On 8/8/06, ravi <gadfly at exitleft.org> wrote:
>
> At around 8/8/06 11:00 am, Doug Henwood wrote:
> > On Aug 8, 2006, at 10:37 AM, ravi wrote:
> >
> >> What you are talking about above is a result that may demonstrate that
> >> professional-racket medicine is more successful than hippie-medicine
> and
> >> placebos. Well, if so, why not? Billions are spent on
> >> professional-racket medicine, not to forget (as I mentioned), that
> >> professional-racket medicine borrows at will (and to enormous profit)
> >> from hippie-medicine (tribal remedies, ayurveda, etc). One would expect
> >> it to show better results.
> >
> > Life expectancies continue to lengthen, people are healthier than ever
> > (despite getting fatter), cancer survival rates are up. If that's not
> > success, what is?
> >
>
> But greater improvements in life expectancy and health were achieved
> through public health (which has nothing to do with Western medicine or
> the doctor-drug-company-complex) than modern pills. BTW, aren't cancer
> rates up too?
>
>
> > It'd be great to separate the money from the science in medicine, esp in
> > the US, where it is indeed a racket. But the hippie stuff isn't much
> > different. I recall some quack diagnosing my father with a
> > cytomegalovirus infection - which is a pretty safe bet, since CMV is
> > ubiquitous - and prescribing $100 infusions of vitamin C as a cure.
> > Fortunately, he didn't bite. People like Gary Null are hardly exempt
> > from the moneymaking trait.
>
>
> Doug, I am afraid the old adage applies: the plural of anecdote is not
> data. Gary Null does not represent alternative medical processes (do the
> 100s of practitioners of Ayurveda even know of him?). Without doubt you
> will meet quacks and parasites as you go about seeking help for your
> health issues. The thing is: the quacks on the alternative medicine side
> are unsophisticated in the quackery. They do not have surveys and
> journals where they can go back and forth in their findings and
> opinions. But one cannot extend to physics (hard science) notion to
> medical "science" (the notion hardly meets any real world test of
> physics itself!).
>
>
> > And I don't doubt there are some useful remedies in the natural
> > armamentarium. But they should be tested rigorously like this NIH
> > program is doing. And the results are pretty often not what the hippies
> > would expect - which I'm sure won't dilute their fervor, since they'll
> > just see the NIH as a front for orthodox medicine.
>
>
> Without needing any "conspiracy" the latter sentence is fairly true,
> isn't it? In the same way that the Biology department at Harvard is a
> front for evolutionism? Hippies borrow cures from elsewhere. Ayurveda
> (or even homoeopathy), for instance, *is* orthodox medicine in other
> parts of the world. And what is rigorous testing? Double-blind tests, it
> seems to me, are meaningless when one can never really attain ceteris
> paribus meaningful enough to generalize? And what of commitments to
> 'active ingredients' in the face of Western/orthodox medicine's own
> findings that many cures can be effected psychologically?
>
> [Apologies if I do not respond further on this thread -- I am a bit more
> interested in the other one on identity politics and solidarity]
>
> --ravi
>
>
> --
> Support something better than yourself: ;-)
> PeTA: http://www.peta.org/
> GreenPeace: http://www.greenpeace.org/
> If you have nothing better to do: http://platosbeard.org/
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