Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Aug 9, 2006, at 9:15 AM, Andy F wrote:
>
> > I think a
> > lot of people prefer the entertainment of chasing some esoteric diet
> > plan (western or otherwise) than the boring stuff they already know
>
> Yup. Cf. the women's mags with their constant barrage of new diets -
> much more fun than "eat less, exercise more," which is pretty much
> all the dietary wisdom you need.
If you are really lucky in the lottery for metabolism, exercise quite a bit and eat all you want will do the trick. :-)
I think those complaining about the testing of quackery are confusing medicine with capitalist medicine. Given the destructiveness of capitalism, 'standard' medicine really does better than one would expect it to. I would add that educated adults would not let mere anecdotage or random experiences of their own enter into the debate at all, on either side. One cannot only find examples apparently confirming false propositions, one can find innumerable examples confirming false propositions. My guess would be that at a minimum 80% of "successes" of non-trational medicine are instances of the placebo effect (as are many 'cures' achieved by 'establishment' medicine.
The failures and worse than failures of regular medicine are grounded, in the first instance, in the insurance and drug companies, not in either physcians _or_ alternative medicine, and making the division between the medical profession and alternative medicine is to play Socrates's definition of the poor dialectician who, like a poor meat cutter, breaks the bones rather than dividing at the joint. (That is one result of giving anecdotage _any place at all_ in the debate.)
One life-saving discovery of recent decades has been the power of aspirin to prevent stroke. The medicine that I am taking to prevent headache was originally developed for another purpose, and is now available in generic form. One of the results of drug-company power is that most research is focused on _new_ drugs that can be protected and there is little research (and less advertising) on new uses of old drugs. Of course new uses for old 'establishment' drugs is less jazzy than peach pits for cancer! Has someone pointed out in this thread that the major drug companies also dominate many of the alternate medicines!
I wonder how many people die each year because some earlier bad experience with a doctor or a hospital has caused them to search 'outside' for medical treatment. Anecdotage or mere personal experience can kill.
Carrol
>
> Doug
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