Alternative medicine...

[Griff]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0
This sums up my views.

 

[thiosk]

Chinese traditional medicine has some grounding in reality, but that is NOT because of energy fields of Chi. Acupuncture is not interacting with your chi flow, because there is no such thing as chi.

That sounds strange. You say something involving vague ingredients like tiger claws, rhino horns and cow urine does have some working, and then you bash another branch of shamanist/folk healer rituals doing exactly the same for not working.

How can two identical things both work and not work? Especially if the one that alledgedly works has zero proof and zero reason to assume it would work.

I must specify, not ALL chinese traditional medicine involves that. Acupuncture, which I specified in my post, has a long history of inexplicably working.

Yeah, the tiger claws rhino horns and bear bile, no thats garbage.

Some. Aspects. Nothing in any traditional medicine that is thought to "improve stamina" is of any value. You can swallow all the goat testicles you want, but viagra is gonna work a lot better for you. There is a significant amount of spending involving the chemical analysis of many of the non-retarded ingredients in chinese medicine, which is a complex and varied herbology.

 

[similar.squirrel]

Using plant extracts isn't quackery. It hasn't been adequately researched, is all. From what I've heard, the Chinese haven been doing for a lot longer than Westerners, so their efficacy may have something to do with local physiology as well.

Homoeopathy and eating tiger dicks, however, is still nonsense.

 

[CM156_v1legacy]

I knew a bloke who tested "alternative medicine" for a science fair project. He went to 10 doctors with a problem (A actual problem, mind you). 8 prescribed the same drug. The other two prescribed a similar drug in the same class of drugs.

He then went to 10 "alternative medicine" shops with the same problem. The result? Every single one told him to do something different. Two were even contradictory to one another.

 

[PhantomEcho]

Medicine? Medicine in general makes me raise my brow. Why? Because I know some 'medicine experts'. I know some geniuses up there in their pharma-corps, and just EXACTLY how much brains they've got going on.

Let me tell ya what, if you had half a clue the kind of shit they put in those pretty little pills of yours and call them 'medicine'... well... you'd probably drop over dead. Of course, you might just drop over dead anyways, from taking the things... but hey.

That's the price you pay for 'wellness'.

Sadly, I signed an NDA. So I can't say anything. Or rather, I won't... because I'd like to continue doing business with these folks.


But hey. Don't take my word for it. I would never ask anyone to do such a thing.

But I'm just as disgusted by modern medicine as I am distrustful of the old school herbalism route. It's all quackery and half-baked science, if you ask me. Because there's never a time that potentially killing 20-goddamn percent of your user-base is acceptable.

That's a game of Russian Roulette I refuse to play.

It's the internet. You are essentially anonymous here. Will you put some proof out here, or continue to skip around it? Modern medicine does seem to work, and since it does, I really don't mind what the put in it. After all, most antivenoms are derived from the venom itself.

Here's the problem. I'm -not- a scientist. I'm Division Manager of a distribution company which purchases medicines in bulk. All my job entails is meeting with the scientists and executives over at these corporations in order to hash out details. Things like how much of Drug X Hospital Y will need to stock up in order to last through an average month.

I have no scientific background. Even if I gave you all of the evidence I have, I lack the knowledge base to back it up. You could take one look at it, deny everything I said, and it wouldn't matter. Because I wouldn't understand a word of it anyways.

Moreover, I have no interest in convincing anyone that avoiding medication is the right path to take. I didn't reply to this thread in order to do so, I simply replied to it in order to share my opinions based on what limited knowledge I have, given to me by people working for the companies I do business with.

That I said anything at all is perhaps in the hopes of inspiring at least one person to look a little deeper than the surface to decide how they feel about medicine in general. It has MANY uses, and good effects... but those uses aren't limited to modern medicine. Does modern medicine outstrip most herbalism remedies? Well, sure. But modern medicine also kills over 100,000 people every year, right here in my home state. That's not including malpractice, misdiagnosis, and patients lying about their symptoms.

My job is to make the decisions about what drugs we buy, and how much. In that time, I've made friends with a good number of the folks I deal with. The basis for my personal mistrust of modern medicine is a personal one. I have lost many members of my family to bad drugs and medical malpractice.

My choice to avoid medicine of all flavors, however, comes from the information I have gained working with the pharmaceutical companies responsible for making them. They release blood-pressure drugs that are known to cause deadly blood clots. They release depression drugs and anti-anxiety medication that cause symptoms not entirely unlike schizophrenia. They release drugs to treat headaches that can cause aneurisms.

If a 'medicine' has a side effect, but only 18% of a test group over 2,000 demonstrates it, then the company can safely omit this side effect in their advertisements and their journals. They all agree that it won't likely ever come up in federal testing, so they just don't list it. If it does come up, well... then it gets listed as a 'rare but serious side-effect'.

Each year, companies like the ones I regularly do business with spend right around a quarter of a billion dollars (average) lobbying the FDA. They use friends in high places to push medicines through testing which haven't actually undergone comprehensive testing, with a promise to complete their testing suites once they have established a presence in the market. This testing usually never happens.

Every day, you hear about a new drug being pulled... a new drug being found to be dangerous.

The reason is because they're -all- dangerous. Any time you go dicking around with body chemistry, you're taking a calculated risk. Modern medicine is no better, in this regard, than ancient herbalism. It's all a calculated risk.

And I don't rightly care if you choose to put your faith in medicine, or herbs, or acupuncture, or whatever you please. That's your right.

But since this was a thread asking what we think?

I think it's all a crock. And I'll stand by my decision.

 

[Alleged_Alec]

But modern medicine also kills over 100,000 people every year, right here in my home state.

Firstly, and I hate to ask this, but: source? There are many reasons why a medicine can kill a person. Knowing the exact reasons why it does so is important.

My choice to avoid medicine of all flavors, however, comes from the information I have gained working with the pharmaceutical companies responsible for making them. They release blood-pressure drugs that are known to cause deadly blood clots. They release depression drugs and anti-anxiety medication that cause symptoms not entirely unlike schizophrenia. They release drugs to treat headaches that can cause aneurisms.

As has been said before: any drug with an effect has a side effect. It's almost impossible to work just on a single pathway, and even if you'd do so, there are still things that can go wrong without the correct dose.

Every day, you hear about a new drug being pulled... a new drug being found to be dangerous.

The reason is because they're -all- dangerous. Any time you go dicking around with body chemistry, you're taking a calculated risk. Modern medicine is no better, in this regard, than ancient herbalism. It's all a calculated risk.

I'd disagree slightly. Most drugs are only dangerous in extremely high dosages, or under quite specific circumstances. I could use the same logic that every time you travelled to the shop to buy food, you are taking a calculated risk.


My credentials: not too much. Third year biology student (Utrecht University).