boddhisatva wrote:
> I think people who criticize "Western" medicine on the grounds
> that it is not open to new therapies, and new maladies on which to use
> those therapies, are misguided. The history of medicine clearly shows that
> it has always been open to excessive treatment of dubious merit, pure
> flim-flams and snake oil from the first.
I would agree that this has been true in the past because to treat (and get paid for it) requires a diagnosis and a standard treatment. But, now that managed care is taking over the health care field, the payment paradigm has changed. The HMOs lose money by having to treat someone. The worst experience I had in my search for a diagnosis (which turned out to be fibromyalgia) was by an HMO doctor who kept prescribing anti depressants without doing the work to determine the cause of my physical pain. This was Secure Horizons, a large HMO that takes Medicare patients. Once when I went back to him to complain that my symptoms were getting worse, not better he said "What are you doing back in here?" At that point I disenrolled from the HMO ( you could get out within a month back then) and went to UCLA where I was diagnosed four days later with fibromyalgia. I wrote a letter of complaint to Secure Horizons about how I had not been adequately assessed by their doctor. There answer back to me was that they were not in the business of practicing medicine, that they independently contracted with doctors, i.e., they took no responsibility. As you know, one cannot sue an HMO except in the state of Texas. It was NOT in the interest of the HMO plan to accurately diagnose my condition, much less to treat it. I'm sure you get my drift. This is what we are dealing with today.
Marta Russell
> Look how the supermarket shelves
> are filling with "herbal" remedies inspired by the notion that using them
> somehow pulls one away from cold, capitalist medicine into a warm
> "holistic" bosom. St. John's wart and it's untested, unregulated (now
> specifically unregulated and unregulatable thanks to recent law)
> counterparts are big money makers. Which business do you think
> capitalists want to be in, the business of developing drugs and
> scientifically testing them for tens and hundreds of millions of dollars,
> or the business of digging up a root and making any claim you want about
> it? Do you think Merck spends all that money out of the goodness of its
> heart? Do you think Eli Lilly wouldn't fire all those chemists if it
> could ignore the FDA and the community of *scientific* medicine? You
> think Pfizer would hate it if CFS became a recognized syndrome and a new
> market for an anti-viral drug it's spent millions developing?
>
> The medical community is perfectly eager to give "affirmation" to
> a lot of people who are not physically ill. From people whose noses are
> "too big" to people whose breasts are "too small" to people who think they
> are women trapped in men's bodies - doctors regularly intervene medically
> on people who have cultural, sociological and psychological problems. If
> you claimed you were a fish, you might even be able to find a surgeon
> willing to give you a pair of gills. That doctors embrace, by and large,
> the bourgeois status quo has not limited their creativity. Looking for
> "affirmation" in medicine is a good way to get cut up, drugged and rooked.
> Looking for hard science while keeping an open, skeptical mind (intrinsic
> to science) is the way to get well, absent divine intervention (which,
> while infallible and ubiquitously available, is not always offered in its
> pure form and is therefore unreliable).
>
> peace and good health