> Except that what Ravi writes isn't true.
>
> These are quotes from the article that started this - by a prof at
> the Harvard Medical School - it doesn't get more establishment than
> that:
Doug I think the western medicine/alternative medicine is a personal hot button issue for both of us. And I suspect that it is largely shaped by personal experience. You have had friends and family members that were harmed or nearly so by alternative medicine. I, on the other hand, have had disastrous experiences with western medicine in the last twelve years.
This is not a black/white issue. "Western medicine" is a big mouthful that embraces a lot of things: those who support it see antibiotics, miraculous surgeries, and modern dentistry; those who reject it see capitalistic pill pushing, high tech torture for the terminally ill, palliative medicine that doesn't treat root causes, and more.
Perhaps we can agree that there are all kinds of quackery and that neither being anti-western medicine nor having a degree from harvard is, in itself, a guarantee of good science. We both went to grad school and we both know plenty of idiots who went to grad school and who got degrees and who can prove all kinds of stupid stuff. I spent a couple of years doing basic research in prostaglandins in an obstetrics & gyneacology lab. The results of that research determined oxytocin dosages administered to women to force labor, and I know for a fact (cause I was in the lab every day), that at least half the data was faked.
"Science" takes place in the real world; it is carried on by real people who are motivated by greed for money, fame, or security as much as they are motivated by respect for truth. To shout "science" through a megaphone does not obviate these realities. You will argue that bad results will be disproved by other labs running similar tests, but that's not quite how it works. First of all, there is not always money to fund parallell research; second, a less prestigious lab will feel pressure to duplicate the results of a more prestigious lab; third, a lot of "research" is funded by drug companies who have vested interest in the outcome of experiments and in the interpretation of data. There have certainly been plenty of stories about data that has been suppressed and about people who have died as a result.
I also have problems with the ideology of western science. To take two examples
-- its drive to disarticulate the body and to treat one part as if it existed in isolation from the other parts (its lack of ecological sense and its dismissal of psychological factors follow from this approach).
-- its bent to essentialize and universalize the subject of medicine, not being willing to understand that the universal subject is a construct of the mind rather than an actual given. Since differences in age, sex, race, etc. actually require different medical treatment, this has resulted in gross mistreatment and misdiagnosis.
I also have a problem with a concept of medicine as that set of buttons we push that should magically restore a body that we have insulted in every conceivable way -- with drugs, stress, poisons, indolence, etc. It seems to me that most of medicine/health should be synonymous with the way we live rather than with what happens after we get sick.
Anyway, I think that it's a waste of time to get into these two legs good; four legs bad arguments. But if anyone is interested in discussing some of the notions I mentioned above....or anything else....clearly these are issues that will affect all of us...
Joanna