[Avodah] eye pains on shabbat

[harchinam]

> In a recent daily halacha from ROY they discuss eye pains on shabbat.
> The gemara considers it
> choleh she-yesh bo sakanah because the eyes are connected to the
> heart. The question is that modern  doctors dont know of anu
> connections between the eye and the heart.
>
> ROY answers that nishtanu hateva (IMHO dont understand how the anatomy
> of man could change - though ROT takes it for granted that changes
> happen every few decades). So ROY paskens like chazal against modern
> medicine.
>

 Interesting. But I see a different definition for the words nishtanu hateva
than you are using.

We know that "modern medicine" is not a finished book; we are discovering
new things about nature and how our bodies work all the time. Just recently
it has been posited that insulin resistance/diabetes has a causative effect
on Alzheimers, for instance. We constantly discover things that prove Rambam
and other sages were correct that didn't make proven sense to us before.

It is not that the physical teva changed necessarily but that our
understanding of it changes constantly according to what we are able to see
with our own eyes [or our researcher's eyes]. I would not find it beyond the
realm of the possible to say that we may yet find some eye disease that is
connected to the heart -- as a matter of fact we know that gum disease has
now been linked with heart disease so why could we not find out that some
eye disease is also linked to the heart?

*** Rena
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