form of such fields can be described geometrically as multidimensional expressions of mathematical equations. He presents proposals for such equations, postulating that such equations may provide a basis for a new anatomy, where smaller and larger parts of the body and their connections may be defined by projective geometry. This way he provides a view of an organism as a system of systems, where the laws of geometry are equally relevant regardless of which level of subsystems we choose to study.

It is quite a lot in this world a poor journalist does not understand. For my part This applies to mathematics and physics. When I went to school they were not in fashion. They were not fun, and as far as I understood you could not use them to save the world. Accordingly I disappeared from the lectures in mathematics and physics, at first mentally, then also physically as soon as I had the chance to choose. I am afraid something similar applies to many of the potential readers of this book. That means that I and – perhaps also you reading this book – are poorly equipped to judge the details of the mathematical constructions Misha provides us with. But the greater perspectives I believe we may relate to.

From my position the perspectives look like this: With all our modern science humanity is still poorly prepared when it comes to understand and relate to complex dynamic systems – like the earth globe or a human body. The changes in climate are striking examples these days (and for the next century it looks like). As regards the environment there are numerous examples telling us it would have been wiser to be much more careful than we actually are when confronted with living systems where everything is interconnected.

Also the human body is a similar case. As to day the medical sciences function for a large part about developing new medical preparations that can be sold in a marked. Most of these chemical inventions look at first glance as good ideas (Like all the cars and all the power stations which together make the climate change.) Some of the medicines do save lives-. Others make life easier to live. But together they have the effect that most people who can afford it, willingly ingest ever more highly specialised chemicals. This specially applies to those of us who have got a diagnosis of a chronic disease. This has to be characterised as a great experiment (not the least when we consider all the other chemicals we are exposed to, like environmental poisons and all the daily chemicals). The side effects are sometimes small, sometimes serious, and often we have to believe not really known. Our organism is complex and nothing acts only in one way. What is certain is that this development makes us increasingly more dependent. If we are going to function as we like to, we ought to have a chemist’s dispensary ready at hand.

What the medical sciences invest less resources to find out, are the systemic properties that make the body – with individual defects or not – into an exceedingly well adjusted self repairing system. It is neither plaster nor ointments that make the wound heal. Let us once more make a comparison with the climate: In a natural condition as this has developed through the ages the terrestrial climate is relatively stable due to a complex system of interactions between the atmosphere and living beings. Drawing your breath you are a part of the great interplay. The situation can be characterised as a dynamic balance – something is happening all the time, but the result of all this activity is a stable system. We are now in the process of discovering what happens if human activity makes the system loose balance for a while. The lesson is that we have to learn to understand what keeps the system in balance, how it may compensate for changes, and how the system is able to maintain and restore itself. When we understand how the system functions, we may also learn to adjust our own behaviour in such a way that it harmonises with the wholeness of which we are compelled to be a part.

To understand and utilise natural self-maintaining systems ought according to my judgement be an ideal not only in ecological politics, but also in the art of healing. And it is a scientific explanation of such systemic properties of the human body Misha is searching for. I am not making a bet that Misha is perfectly right in his hypotheses. But I make a bet of a dinner and a bottle of good wine that the perspectives he is offering will bring medical art further. Within, let us say twenty years many more medical doctors will take interest in the geometrical structure of the body and develop new medical therapies based on new theories about this. And I make a bet that some of these new theories you may already read about now in this book.

Take a look yourself and see if you want to make a bet against me.

Jon Bjartnes, Harestua, October 2007.

A Science of Healing without a Scientific Theory: Can Misja help us here?

In his preface to the Norwegian edition of his book Misja writes: “The main problem is not that there are alternative therapies as such, but that the alternative medicine does not so far has not got a unifying scientific theory. It is also wrong to have two kinds of medicine, like having two kinds of truth, or two answers to the same question.”

The problem is in fact that we to day lack a unifying scientific theory for medical science, whether alternative or academic. “What kind of profession is medicine,” writes Misja, “is it a science, an art, or something else? Anatomy, physiology, biochemistry and pharmacology are all sciences with their own research fields. But what is medicine which is based on these sciences without being a theoretical discipline in itself?…. If we compare basic research and medicine, we see an uncomfortable situation. Physics is both a theoretical and experimental science. The experiments confirm the theory. Medicine is also experimental. But that means – the research is done in the blind, on the so called statistical level. There is no general theory…..The therapeutic methods and the evaluations of the conditions of the patients are mainly based on statistics. The relations between the parameters and the measurements are arbitrary and in the blind without any explanation of the causal mechanisms that regulate their correlations. And neither is it possible to determine such relations, as there are millions of parameters and, in general, methods have not been developed to assess them. All discussions about the state of the patient end up that we stick to some details. And the patient is no better off for that.”

What Misja writes here, may look as a devastating verdict on modern medical science. He does, however, give acute medicine a good testimony. But when we get to the treatment of chronic diseases, it is a sadly disappointing story. Unfortunately, there are some good reasons to agree with Misja at this point. And the scientific arguments he brings carry some weight. It is in this connection we have to look for the reason for the strong development of alternative medicine in recent years. But, according to Misja, neither does alternative medicine have unifying, scientific theory. Accordingly, alternative medicine also operates more or less in the blind.

Misja himself has developed a method that essentially is based on thermo-photography of the skin and treatment by vacuum-cupping. Testimonies from a great number of patients indicate that he has developed this into a highly successful method with excellent results in a large spectre of human ailments and diseases. But is this medical art at a high level, or is it medical science?

