Nothing Plus Nothing Equals Nothing

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AuthorTopic: Nothing Plus Nothing Equals Nothing
Law Bringer
Member # 335
Profile Homepage #25
I'm likewise baffled. Why do you think biology has not incorporated the changes in physics in chemistry into its advances? It has. The "paradigm" that you seem to object to is the use of drugs, particularly psychoactive drugs. They aren't a paradigm, though. They're the tools that we currently have.

Pharmaceutical research is narrowly focused on pharmaceuticals by definition, but other medical fields aren't all drug-based. Consider radiation therapy, which is very obviously a use of "waves" instead of "particles"! (Note that it also has its drawbacks.)

Ultimately, I think you are disappointed in drugs, particularly psych meds, for working only some of the time and for having devastating side effects some of the time. Drug inefficacy and toxicity are known problems, and they're the reasons we don't all pop pills like candy. Ultimately, though, if they're the best tool then they're used.

Not liking pharmaceuticals is hardly uncommon, but it's also counterproductive. Drugs work better than the absence of drugs on average. We try to find new and better ones and we try to improve the ones we have, both in their effects and in how to target them, but they're imperfect.

—Alorael, who feels compelled to also point out that drugs have a tendency to affect cells by acting as signals. They're obviously not able to alter DNA directly (most of the time), so they make cells do the work for them. That would be exactly the approach you seem to want except for the use of "particles" instead of pure "energy" to do it.
Posts: 14579 | Registered: Saturday, December 1 2001 08:00
Shaper
Member # 6292
Profile #26
[ Wednesday, December 13, 2006 20:10: Message edited by: Synergy67 ]

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A4 Item Locations A4 Singleton G4 Items List G4 Forging List The Insidious Infiltrator
Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00
Off With Their Heads
Member # 4045
Profile Homepage #27
quote:
Originally written by Synergy67:

Has it changed that we still treat disease with knives and drugs by vast proportion?
Other than by chanting over bodies or waving magic wands, I'm not sure what treatments you're proposing. You have mentioned preventatory measures, which probably doesn't get as much research as it should, but mostly because of market forces, not because of some sort of general disbelief in the importance of prevention. If you have an alternative, explain it plainly instead of vaguely asserting that some alternatives exist that are better.

quote:
Tell me the dominant attitude and perspective of this country isn't
Er, you just lost the science there. Now you're talking about culture and media and representations of science, not science as conducted by scientists. You're confounding a complex issue.

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Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens.
Smoo: Get ready to face the walls!
Ephesos: In conclusion, yarr.

Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me
The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever
Posts: 7968 | Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00
The Establishment
Member # 6
Profile #28
quote:
Tell me the dominant attitude and perspective of this country isn't that we are essentially at the mercy of, and the victim of our genes, and that we are stuck with the lot we are handed? Virtually everything I read in the media and hear out of the mouths of my fellow citizen reflect this viewpoint.
Your fellow citizen does not know the difference between voltage and current. Point is the general public have a lot of misconceptions with how things work in just about every scientific discipline.

Most geneticists (and biological sciences) are pretty certain genetics is not the end of the story. Environment affects genetics in a very non-linear and subtle way. Slight changes in diet early pregnancy can lead to significant changes in the offspring, this is fairly well known among researchers in the field.

I would not say biology/medicine has not evolved when it clearly has, perhaps you have a different definition of fundamental, but I can say the same for physics as well. You keep talking about things that work better in vague terms. I want examples. Tell me specifically about medicine needs to be changed.

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Your flower power is no match for my glower power!
Posts: 3726 | Registered: Tuesday, September 18 2001 07:00
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
Profile #29
The reason I object to your absurd nonsense, Synergy, is that you are debasing and misdirecting a legitimate political institution. What is sometimes referred to as 'big pharma' - the interests of established pharmaceutical companies - is indeed dangerous, but on entirely different grounds than you suggest.

Pharmaceutical companies are handed research and subsidies by the government, and with those proceed to produce medicines protected by lucrative patents which cost dozens, sometimes hundreds, of times what they ought to. Those medicines are not only effective, which you ridiculously dispute, but necessary, in some cases as vital a commodity as air or water, and are exploited for millions by big corporations whose largest profit margins are earned on the suffering of man.

