> But that is incredibly disingenuous to medicine. You're removing all the things we do incredibly well - to the point where infectious diseases, for the most part - until we reach this disaster warned about in the article we are commenting on - have ceased to be a major burden of disease in the modern world.
Please don't take it this way - I am in no way diminishing the achievements of modern Western medicine. To say that it has saved the lives of millions of people would be a gross understatement and this fact should rightly be celebrated. I was 'discounting' those things only because they are so obvious that you would frankly have to be dumb not to acknowledge them.
Surgery is a more complicated topic of course - someone gave me an example once of a doctor explaining to a patient due for heart surgery operation that they were saving some veins in their body as donor tissue for when they would inevitably be back for a repeat. So, it's not exactly ideal, right? Yet such surgery is proclaimed as a success.
Similarly when the 'cure' involves cutting away parts of the body as a lesser evil (or chemo / radiotherapy which is in a way similar) then there is also much room for improvement?
> For example, when I work in the Emergency Department (Most of my work these days) It is rare for me to 'pick up' a patient that has never had a hospital admission. Most people swing in and out and and out and in and out until one day they don't make it out again. They have chronic diseases caused by a lifetime of either 'just living' or living hard (smoking, drinking, eating too much) and the accumulated damage is BEYOND modern medicine's ability to fix it.
This is the real point that I wanted to get to. You can go a long way with correct nutrition and healthy lifestyle and yet there seems to be relatively little attention paid to it (I don't consider some leaflets in the GP surgery, or an article here and there in the press as adequate attention). And as you said in your earlier comment early diagnosis of a condition before it has chance to really set in and cause irreparable damage. This is not a problem for the individual doctors to solve, but it should be something addressed by medicine in general as well as government policy (and consequently a lot more money than is currently being invested into it it seems). Otherwise what you are doing is the same thing as we call 'firefighting' in IT - constantly fixing up the symptoms and not fixing the root cause of the issue.
And it is here that Chinese medicine could have the biggest impact (alongside Western medicine rather than in opposition to it) with it's emphasis on prevention, in-depth and continuous diagnosis, tailoring the treatment to the individual and holistic treatment of the patient (as an interconnected process rather than a collection of individual parts to be treated or removed as necessary). Uneducated people immediately think of acupuncture and herbs as being what Chinese medicine is about but these are only tools and are considered to be 2nd class medicine anyway compared to preventing illness and enhancing health.
> And it is here that Chinese medicine could have the biggest impact... with it's emphasis on prevention, in-depth and continuous diagnosis, tailoring the treatment to the individual and holistic treatment of the patient (as an interconnected process rather than a collection of individual parts to be treated or removed as necessary).
That is exactly what medical primary care providers do, up to the point of the magical "holistic treatment", where your definition turns muddy. Clearly, doctors understand that the body is an interconnected process. The only difference is the treatments you pay for are actually studied scientifically to validate their efficacy.
>Surgery is a more complicated topic of course - someone gave me an example once of a doctor explaining to a patient due for heart surgery operation that they were saving some veins in their body as donor tissue for when they would inevitably be back for a repeat. So, it's not exactly ideal, right? Yet such surgery is proclaimed as a success.
Given the alternative of dying now, it may very well be a success to get whatever time that surgery has granted them even if they'll need repeat surgeries in the future. As the physician you're addressing said- we would love to grow these people new hearts or entire bodies but our medical knowledge hasn't yet reached that point.
As to the bit on correct lifestyle, you're speaking as if this isn't something that all relevant health care professionals are already preaching. The unfortunate reality is that most of our patients would rather slowly kill themselves than adapt the lifestyle changes we recommend. Even without our input they're bombarded daily with nonstop messaging about how they should be slimmer, eat better, and exercise more. Culture is powerful, and a lifetime of overeating and being sedentary isn't going to be remedied in a 15 minute conversation with a physician despite our best efforts.
>This is not a problem for the individual doctors to solve, but it should be something addressed by medicine in general as well as government policy (and consequently a lot more money than is currently being invested into it it seems). Otherwise what you are doing is the same thing as we call 'firefighting' in IT - constantly fixing up the symptoms and not fixing the root cause of the issue.
I agree with you here, you need to incentivise people who would otherwise not plan ahead. We need to design our cities better, we need to get people more active, we need to improve social supports and interactions so that people's mental health is better. Sadly it doesn't look like much of the world is in a hurry to fix these problems.
I do however completely disagree with you in regard to Chinese medicine, which is, from the position of efficacy, utterly worthless.
Show me a well designed study that proves otherwise and I'll eat my hat, but in my years of study and investigation of alternative medicine the only study I am aware of that showed usefulness of Chinese medicine proved that it was 'time with practitioner' that resulted in the improvement, ie. talking to them about your problems, having a sympathetic ear.
This makes sense because so many problems and hospital admissions are psychogenically driven - people derive great comfort from being able to externalise their existential angst. But Chinese medicine is not medicine. Strip the bullshit and hand waving from it and call them therapists, and go to your Chinese therapist - but don't call it medicine because they aren't treating shit
Please don't take it this way - I am in no way diminishing the achievements of modern Western medicine. To say that it has saved the lives of millions of people would be a gross understatement and this fact should rightly be celebrated. I was 'discounting' those things only because they are so obvious that you would frankly have to be dumb not to acknowledge them.
Surgery is a more complicated topic of course - someone gave me an example once of a doctor explaining to a patient due for heart surgery operation that they were saving some veins in their body as donor tissue for when they would inevitably be back for a repeat. So, it's not exactly ideal, right? Yet such surgery is proclaimed as a success.
Similarly when the 'cure' involves cutting away parts of the body as a lesser evil (or chemo / radiotherapy which is in a way similar) then there is also much room for improvement?
> For example, when I work in the Emergency Department (Most of my work these days) It is rare for me to 'pick up' a patient that has never had a hospital admission. Most people swing in and out and and out and in and out until one day they don't make it out again. They have chronic diseases caused by a lifetime of either 'just living' or living hard (smoking, drinking, eating too much) and the accumulated damage is BEYOND modern medicine's ability to fix it.
This is the real point that I wanted to get to. You can go a long way with correct nutrition and healthy lifestyle and yet there seems to be relatively little attention paid to it (I don't consider some leaflets in the GP surgery, or an article here and there in the press as adequate attention). And as you said in your earlier comment early diagnosis of a condition before it has chance to really set in and cause irreparable damage. This is not a problem for the individual doctors to solve, but it should be something addressed by medicine in general as well as government policy (and consequently a lot more money than is currently being invested into it it seems). Otherwise what you are doing is the same thing as we call 'firefighting' in IT - constantly fixing up the symptoms and not fixing the root cause of the issue.
And it is here that Chinese medicine could have the biggest impact (alongside Western medicine rather than in opposition to it) with it's emphasis on prevention, in-depth and continuous diagnosis, tailoring the treatment to the individual and holistic treatment of the patient (as an interconnected process rather than a collection of individual parts to be treated or removed as necessary). Uneducated people immediately think of acupuncture and herbs as being what Chinese medicine is about but these are only tools and are considered to be 2nd class medicine anyway compared to preventing illness and enhancing health.