Modern medicine is magnificent at one thing: it rushes heroically to the battlefield after the war has already been lost. When the coronary artery is blocked, a stent is inserted. When the pancreas fails, insulin is administered. When cancer erupts, it deploys surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy like heavy artillery. These interventions save millions of lives—and for that, we must be grateful. Yet there is a deeper, more unsettling question we rarely ask: why did the war begin in the first place? Why did the artery harden, the pancreas tire, the cell turn malignant? Why do we wait for a disease to declare itself loudly before we listen?

We have built a civilisation around treating disease rather than cultivating wellness. It is an industry measured in trillions of dollars, driven by hospital beds, insurance claims, drug patents, and procedural billing codes. The patient often enters this system only after the body has already crossed the threshold from balance to breakdown. What is missing is not compassion or technology, but curiosity about origins.

This is where an ancient Indian idea offers a radical lens. Knowledge, we say, is what is collectively known; education is the process of transmitting a small, curated part of that knowledge. But what about everything that is still unknown? What about the vast, invisible ocean beneath the few islands of certainty we inhabit? The sages called this Ajneya—that which is unknowable, or not yet known—the dynamic ground from which all phenomena arise. To mistake our fragmentary knowledge for the totality of truth is the deepest error of modernity.

Medicine today is built almost entirely on what is already known and measurable—blood sugar, cholesterol, tumour size, and blood pressure. However, disease begins long before these numbers of cross-pathological thresholds. It begins in subtle disturbances—in hormones, glands, immune modulation, cellular signalling, and the bioelectric and biochemical whispers that precede loud dysfunction. These early shifts live in the realm of the Ajneya, or at least the ‘not-yet-known’. Our failure is not technological; it is philosophical. Have we designed medicine to listen to the subtle voice of disharmony in the body?

This thought was very much alive when Dr. Sujit Vakkalanka visited me the other day. We sat on the balcony, with a gentle winter sun in the clear sky, and a cool breeze stirring the leaves of the plants around us. The son of Dr. Venkata Ratnam of Kakinada—a legendary diabetologist who has, over decades, observed how quietly the body drifts into metabolic chaos before succumbing to disease—Sujit is a practising hospitalist at Advocate Health in Charlotte, North Carolina. Equally versed in Western medicine and Indian spiritual traditions, Sujit had just returned from a pilgrimage to the Dakshinamnaya Sri Sharada Peetham at Sringeri.

As we spoke about diabetes, heart disease, autoimmune disorders, depression, and cancer, a strange convergence emerged. Almost all of them, Sujit pointed out, begin with disturbances in the endocrine and immune systems—such as insulin resistance, cortisol imbalance, thyroid dysregulation, inflammatory cytokines produced by immune cells, and stress hormones released by the endocrine system, under the control of the brain. By the time glucose rises or arteries clog, the real story has already been written in the glands. We are treating the last chapter as if it were the prologue.

Here is where the convergence of nano, bio, and information technologies can transform medicine from merely a repair shop into a wellness science. Nanosensors can already detect tiny molecular changes in blood, saliva, sweat, and even breath. Wearable biosensors can continuously monitor hormones, inflammatory markers, and metabolic signals. Artificial Intelligence can integrate these streams into a dynamic map of an individual’s internal ecology. Imagine a future when your smartwatch not only alerts you that your heart rate is elevated but also indicates that your cortisol levels have been high for a long time, your melatonin is suppressed, your insulin sensitivity is decreasing, and your immune system is shifting into a low-grade inflammatory state—months or years before diabetes, depression, or heart disease develop.

This is no flight of imagination; it is the natural evolution of what we already possess. But it requires a civilisational shift in intent—from curing disease to understanding wellness.

The legend Sujit brought from Sringeri carries a profound metaphor for this shift. When Adi Shankaracharya arrived on the banks of the Tunga River, he witnessed something impossible: a cobra shading a pregnant frog with its hood, protecting it from the harsh sun as it laboured to give birth. In nature, the snake and the frog stand as natural adversaries—one survives by consuming the other. Yet in that sacred moment, they transcended instinct and became guardians of life.

Adi Shankaracharya understood immediately that this was a place where deeper laws were at work—where the underlying harmony of existence revealed itself beyond surface conflict. That is why he established the Sharada Peetham there, as a centre for the pursuit of knowing the Reality.

Modern medicine seems to have got trapped in surface conflicts—killing microbes, destroying tumours, and suppressing symptoms. These are necessary acts, just as the snake must eat a frog to survive. But the deeper law of life is not war; it is balance. True wellness emerges when systems cooperate—hormones with immunity, metabolism with circadian rhythms, and the mind with the body.

The cobra shading the frog is a reminder that the most profound healing happens when we align with the deeper intelligence of life rather than fighting its manifestations.

Chronic disease creates lifelong patients. But wellness creates autonomy. A world where people are monitored, guided, and gently corrected at the level of glandular and hormonal balance would radically reduce the incidence of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and mental illness. That would be a triumph for humanity.

This is why the idea of ‘to be known’ matters. The future of medicine lies not only in what we know, but in what we are willing to explore beyond our current maps. The Ajneya is not mystical; it is simply the frontier of biology that we have not yet measured. It includes the microbiome, epigenetics, neuroendocrine loops, psychoneuroimmunology, and subtle bioenergetic patterns that shape health long before disease appears.

When Sujit and I spoke that morning, we were not rejecting science; we were calling on it to grow. Western medicine has given us miracles—antibiotics, surgery, vaccines, imaging, and intensive care. But the next leap will not come from sharper scalpels or stronger drugs. It will come from understanding the invisible orchestration that keeps us whole.

The ancient seers understood that reality is layered. What we see is only the surface of a deeper order. To ignore that deeper order is to live in reaction rather than in wisdom. Medicine must now learn the same lesson. The fifth-century poet-philosopher Bhartrhari articulated best the difficulty of dealing with those who possess only superficial knowledge.

अज्ञः सुखमाराध्यः सुखतरमाराध्यते विशेषज्ञः। ज्ञानलवदुर्विदग्धं ब्रह्मापि नरं न रञ्जयति ।।

An ignorant person is easy to please, and a knowledgeable person even more so, but even Lord Brahma cannot satisfy or win over someone conceited by a little knowledge. (Neeti Shatakam, Verse 3)

The age of treating diseases must give way to the age of knowing health and establishing balance. And as nano, bio, and information technologies converge, we have an unprecedented opportunity to make this vision real—not in some distant future, but in our own lifetimes.

The question is no longer whether it can be done. The question is whether we dare to step beyond the small island of what we already know and listen to the vast, silent intelligence of what is waiting to be known.