Quantum medicine: going to the origin of the disease

The “quantum” concept has enormous prestige. It is the closest thing to the philosopher’s stone in our civilization. It is the promise of absolute knowledge. For ordinary people, a quantum physicist is a medium who can see a hidden world that explains the reality that we see and touch.

For this reason, when the adjective quantum accompanies the word medicine, it acquires a new dimension. The quantum medicine it would be the future that would leave behind any other form of treatment. And there are already many doctors or therapists who claim to practice it. Unfortunately, in many cases it is nothing more than a marketing pitch.

What is true quantum medicine?

It would be the one that applies the discoveries made by quantum physics. According to it, on the most intimate, deepest scale of reality, particles are in two places at the same time (superposition). They communicate with each other regardless of distance or barriers between them (entanglement), and can disappear in one place to reappear in another (teleportation).

These behaviors –as proven as the law of gravity– are bombs for our minds accustomed to ordinary reality. We live as if this extraordinary world did not exist, and so does conventional medicine.

In fact, there is still a great discussion among theorists about whether the way things work on the smallest scale is mirrored or can be carried over to the usual world of big things.

For some experts, they are different worlds and practically incommunicado. For others, it is the opposite: the quantum world is the basis, the “matrix” without which the big world is not fully understood. If the latter are right, acting at the quantum level would be the most effective way to transform reality.

In medicine it would mean go to the deepest origin of the disorder. It would mean treating in a place that is beyond chemical reactions at the cellular level, which is the battlefield of scientific medicine today.

Quantum phenomena in living beings

For the time being, it seems that the scientists who bet on the quantum matrix hypothesis they are more right than their opponents. Biologists are discovering the quantum basis of phenomena that until now had no explanation.

For example, the bird’s ability to navigate on their migratory journeys is one of the great mysteries of biology.

According to Marshall Stoneham, from University College London, birds – the robin, for example – could literally see, thanks to the qualities of elementary particles, the magnetic fields from Earth, and they would use them to orient themselves on their migratory journeys, as if they were wearing augmented reality glasses.

Quantum phenomena would not only explain abilities such as the orientation of birds, but would also be at the base of the physiological processes that maintain life and health. This idea was already expressed by one of the pioneers of quantum physics, Erwin Schrödinger in his well-known book What is life? (Tusquets Publishers, 1983).

The cells ability to produce energy and the functioning of neurons could be explained by quantum phenomena. Although the production of energy from glucose is a basic process in organisms, classical chemistry fails to explain the incredible speed at which reactions occur.

According to physicist Vlatko Vedral, from the University of Oxford, the ability of quantum particles to be in two places at the same time it would help to understand. This quality would explain why enzymes are so effective in catalyzing all kinds of chemical reactions.

According to Luca Turin, a biophysicist at University College London, the action of neurotransmitters is explained by the electron flow at the quantum level. And it would not be surprising –if they occur in the heart of the neurons– if they were related to the unknown links between consciousness and the body.

Everything is related

Quantum reality would explain phenomena that we have before our eyes and also the holistic functioning of natural and traditional therapies. For authors such as the biologist Bruce Lipton and the physicist Amit Goswami, quantum physics can explain the interaction at very deep levels between thoughts, emotions and cells.

This interaction would make possible the beneficial effects of meditation, visualizations and relaxation techniques, for example. And it would affect processes as determinant of health as the expression of genes.

Bruce Lipton, author of biology of belief (Palmyra, 2007), alludes to the phenomenon of “quantum entanglement”by which a particle (an electron or a photon, for example) is related to others in the same system regardless of distance, obstacles or time.

Thus, when meditating, the state of harmony could spread from the brain to the rest of the body. And not only that: it would also affect the people around the meditator, as has been proven by observing brain activity.

It is possible to heal by resonance

For Lipton, by establishing a relationship between therapist and patient, if the mind –and each one of the cells– of the first is in harmony, it is already producing a benefit in the second. Before you have started any treatment! Of course, this does not make medication, dietary changes, or other therapies unnecessary.

What the quantum world teaches us is that everything in our body/mind is related at deep levels and still very unknown. And the same can be said of the relationships between the body and its environment.

As far as it goes the effect of a thought, a memory or an emotion? We may be influencing and therefore being influenced by the people around us and by shapes, sounds, colors or scents.

In the words of the revolutionary physicist Amit Goswami, “the world is made up of possibilities, not determined events, therefore we can choose health over disease. Neither disease nor cure are entirely objective.”

“Subjective experiences and our attitudes towards them have a role to play. Through creativity, the quantum activist learns to change the attitude that leads from illness to health, and from ordinary health to positive health.”

Do we really need a quantum computer?

But really, everything we can say today about quantum medicine is more close to metaphor and speculation that of a well-established method. Proof of this is that no dictionary has dared to define it.

Those who use the prestige and mystery associated with the quantum to justify absurd treatments also take advantage of this uncertainty (although you never know what effect the mobilization of subconscious energies may have!).

Leading physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists are taking the first steps to develop the first quantum computerwhich will multiply thousands of times the calculation capacity of the current ones.

Perhaps when we are able to build powerful computers of this type – in about 50 years – we will begin to better understand how we function from the quantum level and new treatments will be developed (this is the promise of the giant IBM).

Or perhaps we will advance in the understanding that the quantum computer was already in our possession and that it was our own conscience…