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