Extreme Variability is Typical Not Normal

Abstract

The theory of medicine is intended to explain the workings of the large number of mutually interdependent complex physiologic networks in the human body and to apply that understanding to maintaining the functions for which nature designed them. However when what had originally been made as a simplifying assumption or a working hypothesis becomes foundational to understanding the operation of physiologic networks it is in the best interests of medicine to replace that assumption with one more compatible with the evidence and determine how the new hypothesis affects understanding of medical science. Normal statistics is such an arcane assumption and we explore some implications of its replacement with fractal statistics and examine the difference between black swans and dragon kings. One implication of the difference is how to relate disease to the loss of complexity rather than to the loss of variability.