the world’s greatest thinkers including the writer Aldous
Huxley and the biochemist Linus Pauling, PhD (the only
person to win two unshared Nobel prizes) 3 .
And today, more than 50 years later, the medical
community lacks the tools to embrace the “everybody
is unique” paradigm. The current state of the industry
prompts three questions. Where did our current medical
“one size fits all” approach come from? How effective is
it if we develop medicines for Mr. or Ms. Average? And
if it is not, how could we move on to a more effective
approach?
The answer to the first question revolves around the
tendency to aggregate populations of people and average
things into a single number (or set of numbers) that may
not be representative of any individual. If other industries
used this approach they would go out of business fairly
rapidly. Imagine if the clothing industry only offered one
size fits all.
The time in Western history when we became interested
in dealing with populations of people and stamping
Here are pictures of 12 real stomachs in
contrast to the “textbook” stomach at the
top of the page. The real stomachs neither
look alike nor do they operate alike.
This figure from You Are Extraordinary by Roger J.
Williams, PhD. (1967) originally taken from An Atlas
of Human Anatomy, Barry J. Anson, PhD (1957)
W.B. Saunders Company.
22
HeadW ise ®
|
Volume 7, Issue 1 • 2018
out something that could be sold to entire populations
was of course the Industrial Age. Perhaps by no small
coincidence, the field of modern statistics also was born
around the same time – roughly 300 hundred years
ago. In medicine, an average representing an aggregate
population would allow one to scale and manufacture
therapies for everyone. For this reason, virtually all
clinical trials for therapies including drugs and medical
devices, are still analyzed on aggregate populations.
However, the paradigm of Mr. Average has had
enormous clinical (as well as social and behavioral)
consequences for humans who are outliers. If the
population contains a high degree of individual variation,
then any average number that is close, but maybe
not close enough to be clinically useful to any given
individual, is obviously a problem. For this reason a high
degree of individual variation poses a serious problem
for the healthcare industry. 4 For example, discovering
and developing custom-made pharmaceuticals targeted
to a single individual’s biochemistry and that person’s
particular variation of a disease is not as simple as