Forgotten Fundamentals

Modern medical science has produced scores of wonder drugs and made enormous technical advances. Has it meanwhile been losing the human touch? Yes, says Swiss Dr. Rene Burnand, who believes it is high time for a return to some forgotten fundamentals.

Writes Burnand, a lung specialist, in Paris' Concours Medical: "We live under the rule of pharmacy . . . The equation

'Disease a equals drug a' not only tyrannizes the minds of the public, it haunts the practitioner, whose professional capacity is rated according to the skill with which he applies the formula. There is something still worse; mass medicine, socialized, mechanized to excess, tends to substitute an even more deceitful equation: 'Symptom b equals drug b.'

"Faced with a difficult case, too many physicians think it advisable to try a series of drugs, in the hope that a happy accident will point out the one, good, effective drug after a series of failures.

"The doctors are positively forgetting that the human organism possesses in itself the defenses, a potential for cure, which they should utilize more often, with more faith. Who in our day thinks of the resources of another age--morale, the will to health, valor . . .? But these things are still powerful . . . The faith of the patient, his will to recover and to live, to recover by life and for life, are a powerful support for our prudent counsels."

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