Beliefs and Knowledge

Louis Pasteur

Any kind of belief can orbit any issue or, rather, any kind of issue can orbit any belief.

I believe in medicines... for everything, in homeopathy for everything, in needles for everything ... Everything can be referred to the creed embraced by oneself ... at least for a while, the one that continues with the appearance of effectiveness:

- I only know that (right now) it works for me.

Beliefs about the body may be multicolored and evanescent, changing, capricious.

- Why don’t you try it?

Not everything (for everything) is always believable. Few citizens would accept being treated for bacterial meningitis or insulin-dependent diabetes with something other than antibiotics or insulin.

There are tangible diseases to which scientific knowledge has unveiled its dynamics, taken the initiative and overcome with therapy. There is little room left to believe whatever you like. It’s a matter of life or death.

One thing are tangible diseases and, another, suffering without a tangible disease substrate. A person with an objectively healthy body can suffer without limits. More than half the volume of health care is devoted to this area: chronic sufferers without a tangible medical certificate of disease. At most, a label (provisional) of supposed illness, a label that must be validated by the Diagnostic Labels Validation Office.

The lack of tangibility allows all sorts of speculations and proposals, both in Official and Alternative Medicine. In the intangible are the drugs, needles, herbs, homeopathic products, the "handicrafts" (chiropractic) ... disputing the creeds of the sufferers.

Before Pasteur demonstrated the tangibility of infectious diseases, those who offered explanations of the intangible would dispute the origins and true remedies. The great clinicals of European Officiality held the theory of miasma: “putrid effluvia from decomposing organic matter". They believed in miasma and ignored themselves as carriers of death in their hands, full of germs.

There are molecular explanations for intangibility (genes, neurotransmitters, toxins, food) or pseudo-molecular (molecule memory, faceless traces) and energetic (electromagnetism) or pseudo-energetic (ki, handicrafts, spirituality, mentalization, religiosity). Not in vain, everything is matter and energy (or pseudo-matter and pseudo-energy)... but there isn’t only matter and energy. We forget about history, evolution in time and space, the way matter and energy are intertwined, organized by evolution’s requirement. We forget about information, memory, prediction, probability, errors and their detection, learning ...

We know a lot about matter and energy, enough to handle some problems of the body that have their origin and possible remedy in terms of matter and energy. What happens with information?

Neurons are physical, tangible entities, that generate tangible, detectable and quantifiable molecules and electrical signals. However, signals and molecules are at the information’s expense: they express memories and probabilities, certainties, uncertainties, anxieties, desires and fears ... motivations, relevances, things not so tangible and quantifiable.

- It hurts

- You don’t have anything tangible. Which beliefs do you think can be responsible for this?

This comment is unthinkable at the doctor’s office. Perhaps the formula "what do you blame for it?” would be more fortunate ...

- I believe that nerves, changes in the weather, wear, years, cervicals, nutrition, hormones, stress, that accident I had, separation have an influence.

- What treatments have you followed?

- I tried everything. Drugs, needles, homeopathy, herbs, diets ... psychoanalysis ... Nothing worked.

- You are in a Neurology office. We Neurologists are trained to solve issues with medicines... Do you believe in medicines?

- They haven’t worked on me. I don’t like them. They damage the stomach and don’t take away my pain.

Sufferers involuntarily confess their pilgrimage around the market of faiths. Belief in therapies go below the minimum, they are on the edge of absolute disbelief, despair or self-sacrificing conformity.

- Beliefs are your problem. You must get rid of them and fill the gap with what we know about what’s afflicting you. Forget about the solution. Listen, read, think it over and learn. Let the knowledge module your brain’s decisions. Its matter and energy are sufficient. You may need to review the information that manages them.

Information exists. It’s a fundamental component of matter and energy, trapped in the history of living beings. When a living thing dies it’s because it runs out of information. It’s only matter and energy pending to be part of another living space-time, informed.

There is information that cheers life up, that projects it to explore the environment. There is information that encourages inaction, catastrophism, disease conviction, claim of an official label of illness.

Take care of your information. You need it in order to live. Don’t devote yourself to obtaining pro-disease information. You will live in anguish.

- You have nothing. It’s just information. Your matter and energy are adequate but poorly managed. Believe me ...