Science is our new religion, the savior that will rescue us from all human problems. When the managed care industry set out to eliminate waste from the delivery of health care, it asked doctors to define quality medical care. We answered, and continue to answer, in the language of science only. Science has won and the art of medicine has lost, or at least it has run out of money. For science, what is real is only what can be counted or measured.
Physical reality is the only reality.
Science reduces an object to its parts in order to study it. In doing so, it often loses sight of the whole. So scientific medicine tends to reduce people to bodies and bodies to their parts. Disease has meaning only as an enemy to be fought. The science of medicine focuses on the biologic fact of disease, the art of medicine on the patient's experience of illness.