Modern medicine’s public relations apparatus constantly pours out stories of new cure hopes, and the media gobbles it up and spews it out. The latest is about a “breakthrough” that could provide the “cure” for liver disease. It’s a vain hope, though. The hope is predicated, like most of the medical industry’s treatments, on a foolish belief that understanding the most minute details of how a cellular process works will show how to fix it.

This is a view of the human body as a machine. If a part doesn’t work right, repair or replace it. The assumption is that the symptom is a result of the body going wrong, so the scientists just need to figure out how to correct the body’s mistake.

But the human body isn’t a machine. It isn’t a matter of mix and match parts. The body is billions of individual life forms – cells – each performing processes acting symbiotically with all the others—a beautifully coordinated community that make up a single living being. Each process informs the others. All of them act—in most instances—in the best possible manner to produce health.

Effort to Find a Cure for Liver Disease

The Independent has reported what’s being called a breakthrough in understanding of liver disease. They wrote:

The latest research, published in the journal Nature Medicine, has unravelled the network of complex biochemical signals that trigger the regeneration of cells within the liver, the body’s main organ for filtering harmful toxins from the bloodstream.

The study’s authors found that a diseased liver slows or stops creating new hepatocytes, instead producing more bile ducts. They’ve decided that this is not what the liver should be doing, and have managed to force genes to alter their behavior so that they revert to the normal production of hepatocytes. They believe that doing so will make the liver healthy again.

The study’s lead author, Luke Boulter from the Medical Research Council’s Centre for Regenerative Medicine at Edinburgh University, stated:

This research helps us to know how to increase numbers of cells that are needed for healthy liver function and could pave the way to finding drugs that help liver repair.

Boulter and the other researchers—along with that vast bulk of modern medicine’s practitioners and researchers—believe that. They ignore that there’s a reason the liver is doing something that isn’t normal in a healthy person. Instead, they focus on forcing the liver to do something different.

The chance of this being effective is minuscule, if not impossible. If the researchers would ask why a liver starts producing bile ducts instead of regenerating hepatocytes, they would see that there is little chance for returning people to health unless they resolve the cause, rather than try to suppress the symptom.

The liver has several functions. Two of the most significant are removing toxins from the body and aiding digestion in the lower intestines. Both of these are carried out by producing bile and releasing it into the digestive tract. What happens when the liver is overtaxed with too much toxic material? Over time, the toxins build up. When they start reaching a critical level, the liver needs to act.

The authors are ignoring the context: that the liver responds to excess toxins by trying to build more paths for bile excretion. An organism cannot survive when the toxic load is too great. Therefore, the liver sacrifices one function for the more immediately critical one. It stops reproducing hepatocytes and uses the resources saved to create bile ducts. The liver is creating more pathways for removal of toxins.

Hepatocytes are responsible for processing toxins, that is, pulling them out of the body. It is, however, pointless if there’s no way to move the toxins out of the liver. That’s where bile ducts come in. They carry the bile, which carries the toxins, from the liver to the lower digestive tract for elimination.

The authors believe that forcing the liver to make hepatocytes, as if the organism were healthy, will return normal function to the liver. However, they are completely ignoring the question of why hepatocytes are replaced by bile ducts in toxic overload. Ignoring that question is pure hubris. The researchers’ believe that they are smarter than the body’s methods of healing—methods developed over millions of years, methods that allow us to exist today.

Instead of seeing that the liver is doing the most life-affirming thing it can under the circumstances, the researchers suggest that the appropriate response is to add a drug – yet another toxin – to the body’s toxic overload.

Big Pharma’s Role

Big Pharma’s clever. They will likely find some chemical that can change some biological marker associated with hepatocyte generation. They will then do studies to show their chemical can create that change in the biomarker.

Let’s call their chemical hepatochoke. They’ll claim that hepatochoke reverses liver disease. However, their research will only show that a biomarker associated with hepatocyte production is improved. They’ll use misleading statements, such as, “Hepatochoke has been proven to be successful in increasing the number of hepatocytes, which have been linked to liver health.” There won’t be any outright lies (usually), though what they’re doing is simply scamming a medical system set up for such scams.

The Fundamental Error: Suppressing Symptoms

When a body part isn’t acting in the manner that it does in health, it’s doing its best to promote health. It isn’t acting against nature. It isn’t broken. It doesn’t need to be repaired. It’s behaving differently because there’s a benefit in doing so. Something is so wrong that behavior different from normal is necessary.

The body may require assistance in healing, but it certainly doesn’t need more toxins in the form of drugs to suppress a healing response.

Trying to suppress a symptom—to make the body behave like it would in healthy homeostasis—is not a means to health. It is, in fact, exactly the opposite. The standard example is fever. When our bodies produce fever, they’re healing themselves. Even  though that’s well understood, the standard response of modern medicine is to bring a fever down. And that, of course, is nearly always a mistake.

That’s why most early reports of medical breakthroughs and drug testing tend not to prove out. Either the product isn’t brought to market or it’s later found to either not work or do more harm than good, or both. Most of modern medicine’s treatments are based on suppressing symptoms, not on working with the body’s healing processes.

Until they realize that suppression of symptoms cannot work—that it is contrary to nature—modern medicine will continue to go round and round with self-deluding breakthroughs that result in dead ends and treatments that do more harm than good.

Sources:

• Breakthrough could lead to cure for chronic liver disease