HIV/AIDS drugs are generally too expensive for the majority of sufferers to benefit from them, and yet far from reining in their costs, Big Pharma-influenced governments tend to hand more subsidies, contracts, and research to the abusive producers.

Your babble about 'allopathy' is just that - babble. It serves to conceal a legitimate issue: thanks to heavy and inappropriate corporate welfare, the pharmaceutical industry in the United States simply does not serve the mass of people cheaply, effectively, or in a great number of cases at all.

Meanwhile, your infuriating diatribes against physicians also serve to conceal a serious social problem: thanks to the pseudo-private nature of American healthcare, prices are inflated by the oligopolistic insurance market and doctors are forced to charge an arm and a leg to maintain decent profit margins. (It costs an American physician the better part of a million dollars and a decade to achieve her degree. Would you ask her to spend her entire life paying that off?) In countries with state or state-subsidized healthcare, doctors make decent salaries without horribly overcharging their patients, and the only losers are predatory insurance companies.

Your inane blathering paints an obviously inaccurate picture of a violently ill sector. The most malicious effect you have on the disinterested observer is not the danger you will convert them; I admit that risk is small, on account of it would be difficult for a reasonable person to read your pap and consider it anything more than the rantings of an either delusional or deceptive mystic.

On the other hand, someone who seriously takes what you have to say as representative of criticism on the pharmaceutical industry and the state of healthcare in the US will likely come to the conclusion that such criticism is meritless.

While yours certainly is, there is a large body of legitimate criticism of American healthcare - a large and quietly reasonable body often drowned out by nonsense about quantum energy and iatrogeny and outmoded paradigms. It is a body of criticism I take very seriously and I strongly resent your efforts to strangle it with your lies.
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Shaper
Member # 247
Profile Homepage #30
"And a point is that genetic theory has gotten stuck on a premise/assumption that somehow genes drive things as a primary cause, rather than something drives our genes. Tell me the dominant attitude and perspective of this country isn't that we are essentially at the mercy of, and the victim of our genes, and that we are stuck with the lot we are handed? Virtually everything I read in the media and hear out of the mouths of my fellow citizen reflect this viewpoint."

Something does drive our genes. Generally what we eat and the environment we live in affect what genes are transcribed and what proteins are in turn made. Steroid hormones and peptide hormones among other things determine what a response a cell has. Genes would be useless without signals influencing their actions. Genes can be controlled altered deleted and wholly replaced. We are in no way at mercy of what we begin with. Research is progressing to the point where many genetic problems can be partially or fully solved.

[ Tuesday, December 12, 2006 23:29: Message edited by: VCH ]

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The Knight Between Posts.
Posts: 2395 | Registered: Friday, November 2 2001 08:00
Shaper
Member # 6292
Profile #31
[ Wednesday, December 13, 2006 20:11: Message edited by: Synergy67 ]

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A4 Item Locations A4 Singleton G4 Items List G4 Forging List The Insidious Infiltrator
Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00
Off With Their Heads
Member # 4045
Profile Homepage #32
So let me see if I've got this right.

* Diet: This is discussed as a prevention issue a lot in modern medicine. It is an active area of research. I think the basic chicken soup-type remedies are pretty well accepted in modern medicine at this point, too.
* Exercise: Also discussed as a preventative measure. I'm not sure how much it is used in cures, but it may be.
* Sleep: Also discussed as under the heading of prevention. It's hard to prescribe, "Get 9 hours of sleep every night," but doctors do recommend plenty of sleep as part of cures from time to time.
* Breathing: Not sure about this one. I think yoga and the like are recommended under prevention, but I don't think they're part of cures at this point (except for, say, alcoholism).
* Acupuncture: I have no idea what the status of this is.
* Hydro-therapy: Nor this.
* Sex: Also hard to prescribe. I think scientists have investigated it as a means of exercise and emotional balance, which suggests that it could be an effective part of prevention, but I'm not sure what its status is.

In other words, a goodly number of these things are actually part of modern medicine, either as part of a preventative good-health program or as part of cures (or both). Medicine has been investigating the effects of the mental set (emotions, etc.) on physical well-being since at least the '60s.

quote:
Originally written by Synergy67:

What works works, even if we don't understand it. What's plain is what works and the downsides to the approach at the same time. All these can be weighed.
In this, I agree with you. You're not saying anything even remotely new, though. This has been the approach of medicine for at least several decades.
quote:
Originally written by Synergy67:

I thought I made a statement earlier which is also not insignificant: medicine (drugs) use ionizing energy, energy that destroys matter, but does not use energy in constructing.
What on Earth are you talking about? What "ionizing energy"? What does that even mean?