Vacuum-cupping acts on the capillaries, the very fine blood vessels, in the skin and make these open up. The Danish physiologist August Steenberg Krogh received the Nobel price in medicine in 1920 for his discovery that it is the distribution of blood in the capillaries that determine to what extent the different organs of the body function actively in agreement with their tasks in the body. According to Misja this is “the fundamental mechanism which coordinates the function of all the systems of the organism”. And due to the functional relation between different areas of the skin and internal organs, it is possible by vacuum-cupping to act on the organic regulation of the function of the different organs of the body. The discovery of Steenberg Krogh is therefore of fundamental medical significance. But, as Misj writes: “It is an irony of destiny that the work of Steenberg Krogh – like so many other medical discoveries – has collected dust in libraries without getting any real practical use until now.”

Vacuum-cupping may be an excellent method, if you really know what you are doing. Misja tells about all those who started using cupping after his first visit to Norway in 1992. But their results were not satisfactory because they had not really learned the theories on which the therapy was based. It is this which will be our main topic here.

Central to Misja are the thoughts of the great physicist Erwin Schrödinger about ‘negentropy’ as a condition for life itself. Negentropy is the opposite of entropy, expressing a degree of order, while entropy is an expression for disorder. Negentropy accordingly corresponds to the concept of ‘syntropy, which Fantappie introduced, and which we have chosen as the name of our web site.

Living beings have the ability to preserve and even increase their degree of order, seemingly at odds with the second law of thermodynamics. Misja remembers a citation from Schrödinger: “Living matter tries to avoid a state of equilibrium by using negative entropy.” I myself have several times used a corresponding citation from Schrödinger: “The artful ways by which an organism succeeds in staying at a rather high level of order, corresponds in reality to an ability to suck order from the external world.”

Misja started reflecting on this already in 1968, and it became the starting point for him trying to answer the crucial question: “What is the main principle for living matter making it develop and adopt given forms and functions? And are there in this wide world anybody who has solved this question, or do I have to solve it by myself?”

It was a matter of scientific logic that he primarily tried to look for an answer to this question in biophysics, i.e. in the physical basis for life functions. (And here I have to emphasize as I have so often done, that biophysics has a far stronger share in Russian medical thought than it has in Western countries where biochemistry plays an almost dominant role). He discovered, however, soon that contemporary science lacked a sufficient mathematical basis for the study of living organisms. And without such a mathematical basis medical science was according to his view not a really scientific field. For such a new theory of medicine he found a reasonable starting point in the theory of morphogenetic fields such as this had been developed by the Russian biologist Alexander Gurvitch.

In his post graduate training in cardiology at a university clinic Misja learned about thermo-photography, where you take photos of the infrared radiation from the body surface. This method gives an exact estimate of the circulation of blood in the capillaries of the skin. And this actually mirrors the circulation of blood and, according to the discovery of Steenberg Krogh, the functional state of the different organs of the body. Thermo-photography can therefore be used diagnostically giving an image of the total state of the organism. This diagnostic image may be used as a basis for therapy. And through experience Misja found in this context vacuum-cupping to be the most appropriate method. He describes this as a therapeutic dialogue:

“The patient immediately ‘recognises’ all his ailments and pains in the image without being a specialist, and he is ahead of me in his commentaries to the thermo-photography. …. Diagnosis and therapy this way become inseparable, being two aspects of the same process. This is something which has always been a dream for medical doctors and still remains so.

To me the therapeutic process is at the same time a further diagnostic proceeding. The ‘answer’ coming from the organism during therapy gives the basis for the further strategy of treatment. It looks as if principally new possibilities for helping chronically diseased patients arise. And this process becomes ever more concrete, giving sufficiently strict rules for appropriate actions.”

Many of you may question how the body surface may reflect the whole body with all its organs and parts. Misja here refers to recent developments in theoretical physics indicating that “all information about any physical system, including you and me, is written into its border surface”, (Gerardus t’Hooft got the Nobel price in physics for this in 1999). It is here a question of holographic information, which also implies that all information about a 3 dimensional physical system can be retrieved from a 2 dimensional surface. In this context we may also find a mathematic explanation of the holographic structuring of living organisms which I have described in my article ‘The Healing System and Bioholographic Acupuncture’ (which can be found at this web site).

According to Misja we therefore have to understand the morphogenetic field as a fractal or holographic field where the essential information is found in each part and even each surface of the organism. This is in agreement with what Ervin Laszlo writes in his book ‘Science and the Akashic Field’ of which we bring a review in this newsletter. At this point Misja decidedly is in step with the evolution of present day science.

Misja is much engaged in how the human body is built up geometrically and gives interesting illustrations based on his use of projective geometry. These are interesting contributions to our understanding of the anatomy of the body, and thereby also to our physiology and medicine. In this field we may hopefully see a trend that may help to transducer medicine into a more mathematical science. This year the Abel price in mathematics was given to the Russian mathematician Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov for his revolutionary contributions to geometry. According to the committee Gromov is “on the search for new problems all the time developing new ideas that may solve great problems”. In a radio interview Gromov told that he is now engaged in how to apply geometry in microbiology, and that he is presently working on how to model the geometry of the heart. Perhaps we shall not exclude the possibility that the medicine of the future will be a mathematical science, like Misja tries to anticipate.

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