Quantum Theory of Health

By Kim Bellard, January 30, 2020

We’re pretty proud of modern medicine.  However, there has been increasing awareness of the impact our microbiota has on our health, and I think modern medicine is reaching the point classical physics did when quantum physics came along.  

Classical physics pictured the atom as kind of a miniature solar system, with well-defined particles revolving in definite orbits around the solid nucleus.  In quantum physics, though, particles don’t have specific positions or exact orbits, combine/recombine, get entangled, and pop in and out of existence.  At the quantum level everything is kind of fuzzy, but quantum theory itself is astoundingly predictive.  We’re fooled into thinking our macro view of the universe is true, but our perceptions are wrong.   

So it may be with modern medicine.  Our microbiota (including both the microbiome and mycobiome) both provide the fuzziness and dictate a significant portion of our health.   

Two articles in Science illustrate how we’re still just scratching our understanding of their impact.  The first, from Rodrigo Pérez Ortega, reports on two new studies. 

The first study found that the genetic structure of gut microbiome was more predictive of health than one’s own genes.  It was especially better for “complex” diseases that are attributed to both environmental and genetic factors.  Gut microbes are impacted sooner by environmental factors and thus serve as better predictors for such diseases. 

The second study found that a person’s microbiome could be used to predict their death 15 years later.  Presence of a certain family of bacteria led to a 15% higher mortality rate in the next 15 years.  Whether the bacteria are the cause of the mortality or a side effect of other factors is not clear. 

The second article was a study from B.B. Finlay, et. alia, that speculated that so-called non-communicable diseases (NCD) might actually be communicable, via the microbiome.  Their paper concludes:  “These findings could serve as a solid framework for microbiome profiling in clinical risk prediction, paving the way towards clinical applications of human microbiome sequencing aimed at prediction, prevention, and treatment of disease.”

Dr. Finlay says: “If our hypothesis is proven correct, it will rewrite the entire book on public health.”

Still, it is too early to get overly excited.   Everyone agrees more research is necessary.  Timothy Caulfield, the Research Director of the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta, warns: “Gut hype is everywhere.”  He acknowledges that this is an exciting field with great promise, but cautions “it is still early days for microbiome research.”  

Think of modern medicine, with its germ theory of disease and its understanding of our body’s biomechanics, as classical physics.  Our recent discoveries about our microbiota are upending our notions about what disease is, what causes it, and how we should best deal with it.  Our supposed precision in medicine is illusionary.  

Modern medicine loves its antibiotics, despite the devastating impact they wreak on our microbiome.  It is fascinated with our genome, despite the fact that our microbiota’s genes greatly outweigh our own, and have more diversity.  Our microbiota change in ways that we don’t understand and, as yet, can’t even really track, much less predict the effect of. 

We need the equivalent of a quantum theory of health.  

Modern medicine is in the stage physics was in the early part of the 20th century, when the concept of quanta was known but the consequences of it were yet to be discovered.  

Modern medicine has had its Newtons, maybe even its Einsteins, but now it needs a new generation of scientists to develop more accurate theories of our health, no matter how counter-intuitive they might be.  

Welcome to a quantum theory of health.

This post is an abridged version of the original posting in The Health Care Blog.