More to the point, it would be very hard to explain how a drug like Prozac — which acts by binding to certain receptors in the brain — destroys matter. A quick discussion with someone more biologically knowledgeable than I am came up with examples like G-CSF that actually help to produce more white blood cells and don't act by destroying anything.

[ Wednesday, December 13, 2006 00:10: Message edited by: Kelandon ]

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Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens.
Smoo: Get ready to face the walls!
Ephesos: In conclusion, yarr.

Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me
The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever
Posts: 7968 | Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00
Shaper
Member # 247
Profile Homepage #33
I don't believe the public needs to know or understand how anything works. That's not to say people can't. But really unless you're really, really into to learning about science you'll always have just a base understanding of how things really work. I'm reminded of experiences in school where you learn something about the cell, or whatever, one year then the next it's like "well none of that is really correct". WTF did I learn it for then lol. If you're a genuine super human genius maybe you now what's what. Otherwise the car works and that's enough I don't have to be a mechanic to use it. I trust that people study and learn things to benefit humanity and make themselves a little cash.

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The Knight Between Posts.
Posts: 2395 | Registered: Friday, November 2 2001 08:00
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
Profile #34
Okay, some of your errors here are so egregrious even I - and I know all too little about biology - can correct them. You're clearly out of practice when you narrow your babble down to specifics.

quote:
Originally written by Synergy67:

Primarily in response to Stareye here...

Is the argument now that the public is somehow en masse wrong and ill-informed in their understanding and subscription to medicine? If so, where do the wrong perceptions come from and whose fault should that be? Who has the most power to remedy this?

So, let's see, some specific alternative ways to address and foster human health include changing diet and lifestyle—perhaps radically—when confronted with disease, putting things into one's body that nourish its ability to heal itself without unfortunate or damaging side-effects which drugs typically have by forcing effect in the body in a more heavy-handed fashion.

There was a dramatic demonstration of why naturopaths' obsession with "strengthening the immune system" is so hilariously inaccurate: people's immune systems are about as strong as they're gonna get. Strengthening it substantially, as accidentally occurred in clinical testing of TN-1412, leads it to try and reject the body's own organs, which results in horrible injury and possibly horrible death.
No physician would argue that you shouldn't modify your diet and exercise to render them more healthful, which you seem to be in the habit of implying. But diet and exercise alone aren't enough to affect a dramatic change in the efficiency of the immune system. If it were, people would die in agony.

quote:
I thought I made a statement earlier which is also not insignificant: medicine (drugs) use ionizing energy, energy that destroys matter, but does not use energy in constructing.
'Ionizing energy' is radiation. It does not destroy matter, but rather does exactly what it says on the tin: ionizes it, thereby rendering it chemically different and usually destructive to the cellular order. No matter is destroyed, but matter is chemically altered by radiation in a fashion that is destructive to living things.

No drug, besides obviously radiation chemotherapy, employs ionizing energy. Either you are an idiot or a liar, because anyone with even a basic knowledge of physics or medicine can understand how hilariously false this claim is.

quote:
This is one approach/paradigm for how best to treat a diseased state. But what if evidence demonstrates to us that there are less co-occuringly damaging and invasive ways to eliminate disease states in the body, if the body is still at a place where it is capable of heaing?
It is one approach/paradigm for how to treat a disease, sure: bombard it with radiation until it's sterile. If medicine did that as a first recourse, boy howdy would I hate on it too. But it doesn't, so your absurd argument falls flat.

quote:
If our bodies are designed to flourish in an environment of certain kinds of nutrients derived from certain kinds of foods,
Our bodies aren't 'designed' to do anything. What are you, some kind of creationist? They do certain things in reaction to certain nutrients, but they're not 'designed' to treat nutrients from one food different from another.

Ask any nutritionist (who, based on your interests, you ought to hold in high esteem) and they'll tell you that, say, refined sugar is basically chemically identical to sugar in, say, fruit. It's associated with none of the side nutrients present in fruit, but it's biochemically identical. This business about certain foods being what we're 'designed' to handle is a ridiculous story operating on false assumptions of how human bodies arose and how they operate.

