The public health vs. bio-medicine debate is not nearly as obvious and clean-cut as you make it, though the people who originally argued for PH's dominant impact did so understandably, coming off an age of medical triumphalism.  See Simon Szreter, "The McKeown Thesis: Rethinking McKeown: The Relationship Between Public Health and Social Change," James Colgrove, "The McKeown Thesis: A Historical Controversy and Its Enduring Influence," Bruce Link and Jo Phelan, "McKeown and the Idea That Social Conditions Are Fundamental Causes of Disease," featured in "Health Policy and Ethics Forum" in American Journal of Public Health, vol. 92, no. 5 (May 2002), 722-32, which add some nuance to this.  I can send the full text if you don't have AJPH access. <div>On 8/8/06, ravi <<a href="mailto:gadfly@exitleft.org">gadfly@exitleft.org</a>> wrote:<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> 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:       <a href="http://www.peta.org/">http://www.peta.org/</a> GreenPeace: <a href="http://www.greenpeace.org/">http://www.greenpeace.org/</a> If you have nothing better to do: <a href="http://platosbeard.org/">http://platosbeard.org/</a> ___________________________________ <a href="http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk">http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk </a> </blockquote></div>