Six Blind Men, The Elephant, Disease, Pattern recognition and Medicine

There is a well-known story about six blind men and an elephant. When we recount this tale, it is crucial to understand that these men were not ignorant, nor were they stupid or uneducated. These six blind men represent every one of us.

How so? The story reveals that each person possesses their own analytical abilities, and they analyze based on the patterns they have access to. The first man, encountering the elephant’s tail, perceives a pattern like a rope and declares the elephant to be like one. The second, feeling the trunk, accesses a pattern reminiscent of a snake and concludes the elephant is snakelike. The third, pressed against its side, feels an immense, impenetrable barrier and pronounces the elephant a wall. The fourth, holding a leg, senses a pillar and says the elephant is like one. The one holding the tusk is convinced that the elephant is like a spear. The last, touching an ear, discerns the pattern of a fan and decides it is a simple, obvious fact.

Were these men uneducated? Absolutely not. They perfectly discerned what their particular pattern represented. They were performing expert pattern analysis. The challenge, however, is this: when you do pattern analysis, your observations and conclusions are entirely constrained by the singular pattern you have access to. This is what happens in our own lives. We view any subject through the lens we possess, from the viewpoint of the pattern analysis we are best at.

An economist examines a scenario through one lens; a biologist, another; a physicist or space scientist, yet another. What are these lenses? Consider our five senses, the first set of lenses we are born with. Each sense is a lens for pattern analysis. The perception of hot and cold, for instance, is an analysis of vibrational patterns. You feel an object’s vibration. If it is still, absorbing your own vibrations, you call it cold. If it vibrates intensely, transferring that energy to you, you call it hot. This perception is pure pattern recognition.

The same applies to smell, taste, and hearing. Hearing interprets vibrational patterns from the world. How do we know a tiger’s growl represents danger, while a bird’s song signifies safety? We have done pattern analysis. We have seen these specific patterns emerge from contexts of threat or peace, and so we draw our conclusions.

Even language is about creating and understanding patterns. We, as humans, have learned to code patterns based on our needs and desires for communication. On the other end, someone must decode them. In technology, we call this a codec. Life and education themselves are about pattern understanding: recognizing patterns, coding them, and decoding them. When I write an essay, I am coding, creating patterns on paper or on silicon, increasing its entropy. When someone reads it, they decode those patterns to understand my meaning. Our survival is built upon this cycle of creating and decoding entropy, this dance with patterns. Our life itself is an interactive dynamic pattern !

So, how is the story of the six blind men significant to our lives? Let us view it through the lens of medicine.

From an allopathic perspective, analysis focuses on symptoms, the primary patterns for diagnosing sickness. A homeopathic doctor, however, asks a different set of questions, performing a different pattern analysis to reach a conclusion. An Ayurvedic doctor views the same disease through the balance of vata (signaling), pitta (processing), and kapha (storage), seeking a root cause in harmony and often ignoring the surface symptoms. This is his method of decoding.

Similarly, a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine, or Siddha, or Unani medicine, each operates with their own codex. Based on these codexes, they decode illness.

Who, then, is the best? Here we hit the wall, just as with the blind men. If you ask which blind man was correct, the answer is none of them, individually. They were only right in a limited way. Only when they synthesize their learnings, uniting their individual truths, does the bigger picture emerge. Together, united, they are right. Divided, they are wrong.

The same holds for us. Viewing health solely through allopathy, we may miss something. Viewing it solely through homeopathy or Ayurveda, we may ignore vital elements because we consider our own system the best. The belief that Traditional Chinese Medicine is "old and perfect" can also be flawed logic.

The key is to respect the pattern analysis of others. We must respect analytical frameworks that have endured, grown in following, and persisted. There is truth in them to embrace. This is why holistic medicine is vital. Yet, today, many so-called holistic practitioners, when asked about allopathy, dismiss it. They say they follow Ayurveda, or TCM, or homeopathy, but not allopathy. If you exclude allopathy, how can your practice be truly holistic?

The same problem exists within allopathy. Many allopathic doctors possess a pride of modernity, a belief that they understand everything. Dismiss Ayurveda or other traditions as pseudo-science, convinced allopathy is best.

But if allopathy were truly the best, our global reaction to COVID-19 might have been drastically different. In fact, many alternative medicine practitioners delivered better results. Why? Because they had access to age-old pattern analysis, passed down through hundreds of generations, containing the lived experience of countless epidemics. That knowledge informed them that such cycles come and go, and they addressed it with herbs, medicines, and lifestyle practices. Allopathy, in its arrogance, often dismissed these approaches for lack of clinical trials.

This arrogance led to certain vaccines and medical steps that backfired. I am not stating that allopathy failed, but its arrogance cost us dearly.

The central point is this: no single system is the greatest. Medicine itself is what is important. To embrace medicine holistically is not to embrace only allopathy, or only Ayurveda, or only homeopathy. Choosing one and letting others go is the very antithesis of holism.

We must understand this from the perspective of the six blind men and the elephant. Recognize your weak spots. As an Ayurvedic doctor, if you do not understand allopathy, you need to study it. As an allopath, if you do not understand Traditional Chinese Medicine, you must give the benefit of the doubt to a practice millennia old. Take time to understand it. Question why it works. Study its success stories. Endeavor to comprehend its paradigm, for each of these practices originates from a different one.

When the paradigm shifts, the interpretation shifts. Often, the underlying science is the same, but the framework changes everything. That is the key.

When we consider the six blind men and the elephant, we realize that in medicine, if we were to embrace all six perspectives, our final conclusion would be dramatically and drastically different from, and infinitely richer than, what any one of them interpreted alone. It would be a picture of the whole elephant, finally seen.