And if this is true, by all logic we ought very well be reliant on the flora and fauna of the Horn of Africa to survive - for after all, that is where we developed our ability to survive!

quote:
positive mental and emotional states including one's simple sense of security which is going to be fed by your spiritual approach to life among other things,
Really? Most spiritual people I know have a worrying preoccupation with what will happen to them under certain circumstances. I've never met someone who isn't spiritual and holds a ridiculous and damaging belief like if they masturbate they'll burn forever after they die. But, of course, I suppose for you 'spiritual' is basically 'good'. That's because 'spiritual' is another example of a power-word, something without any meaning besides 'good' in context. If it had any other meaning, the statement would defeat itself.

quote:
proper sleep and exercise, how you breathe, avoiding foods and substances which are toxic and distressing to bodily systems,
All good, although I stress that the foods themselves are not toxic or distressing to bodily systems. The substances they comprise, yes. The foods, no. Your body doesn't know peach-seed cyanide from cyanide gas.
quote:
energy work on bodies which can include accupuncture and other manipulations which can effect energetic shifts in body organs and systems
Again, your refusal to define 'energy' is telling here: what 'energy' exactly are you referring to? Clearly some kind of metaphysical force, because no biochemical force is present in 'energy manipulation' as you describe. I will not dispute that some acupuncture works, but not because it manipulates energy, or all of it would work as understood.
quote:
, hydro-therapies (the skin is our largest organ, and even stimulating different areas of our outer covering with hot and cold waters can stimulate responses and shifts in aspects of one's immune system and so forth,)
No it can't. Show me a peer-reviewed study saying it can and we can talk.
quote:
sex is an immune system booster and has numerous health benefits, etc. etc.
Wait, sex is an immune system booster? Sex involves exchanging excretory microbes, which depending on your lifestyle (mostly how many partners you have and how long-term) ranges from benign to an annoyance in immunological terms. This isn't even to mention sexual diseases or the 'spiritual' baggage attached to sex.

quote:
There are lots more. There are multitude practices and bits of wisdom how to effect health all over the world.
When those 'bits of wisdom' prove viable, they are adopted by science; when they do not, they are rejected. On what process do you accept or reject those 'bits of wisdom'? I happen to like the scientific method myself, and a thorough understanding of it and its produce render a lot of your suggestions inappropriate.
quote:
And also many superstitious and spurious ones. They can come from simple experience, and may not require rigorous scientific understanding to be known and employed.
Of course not. You don't need to be an aeronautical engineer to fly a plane - but there do need to be aeronautical engineers verifying the damn thing can fly before you step aboard.
quote:
What works works, even if we don't understand it.
This is true, but you imply that in some cases we can't understand it. In a lot of cases, the 'benefits' from what you prescribe is either from different sources (a balanced diet will not 'boost your immune system' like you seem to believe, but it's certainly good for you for unrelated reasons) or are outright psychosomatic/placebo-based (how, precisely, is water therapy supposed to accomplish anything except making the skin wet?).
Further, 'what works works' is a horrible way to prescribe finding out what else might work.
quote:
What's plain is what works and the downsides to the approach at the same time. All these can be weighed.

I'll say something plainly. I think our drug-based disease treatment system is the predictable result of a modern, industrialized world with unprecedented stressors and toxins and changes in human lifestyle which have brought forth many new kinds of dis-ease to us, but also simultaneously a world in which we want quick fixes for which we are not much accountble or responsible.

Count the reactionary dog-whistles, win a prize. If I may tenderly suggest you look at statistics, which seem to be anathema to you but a boy can dream, I ask you whether our modern, industrialized world with unprecedented stressors and toxins has a higher life expectancy than times when those 'changes in human lifestyle' had yet to occur. For some bizarre reason, even though those stressors and toxins have just been piling on, our life expectancy mysteriously increases over time with the advance of technology! What gives? How can you possibly explain that people living what you broadly refer to as unnaturally live several times longer than their ancestors who ate raw meat and shat upstream from their wells? After all - the latter has less changes in human lifestyle, and certainly has fewer unprecedented stressors or toxins - the stress of disease and e coli are both as old as time!

