Can You Pretend to Have a Health System?
With Miroslaw Manicki and Neshad Asllani
Hopefully, the mercifully low mortality rates with continue on with respect to the many variants that are presenting themselves around the world and circling back to where they had not been found before. Hopefully, we can vanquish this plague more wise and more prepared than before.
The world is reeling from lack of preparation dealing with the demands of nature. The naive nature of human metabolism when faced with wild-type viruses is now obvious. We are only very, very lucky that the pain of this highly infectious agent is not greater.
We have no control over the underlying deadliness of the virus on the whole. Individually, the vast levels of comorbidities that increase the risks felt by some is a huge indictment of national health systems that were once proud and arrogant — the risks hidden to some degree from view. This is not to say that individual pain has not been immense, this is far beyond the direct effects of Covid-19.
What are the requirements of health? James Miller documented this in 1978 and thereafter based on deep consideration by Alfred North Whitehead, one of his mentors. As seen in the following image, living systems exist from the cellular level to the scale of supranational systems.
As a health system cannot be wished into existence, the marvelous and complex relationships among living systems and nature itself cannot be wished out of existence. They must be understood by teams of scientists and students and documented in useful ways, each by them in their areas of study and expertise. Their work needs to be integrated in functional and practical ways.
Although the science is clear, it is not well-known. All is process. Working off of data, such processes have similar characteristics at all levels of scale and in all natural environments. The thing about such data in cells, organs, and organisms is that it is reflected in matter and energy and is breathtakingly efficient — no computer center needed.
The complexity of the task is remarkable. There are three tasks: The first task is to arm the people in question so that they know how to directly apply their knowledge in ways that others can follow using computers — not the guesses of technical staff or automated searches by computers themselves (which is what artificial intelligence is). The second task is to encourage the these groups and communities and to support them in the iterative tasks of recruiting and arming their colleagues in community after community after community.
You cannot average out health issues. That is not the way it works. Sometimes the answers are reflected in the big. Sometimes they are reflected in the small. The third task is that the system needs to be oriented to gather and use the data for every single person. That data is flowing everywhere — we are just not tapping into it. This is what quantum epidemiology is all about, as seen in our book on the subject:
Many problems present themselves in unique environments and systems. Of course, the heart is at the center of this. All needs to be integrated, though — reflecting the minute and nuanced aspects of nature in every case.
The complexity of it all needs to be presented such that it can be used when it is needed. This is difficult for humans, as we have limited recall capacity. This isn’t true of computers. Once the flow of processes is carefully laid out by teams of knowledgeable people, computers can carry them out immediately. There may be tens of thousands of issues that might be raised, but effective organization of technology can reduce effective sessions down to one or two or a few choices in a particular case. Tapping into valid data flows is very important to this.
Such capacity is wasted on much social media and pointless banter. It is time to harness the actions of both people and machines with these in mind.
If it isn’t easy, it will not happen.