Sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad. Sometimes it's hard to know. Suppose a child in America gets Polio because its parents refused to let it have the vaccine? Would that be a good thing or a bad thing?
> Particularly in these days when coporations increasingly define what
> medical problems are worth investigating and what treatments are worth
> pursuing.
I agree that is a big problem. Especially since the awareness of corporate dominance is eroding popular support for a lot of programs (research, vaccines, etc. golden rice would be an example, though I don't mean to start a war about that) that probably produce more social good than harm.
> Some people have a set idea that western medicine is empirically based
> whereas alternative medicine is not. I don't think that's true. So, I tend
> to react to the alternative medicine=anti-science argument
Whenever the alternative medicine crowd get funding to do some research, then obviously they are doing empirically based research. But when I go to a party and the woman sitting next to me tells me that crystals healed her arthritis, then we are back to the kind of medicine that was widely practiced in the 1500s.
--Lawernce Krubner