quote:
If we are choosing to not live in accord with what promotes health for ourselves, even in light of understanding what healthy living really is, do we really deserve to have some magical, convenient fix when the end result is heart disease and cancer? We are just ignoring what creates health in the body to begin with in so many cases.
Uh: I don't get it. Because we don't eat healthily (and we eat better than we have at any period of history, BTW - the diet of the average person in the middle ages or before consisted mostly of a single staple with a few others to prevent serious nutritional diseases), we deserve to get heart disease and cancer? I don't think this'd go over well with a cancer patient. If you deal with them on a regular basis, and I seriously pity them if you do, what do they have to say to this? Do you ever get them to apologize?

quote:
Many of the practices I listed are a lot of seemingly basic and simple and lifestyle-related things which are preventative and regulative in nature, but also useful when a disease state exists.
Most of the practices you list are superstitious hodgepodge which will produce no effect on a reasonable patient and which will do little to stanch the advance of a disease already present.
quote:
If there are non-chemical/forcible ways to get body systems and cells acting in a more healthful way, why don't we employ them more?
Generally, physicians would agree with you on this one; they prefer the less invasive option if the two are equally effective. It's just that you don't care what they have to say. And given that you seem to believe they cure diseases by bombarding them with ionizing radiation, I'm not surprised you feel that way.
quote:
It's a wholistic approach that acknowledges that many disparate things affect our health, and it is our duty to attend to as many of them on our own behalf as we can. We make choices and we have consequences. I am all about personal accountability. So much of what we suffer, we really simply do to ourselves.
I have a peanut allergy. (I was apparently born with it, and there's a history of food allergies in my family.) I guess your solution is to try and guilt the anaphylaxis away when I have a reaction to something, right?
Somehow I find the option less attractive than good old-fashioned allopathic epinephrine, which is the result of laboratory research, a synthetic compound, an artificial hormone, pulls a number on your immune system when you use it, and is absolutely effective at preventing my horrible death by respiratory failure. I've heard it suggested so very often that if I adjusted my lifestyle somehow, I could eliminate my allergy to just about every major plant protein (soy, peanuts, peas, you name it). Yet nothing offers any success. Instead of providing vague prescriptions and trying to guilt me for living in a modern society and hold me accountable for, I guess, my digestive system's laziness with respect to certain proteins, medicine prevents whatever accidental exposure I have with foods you'd regard as healthful from killing me, and it does it without moralizing at me.

You know what sells all of that? Allergies are the result of immune system overreactions.

Holism is hilarious, although I'm really glad it's never going to happen to me.

quote:
I still think it goes even more to human nature, in that we'd rather have someone else take care of us or be authority over us than have that awesome fuller responsibility and accountability to ourselves.
Which is why doctors make a habit of forcing pills down patients' throats instead of giving them full responsibility by doing something like, say, authorizing them to purchase restricted chemicals to treat their problems at will. Those jerks.

Those radiation-spewing jerks.

quote:

-S-

Alec, for what it's worth, for the majority of what you last wrote, I share your outrage and agree with your concerns. Where we, of course differ, is that despite how the public is being raped by the high cost of drugs and health care, it might not be in our overall interest in the long run for drugs to beocome even more prevalent and accessible.

Tell that to polio patients in the third world.

quote:
Perhaps the current distress over how broken the current system is will help drive a retreat to looking more seriously at all the other ways we can take health more back into our own hands and power.
Health IS in our own hands; modern medicine has put into our hands a power to cure our various physical and mental afflictions undreampt-of by past generations. But your holism rejects that based on a fetishistic attachment to orientalist mysticism and an ascientific obsession with 'energy' and the immune system.

For more on the subject of the immune system and naturopathy, this link serves to edify and amuse. We live in an age of progress: the scientific method has proven so fruitful we can classify cranks in advance and accurately describe their absurd beliefs without even encountering them. How much of this fits you to a T, Synergy, and how ashamed should you be of that?

[ Wednesday, December 13, 2006 00:28: Message edited by: The Worst Man Ever ]
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Shaper
Member # 6292
Profile #35
[ Wednesday, December 13, 2006 20:11: Message edited by: Synergy67 ]

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A4 Item Locations A4 Singleton G4 Items List G4 Forging List The Insidious Infiltrator
Posts: 2009 | Registered: Monday, September 12 2005 07:00
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
Profile #36
Yes, we do have the solution in our hands.

