Deja first, then Bea:
deja said:
The entire "health" industry is corrupt because it's just that, AN INDUSTRY.
The alternative health business is an industry. Its very lucrative for the people selling diet books, cleanses, ear candles, et cetera.
deja said:
But it cannot be denied that the system is set up and these doctors are taught even in school that pills are the answer to everything. Their mentality is disturbing and I've witnessed this by having conversations with them.
8( If you show up at a general practitioner's office as an overweight, pre-diabetic smoker, they will tell you to exercise, eat a balanced diet rich in unprocessed foods including lean meat, fresh fruits, whole grains, and vegetables, and to stop smoking. The pharmaceutical industry may be all about selling pills, but doctors aren't their puppets. I have never met a doctor who didn't pressure people to live healthy. Docs prescribe pills because people go to the doctors office to get pills, because they believe they will fix their lives.
deja said:
My problem with the nay sayers isn't that I think they are dirty inside or need to flush themselves, it's that they might possibly turn someone away from this cleanse which could possible help them so so so much. I feel it's my duty to come and tell people how beneficial this cleanse can be. And even if the nay sayers thing this is just placebo effect, it still doesn't make sense why they would try to stop it. As you said, placebo effect is very very real. People who are suffering in poor help need all the hope they can get, I've been there, and liver flushing offers this sort of hope.
Meanwhile, people are writing books claiming to cure cancer with a raw food diet--and making millions off of it. People are dieing from orthorexia. Hope has its place in health, but you preach about it to medicine's detriment.
DT said:
I agree with this. If you know how to listen to your body, your insights about how it works will be very valuable to your decision-making process.
The overwhelming majority of evidence regarding the positive effects of alternative medicine is anecdotes about how much better people feel. How can someone distinguish between how their body feels, and how their mind believes their body to feel? Without double blind studies, cleanses--to me-- are just sympathetic magic.
DT said:
The US has a food industry based on "science". Studies show this-and-that is the new wonder food, lowers blabla, is harmful for your health. So-and-so is the allowable amount, X is safe in minimal, these are the allowable amounts. Planning your diet and building your food pyramid around research and studies. It is a totally confused and young eating and healing arena.
We agree. Americans would be better served by eating wholesome food than they are by eating "nutrients" as they are now. That has a lot more to do with the private industry of selling food to people with lots of disposable income than it does with science, though.
DT said:
However, discounting "alternative" health practices as un-scientific and therefore ineffective, is quite irresponsible. To a large degree, this assumes that validation by scholarly work is a pre-requisite to effectiveness. I am quite wary of newfangled inventions towards preventive health. However, I have more faith in traditional or other alternative medicine than Western medicine, simply because time and tremendous anecdotal information to be more reliable than piecemeal studies that do not cite the myriad other variables to be found outside a laboratory.
First,
alternative healing is fundamentally unscientific, because its the alternative to science based medicine. Many practices have been incorporated into medicine that were previously just old wives tales. The difference isn't who it comes from, its what we know about it. For me, knowing how something works is the best kind of knowing.
Scholarly validation isn't a prereq for effectiveness-- it should just be a pre req for people who dispense advice about something as important as health.
Science doesn't ask for your faith in it. It supplies results, and asks you to make an informed decision based on established facts. Faith is for faith healers, and the people who go to them. If this is all that holistic medicine has to offer-- that the sum is greater than the parts-- then it not medicine-- it may be something beneficial, but its not medicine.
DT said:
When only an expert is "fit" to tell you about the status of your body, there is something wrong with the system.
This may just be an impasse, but I disagree. An architect knows more about ho to build a house than I do, even though I live in one. A mechanic knows more about my car, and a lawyer better understands the law.
That you are fatigued, or achy, may be a fact insofar as you experienced it, but its not what is actually happening. That you have parasites in your gut, and that the affliction responds favorably to a particular medicine is considerably more important. So yes, I think somebody who can tell you what's wrong, and how to fix it, reliably and predictably, is more "fit".
Personally, there were so many signs that we had been taught to observe since we were young-- our tongue, our voice, our sleeping patterns, how we feel when we wake up, our hair quality, our poop!
I know doctors-- they are taught the same things. I think you have a distorted idea of what Western doctors do. It is unfortunate that you have encountered so many ineffective people in health care. I think your inclination is to judge western medicine at its worst rather than at its best.
DT said:
"just" is not a good way to describe this. A "placebo effect" of something like a spontaneous remission from an evangelical prayer session is very real even though science cannot figure out why it happened.
The important thing to take away from this statement is that at least science is trying to figure out whats going on, rather than just shrugging when it doesn't happen the other 99/100 times (when terminal cancer kills). That's the ultimate difference between faith and science based medicine.