>Sorry, Doug. I don't swallow any line coming out of quack. My own
>feeling is that drugs and high technology have their place but that
>NO doctor should EVER turn to drugs and high tech FIRST to solve a
>major medical problem UNLESS there is extremely compelling evidence
>that the drug will "work" without any serious or life threating side
>effects (and even when they do not have immediate serious or life
>threatening side effects, they often have a destructive cumulative
>effect). Just as a matter of ethics, the simple questions should be
>asked first. Unfortunately, doctors, for all their smarts, are not
>trained to ask the simple questions first. In any case, one needs to
>maintain a healthy skeptecism of BOTH mainstream and alternative
>types. There is certainly plenty to be skeptical about.
I'm with you there. Capitalist medicine has a lot to answer for. But so does "alternative" medicine. At least the mainstream kind of science relies on publication of evidence and reproducibility of results. The alternaquacks, as far as I know, don't. When my uncle was dying of prostate cancer a few years ago, his wife took him to a now-dead doctor named Emanuel Revici, one of the gods of quackery, who charged him $500 for a brief consultation and a few bottles of unspecified potions. He died not long after, of course. What was in those bottles? God knows. What was Revici's success rate? Only God knows that too. I'm entirely willing to believe that there are all kinds of nutritional and nonorthodox therapies that work very well - but they need to be studied openly and rigorously. Right now, their purveyors come on shows like Gary Null's and tout their magic cures, with no outside audit of any kind.
The excellent writer Tom Athanasiou told me a few years ago he was thinking about doing a book, half of which was a critique of orthodox medicine, and half of which was a critique of the alternative kind. He realized, though, that while each half might have a big audience, together the book would have almost no audience. Too bad.
Doug