That solution is science: we need more of it. Some of those bits of 'wisdom' you mention, like acupuncture, do work, and we're working out why. Once we do, we'll be able to develop new treatments based on the same principle.

That's science for you: Instead of 'If it works, it works', it's an effort to find out and pursue exactly what works. Medicine is an outgrowth of that, and your irrational contempt for it aside, it embraces every positive thing you prescribe.

By your own maxim: if it works, it works, right? If it doesn't work, explain how we managed to get rid of smallpox and (in the developed world) polio, turn what were formerly life-threatening plagues like influenza into minor maladies for healthy people, and extend the human lifespan to close to what appear to be its biological limits.

Medicine, whether you like it or not, works. You might do well to read up on how it actually works, because you don't understand it at all. ('Ionizing energy'? You were making that up; it literally means 'electromagnetic radiation' and saying that medicine works by employing it is literally laughable. I mean, I laughed aloud for the better part of a minute.) Instead of standing firm and proud of your ignorance, you should strive to remedy it.

Pick up the AMA encyclopedia sometime. For what would, based on your worldview, seem to be a tome of vicious exploitation and lies, it sure is internally consistent and readily applicable in the real world, and it makes for a really interesting read.

To wit: Yes, medicine has made mistakes, and so has science, but in the long run it's self-correcting. 'Alternative medicine' is not - demonstratably useless practices like homeopathy and demonstratably dangerous practices like trepanning and supervitamin treatment survive without any particular oversight, whereas few medicines, no matter how effective, last more than a few decades - and if something has severe and adverse side-effects it is usually swiftly recalled. The only cases in which it is not are cases in which the side-effect is less dangerous than leaving the condition untreated, and when that occurs there is no more fervent research than that for an alternative cure to the dangerous one.

What you're basing your contempt for medicine on is a mixture of anecdotes and stereotypes. I have deflated those stereotypes and provided countering anecdotes; in effect, I have challenged your system of belief.

Whether you respond to that challenge or ignore it is up to you. I will, as always, rigorously approve if you choose to pursue the path of self-improvement on the matter.

[ Wednesday, December 13, 2006 00:43: Message edited by: The Worst Man Ever ]
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Off With Their Heads
Member # 4045
Profile Homepage #37
Synergy: You're not talking about science anymore. You're talking about pop culture perceptions of science. Your complaint is not about scientists; it's about the media. That's a completely different ballgame.

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Arancaytar: Every time you ask people to compare TM and Kel, you endanger the poor, fluffy kittens.
Smoo: Get ready to face the walls!
Ephesos: In conclusion, yarr.

Kelandon's Pink and Pretty Page!!: the authorized location for all things by me
The Archive of all released BoE scenarios ever
Posts: 7968 | Registered: Saturday, February 28 2004 08:00
? Man, ? Amazing
Member # 5755
Profile #38
Sticking yourself with needles won't turn you into an acupuncturist.

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quote:
Originally written by Kelandon:

Well, I'm at least pretty sure that Salmon is losing.


Posts: 4114 | Registered: Monday, April 25 2005 07:00
...b10010b...
Member # 869
Profile Homepage #39
Synergy: People take risks and make tradeoffs in life. Some people would rather be smokers and live to the age of 70 than be non-smokers and live to 80. Yes, people should eat less and exercise more if they want to live longer and healthier lives -- but they've evidently weighed up the risks and benefits and decided they'd rather eat more, exercise less and live shorter lives. Why does that bother you so much? For all your talk about personal responsibility, it seems like you're the one who's uncomfortable with people making informed decisions about their own health. Health is important, but it's not the only worthwhile part of life.

[ Wednesday, December 13, 2006 01:35: Message edited by: Immanuel Velikovsky ]

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The Empire Always Loses: This Time For Sure!
Posts: 9973 | Registered: Saturday, March 30 2002 08:00
Lifecrafter
Member # 6388
Profile #40
Skeptic's Annotated Dictionary quote (from 'natural', which read) illustrating a fundamental distinction naturopathy (and, in this conversation, Synergy) fails to grasp:

