> Doug writes:
> > On Aug 8, 2006, at 12:50 PM, Andy F wrote:
> >>
> >> Vaccines and germ theory have nothing to do with Western medicine?
> >
> > Evidently epidemiology & public health don't either.
> >
>
> But this reasoning flips the consideration. The question is not whether
> "western" medicine contributed to public health, but whether it has
> unique claims (over "alternative" methods) for doing so. Hence, your
> showing that 'western' medicine contributed to vaccines, germ theory,
> epidemiology, public health does not make the case against 'alternative'
> medicine. What you need to show is that 'western' medicine is the sole
> contributor to these issues, or equivalently, that 'alternative'
> medicine did not. For unless you can demonstrate such uselessness of
> 'alternative' medicine, how else can you write "NO ALTERNATIVE"?
Could you identify who is arguing that western medicine is the sole contributor to public or any other kind of health? The original article made no such claim -- quite the opposite -- I sure don't, I don't think Doug did (even if he thinks it). Wojtek maybe? I'm really in the dark here.
> I wrote: "alternative" remedies are stolen by establishment medicine and
> claimed as one of its successes. The last bit above does not say that at
> all. For instance, it does not address my underlying point that some of
> the successes offered in favour of establishment medicine are ideas that
> were discovered and appropriated from "alternatives" **AND** therefore
> these successes demonstrate the usefulness of alternatives, and IN FACT
> not that of establishment medicine.
I don't think I understand the bit about establishment medicine stealing alternative remedies. Should establishment medicine ignore remedies that might work? Not even examine and test them? If you are talking about pharaceutical companies scooping up traditional knowledge of, say, turmeric, patenting it, and preventing the people who practiced and preserved the knowledge in the first place from using, well sure, that's manifestly unjust. But in that case you're talking about capitalistic medicine, not western medicine. Would you object to Cuban (or any other nominally or otherwise socialistic) researchers -- who I would guess are pretty mainstream in practice -- devloping something from ayurveda and releasing it into the public domain? Would you consider this theft?
-- Andy