Thank you for your history of the various kinds of medicine. It helps to have an understanding of how various attitudes in medicine develop.
It has always bothered me that allopaths tend to be so critical of anything that doesn't fit their playbook. Especially when someone starts shouting "quack." Now, with the web, it's easy to find alternative approaches to health problems. Yes, some of the suggestions may be less than helpful, or may mean buying a bottle of pills online which may or may not work for you. But the element of choice is important in healthcare.
The term alternative medicine makes a slight nod in the direction of other healing modalities, but as far as I know, that branch of medicine doesn't seem to be growing very fast.
And finally, I have always been annoyed by the tendency to term some results the placebo effect. Personally, I don't care if I feel better because of the placebo effect or my imagination. The important thing is I feel better.
I really wish the allopaths could get away from their checklist mentality, running through the checklist of possible causes of a problem and when they check off everything that isn't the problem, simply declare the patient has nothing wrong with them. Their job is to find the cause of the patient's problem even if the cause doesn't show up on a standard of care checklist.
Family practice physicians with good patient-physician relationships go beyond checklists and keep looking until they find out what is causing a patient's problem. One reason why they are so successful at this is they know the patient well, and probably knew the patient's parents and grandparents. This is knowledge that escapes AI because it never sees the light of an electronic medical record system.
Physician expertise is based on the ability to remember one incident 30 years ago. The EMR and AI have no access to this physician expertise and they are all the poorer for it. And so is our healthcare.
I'm a firm believer in science based medicine but I have had good outcomes being treated by osteopathic physicians with a combination of typical Western medicine and osteopathic manipulative medicine.
Interesting, and I have always felt the same. I was surprised, therefore, by this fairly convincing counterpoint to the existence of the placebo effect:
Thank you for your history of the various kinds of medicine. It helps to have an understanding of how various attitudes in medicine develop.
It has always bothered me that allopaths tend to be so critical of anything that doesn't fit their playbook. Especially when someone starts shouting "quack." Now, with the web, it's easy to find alternative approaches to health problems. Yes, some of the suggestions may be less than helpful, or may mean buying a bottle of pills online which may or may not work for you. But the element of choice is important in healthcare.
The term alternative medicine makes a slight nod in the direction of other healing modalities, but as far as I know, that branch of medicine doesn't seem to be growing very fast.
And finally, I have always been annoyed by the tendency to term some results the placebo effect. Personally, I don't care if I feel better because of the placebo effect or my imagination. The important thing is I feel better.
I really wish the allopaths could get away from their checklist mentality, running through the checklist of possible causes of a problem and when they check off everything that isn't the problem, simply declare the patient has nothing wrong with them. Their job is to find the cause of the patient's problem even if the cause doesn't show up on a standard of care checklist.
Family practice physicians with good patient-physician relationships go beyond checklists and keep looking until they find out what is causing a patient's problem. One reason why they are so successful at this is they know the patient well, and probably knew the patient's parents and grandparents. This is knowledge that escapes AI because it never sees the light of an electronic medical record system.
Physician expertise is based on the ability to remember one incident 30 years ago. The EMR and AI have no access to this physician expertise and they are all the poorer for it. And so is our healthcare.
I'm a firm believer in science based medicine but I have had good outcomes being treated by osteopathic physicians with a combination of typical Western medicine and osteopathic manipulative medicine.
Interesting, and I have always felt the same. I was surprised, therefore, by this fairly convincing counterpoint to the existence of the placebo effect:
https://carcinisation.com/2024/11/13/a-case-against-the-placebo-effect/?ref=thebrowser.com
Thank you. I’ll have to come back to this when I feel fresh, early in the morning…