Why we need to reinvent the wheel

Taureef Mohammed

STUCK inside the elevator that takes me up to a geriatric medicine clinic in a hospital in Ontario, Canada, is a picture of a medicine wheel, the same wheel that is part of the famous Toronto sign in Nathan Phillips Square. In both places, the wheel seems like an anomaly.

The medicine wheel is an indigenous symbol, dating back thousands of years.

It is a template through which indigenous people view the world. There are various designs and interpretations, but the underlying principle is the same: everything in the world is connected and follows a cyclical nature. Farmers and fisherfolk know this well.

The wheel in the elevator was coloured and divided into four quadrants: north (white), south (red), east (yellow), and west (black), each corresponding to a different stage in life, and its connection with the natural world.

“The North, where the snow, the colour white, reminds us of the hair of our elders,” writes Dr Jennifer Grenz, author of Medicine Wheel for the Planet: A Journey Toward Personal and Ecological Healing. “The place we draw not only upon their knowledges but, most importantly, upon their wisdom. A wisdom missing from modern ecology.”

Every stage of life – birth, youth, adulthood, elder, death – is given equal importance on the wheel. Leaving out a stage or minimising it ruins the wheel and disrupts the cycle. We depend on the natural elements – fire, water, earth, air – to live; without them, there is no life. Every human has four parts: physical, spiritual, emotional, and intellectual. The wheel makes perfect sense: harmony, balance, motion. And had it still been in motion, had it not felt like an anomaly in the hospital, perhaps practising medicine in 2025 wouldn’t be as emotionally draining as it can sometimes be.

The reductionist kind of medicine that we practise today is antithetical to the medicine wheel. A result of scientific advances particularly in the mid-20th century, our reductionist approach to medicine simplifies the human to a physical machine that operates according to a set of biomedical principles.

Of course there are innumerable, indisputable benefits to this approach: antibiotics, insulin, vaccines, anti-retrovirals for HIV; life-saving interventions like coronary angiograms; sensitive diagnostic tools for early detection of diseases like cancer. But it has also come at a cost – the human has been lost.

Modern hospitals operate like assembly lines where patients are reduced to their bed number and diagnoses. To regard a patient as anything more than a collection of physical ailments – to look at the other three aspects of the medicine wheel – is inefficient, and perhaps immeasurable, so why even bother? To catch a glimpse of the human at least once in a day is a victory for a doctor who is struggling to keep up with the assembly line.

There is a darker side to reductionist medicine. Nothing turns out more profit in medicine than the reductionist approach. Despite what their efforts in customer service may suggest, private medical companies – hospitals, diagnostic services, the pharmaceutical industry (including natural health) – practise and promote reductionist medicine wilfully.

Look at their advertisements – they all promote medicine as a purely physical problem to be fixed. TV shows and the media have also played their part in promoting a simplistic, reductionist kind of medicine, sometimes ignoring nuances that may not fit well with their lifesaving or tragic stories.

The effects trickle – this is probably an understatement – into the examination room.

On the part of patients, expectations may not always be right. Hearing that a doctor actually cannot fix the problem comes as a shock many times. Death is also out of the picture – it can be aborted.

And in the case of doctors, especially us young ones who get carried away sometimes with signals from the machine – I got a pulse! – navigating the human – an ambiguous, complex being who is more than a pulse – becomes difficult.

By encompassing more than just the physical, the medicine wheel provides a more comprehensive and realistic framework than reductionist medicine. In a 2024 article in the journal Frontiers in Public Health, Tammy Greer and Jennifer Lemacks, researchers from the University of Southern Mississippi, described what the wheel provided:

“Medicine wheel orientations toward seasons, the natural ebb and flow of light and dark, the cyclical nature of everything, provided…an understanding of where humans were in that cycle, allowing for necessary preparations for what was to come and, improving predictability and, ultimately, survivability.”

In 2025, reinventing the wheel might be just what we need.

Taureef Mohammed is a physician from TT working in Canada

E-mail: taureef_im@hotmail.com