Medicine and Biology Taught Me to See the World with Neutral Eyes
The more medical and biological knowledge I learn, the more neutrally I regard everything in the world. What do I mean by neutral? Roughly, not wanting to make any moral or value judgment. I once had my own standards of right and wrong, good and evil; now those standards fade more and more, approaching nothing—I say approaching rather than reaching nothing because, out of decades of habit, an occasional reflexive judgment flashes for an instant at something happening now. But reason quickly tells me this is wrong, entirely unnecessary, and a mistake and a source of self-torment.
In a physician’s eyes, almost no one in this world is without illness. The more conditions we know, the better we are at recognizing physical and mental disorders in others. The rights and wrongs, goods and ills that ordinary people see may, in a physician’s eyes, be tied to the pathological response of some disease.
If a person is irritable and angry, or fearful and withdrawn, we think their nervous system may be damaged rather than that there is something wrong with their character. It is like seeing someone bent over in pain: we think of a spinal or lumbar injury or an appendicitis attack. Reading news of a murderer, we naturally ask why this person became a murderer—did they inherit antisocial-personality genes, or were they abused in childhood and develop violent tendencies?
As I studied more and met all kinds of people, this rigid view of disease gradually softened. Because to understand various psychosomatic responses deeply, you must enter the groups of various “patients,” listen to them, and understand their mental circuitry. Over time empathy arises: you understand their true feelings and no longer wish to judge them from an “outsider’s” view. Under natural law, everyone has their own survival rules and behavioral logic; these are biological responses to the environment. Though sometimes hard to accept, they are understandable, because they are beyond the reach of free will.
Of course, understanding their true feelings does not mean we can enter their hearts, gain their trust, build good relationships, and help them. Some psychosomatic problems are objectively unsolvable, and the social problems they bring are also unsolvable. For example, a paranoid person’s deep-seated distrust of the world, like other Cluster A personality disorders, is nearly incurable. No physician, however skilled, can help; in such cases we can only respect natural law and not force change.
Nowadays I am unwilling to label patients. I hope that as medicine advances, we may one day replace the professional word “disease” with terms like “different biological traits.” Because that is the truth: so-called “sick people,” compared with so-called “healthy people” (who barely exist in perfect form), merely have certain different biological traits. A cancer patient is just someone whose somatic cells apoptose differently; a mentally ill person just has brain structures somewhat unlike most people. Essentially these are all biological traits.
I wish to look at “disease” this way because I want, deep down, to neutralize all kinds of patients. Many diseases carry stigma, which leads to malicious treatment of the ill. Advances in modern medicine have promoted understanding of diseases, but at the same time created new psychological problems. A person diagnosed with cancer is struck as if by lightning at the moment they receive the report; after a person is diagnosed with bipolar disorder, most around them treat them as an outcast and isolate them.
When we speak of iatrogenic harm, we usually mean damage from things like scalpels and radiation. But we overlook the greatest iatrogenic harm: as medical knowledge spreads, many patients and families, after learning their diagnosis, develop secondary psychological disorders. Their fear of disease wrecks their lives, and the half-knowledge of those around them can leave patients living under discrimination from then on.
I meet many cancer-phobics, repeatedly plunged into panic and anxiety, terrified they have cancer, undergoing test after test—and some finally develop cancer from the radiation of all those tests. I also meet many families asking whether cancer is contagious (the correct answer: it is not), because a relative has cancer and they fear infection, creating a barrier that never existed before. Some families of the mentally ill, upon learning a relative has a mental illness, deliberately keep their distance or even abandon them, leaving them isolated and helpless.
If this society is not to create new discrimination and barriers, ultimately humanity must together neutralize various physical and mental conditions—classifying them as biological traits rather than diseases. In fact, most diseases are essentially just maladaptation caused by abnormal biological traits.
For example, an antisocial person’s genes and behavior are almost innate; their inability to fit into society is a great misfortune, and they themselves would not choose to inherit such bad genes. I believe one day human civilization will advance to where “criminals” too are met with basic compassion, the death penalty is abolished, and conditions are created to keep them from harming others. Human medicine may one day reach the point of using gene editing before birth to remove genes that seriously undermine individual happiness and social order.
From a humanitarian standpoint, many criminals should be sent to psychiatric hospitals rather than prisons. Of course, today’s psychiatric hospitals may not match prisons in freedom and comfort, and modern hospitals also require patients to do light handiwork, much like prisoners operating sewing machines. A convict may leave prison after a few years, but many psychiatric patients may never leave the hospital—their release needs the consent of doctors and family, not a judge’s sentence.
Most diseases are an inevitable genetic diversity of our species in evolution. Human skin color and appearance vary widely; why should other differences be surprising? Every organism carries heredity and variation: we resemble our parents yet differ from them. We inherit many genes from our parents, yet many variations arise in our own environment. Some variations affect our health and happiness, others do not. These variations mean each of us carries mutant genes; some are simply nonlethal, while others may threaten our health and lives.
When we view these questions scientifically rather than morally, we become calm. We no longer grow angry over behaviors that differ from ours because of others’ biological traits; we understand these as natural phenomena of their biology. If they may harm us, we can simply take measures to protect ourselves, with no need for bad emotional reactions.
Once knowledge accumulates to a certain level, our cognition and state of mind are transformed. We no longer measure others’ conduct by simple standards of right and wrong; we ponder the biological mechanisms and natural laws behind it. This makes us less easily aggrieved or impulsive, more understanding of others’ actions and sympathetic to their constraints, helping us reconcile with the outside world. Once a person is at peace with the world, they no longer suffer so much.