kelley, love, I know you are a smart cookie and can produce many anecdotes supporting your case, but so can I. Unless we can do some systematic comparision of medical profession to other professions (here and abroad), we can drop such anecdotes without convincing each other.
Let's also not forget what I've been arguing here.
1. I was not arguing that doctors are not incompetent or do not make mistakes. I was saying that, *given the nature of medical practice* doctors are probably no more incompetent than members of other professions, not that US doctors are more incompetent than their foreign colleagues. However, people often apply unrealistically high standards to medical practice, and then bitch that such standards are not achieved. It is as if you were mad at your porker that it cannot fly.
2. The access to and organization of the health care systam is a far more important factor affecting public health than treatment. Treatement deals mainly with sickness and there are far fewer sick people than healthy people. By contrast, access to preventive care and services affect entire population and is a key factor in public health. What is more, outcomes of any treatment are never certain as, say, outcomes of architectural design. That is simply dictated by the limited knowledge of human body we have. By contrast, access to service is much more more predictable and controllable.
Thus, a little effort in preventive care can have a much greater effect on the state of population's health than a valiant effort in the treatment.
3. Conventional medicine bashing has become a favourite blood sport of people who, for the lack of better terminology, I call newage quacks and crackpots. If you do not know who I am talking about, visit a "health food and alternative medicine" store in your area. Do notak take me wrong, I like those places and see nothing wrong in buying herbal 'remedies.' However, this is avery slippery slope, at the end of which we can find catholic ideologues proposing "natural" methods of birth control, AIDS deniers, or unscrupulous quacks oferring snake oil to desperate people who seek help.
wojtek