"Alternative Medicine" users rely on friends and family for advice

[Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema]

Note that although this fascination with herbal remedies purports to be
an alternative to soulless academic medicine, and a return to something
more authentically natural, it totally fails, in practice to approximate
the knowledge of a traditional herbal healer in a pre-modern society.
Such shamans also were often the religious figures in pre-modern peasant
societies  and are as much the precursors of modern science as anything
else. By contrast, modern people who rely on gossip for pointers on
taking what are, in some cases, really potent drugs are into something
quite different.

Christopher Rhoades Dÿkema

Kevin Robert Dean wrote:


> Mayo Clinic Rochester News
> Tuesday, July 10, 2001
>
> http://www.mayo.edu/comm/mcr/news/news_1663.html
>
> Herbal Product Users Rely on Friends and Family Rather
> Than Physicians for Advice
>
> ROCHESTER, MINN. — A survey of Minneapolis-St. Paul
> adult residents found that those who use herbal
> products to treat or prevent an array of health
> conditions appear to rely predominantly on family and
> friends for information, according to an article in
> the July issue of Mayo Clinic Proceedings.