> I'm with you there. Capitalist medicine has a lot to answer for. But
> so does "alternative" medicine.
Yes, indeed. There is a lot of exciting, fresh thinking about health and medical intervention that goes down in the "alternative" world. Unfortunately, many interesting alt concepts go largely untested because the major health institutions are not much interested in funding research into non-drug or non-high tech solutions to problems. I won't say most but certainly too many alt "professionals" get excited about what seems to them to be the great potential of a non-mainstream approach, develop an untested protocol, then prescribe it to unknowing patients. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they don't. Occasionaly they are fatal. Of course, alt docs kills nowhere near as many people as allo docs. Still, the bottom line is that anybody who wants to take an alternative approach needs to be careful. There ARE many, many good alternative practitioners doing a lot of good for people. But hucksterism is rampant in the alt world and it is all too easy to get pimped.
At least the mainstream kind of
> science relies on publication of evidence and reproducibility of
> results.
There is much more good research backing a lot of alt ideas than I think is generally realized but yes, you are, in the main, right.
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.
There has been a lot of good, highly suggestive research done on oxygen and nutritional therapies in Europe by some big names, and increasingly, nutritional strategies are being studied in the states. Also, curiously, there have been a lot of good papers on magnetic therapies developed by sports doctors in the states(many athletes swear by magnets). But, yes, absolutely, more needs to be done.
Right now, their
> purveyors come on shows like Gary Null's and tout their magic cures,
> with no outside audit of any kind.
I think what's needed is an open admission by these practitioners declaring that they are not infreauently working only from analogy, what appears to be common sense, observation, and experience. Clearly what prevents some alt practitioners from doing this is ego and arrogance.
> 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.
>
>
Yes, that is too bad.
Chris
>