Just because something is natural does not mean that it is good, safe or healthy. Herbs are natural but they are also drugs when used in the diagnosis, treatment, or prevention of a disease. The chemicals which comprise synthetic drugs are natural. St. John's Wort (Hypericum perforatum) is natural, but it is a drug. Why do some people say that they prefer St. John's Wort to drugs for depression? If someone said that he preferred Irish whiskey to alcohol, we'd think he was confused. St. John's Wort contains hypericin, which inhibits monoamine oxidase, a chemical associated with depression. In other words, St. John's Wort (hypericin) is an "MAO inhibitor". MAO inhibitors are commonly prescribed by medical doctors to treat depression. Other types of anti-depressants have become more popular because they have far fewer side effects. MAO inhibitors should not be used when a person eats substances containing the amino acid tyramine or bacteria with enzymes that can convert tyrosine to tyramine, viz., alcoholic beverages, products made with yeast, aged cheese, sour cream, liver, canned meats, salami, sausage, pickled herring, eggplant and soy sauce. Otherwise, convulsions, extremely high fever and death by natural causes may occur.

Further, for amusement's sake alone:

The present Pope commits an unnatural act every day!

[ Wednesday, December 13, 2006 00:57: Message edited by: The Worst Man Ever ]
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
Raven v. Writing Desk
Member # 261
Profile Homepage #41
The frustrating thing about arguing with you, Synergy, is that you treat debate as a contest of assertions made without evidence, where the strength of your belief in your position justifies it.

As I see it, intelligent debate needs to include:

1) evidence, and

2) discussion of the reasoning used to reach your conclusions.

That's why it can be a learning experience for both parties -- they share evidence, and they share ways of looking at the topic critically.

You don't provide evidence. You make assertions which, as others have commented, use a lot of vague language. You refuse to define things more clearly. And when your reasoning comes under critical examination, you ignore the particularly darning parts of others' posts, modulate your rhetoric and make new assertions, shifting the presentation of your original point but nonetheless just re-asserting it without addressing criticisms. This is no way to debate.

I have backed you up at times in the past, but if you want my honest opinion, you're a cartoon character who has just dashed off a cliff. You might want to jump back before you look down, realize where you are, and plummet into a big chasm.

quote:
Originally written by Kelandon:

What I ended up doing, after that, was telling him that I thought that a bunch of what he had just said was idiotic, and then he unzipped his pants, pulled out some New Age buzzwords, and started waving them around.


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Slarty vs. DeskDesk vs. SlartyTimeline of ErmarianG4 Strategy Central
Posts: 3560 | Registered: Wednesday, November 7 2001 08:00
Agent
Member # 2210
Profile #42
You must mean before the year 2000. Genetic determinism has been proven wrong by epigenetics, the idea that how genes are expressed is partially determined by environmental factors, a person has different genes-- the environment interacts with the genes as they growing causing certain genes to express themselves more if a person does certain things. So creating a better environment for children increases the chance of more favored gene expression. Think on this hard.

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[ Wednesday, December 13, 2006 20:12: Message edited by: Synergy67 ]

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[Edit: Basic chemistry time! An ion is a molecule-like atom or group of covalently bonded atoms. Where molecules are electrically neutral, ions are molecules that either gained or lost electron pairs and are therefore charged. They're central to many reactions and can either react to form new molecular compounds or combine with ions of opposite charge to form neutral ionic compounds. Table salt, sodium chloride, is the iconic ionic compound of Na+ and Cl-. Ions don't inherently cause cell damage; they are, in fact, necessary to life. Some reactions harmful to cells involve ions, but that's because the majority of biochemistry involves ions.]

It's all been said before with varying degrees of rage, but I'll say it again:

Popular opinion is a bad metric for science. Most people don't undesrtand medicine, and their decisions to reject "allopathic" medicine in favor of alternatives isn't scientifically meaningful. People have been deluding themselves over thousands of things for thousands of years. Now is not any different.

Drug companies promote their drugs because they are companies and have profits to worry about. Scientists working for drug companies are understandably concerned about making drugs that work because it's their job. Other scientists, however, are concerned with other things. How about iRNA for gene regulation, or (yet again) NCCAM, which tests the alternative therapies you propose for whether or not they are effective? Most aren't, but the ones that are get more study.

Again, Synergy, you seem to have a belief that science needs to be rejected simply because it is so smugly self-satisfied. That's fine, except one of the most basic and fundamental aspects of the scientific method is skepticism. Scientists try to prove themselves and each other wrong constantly. Science requires verification and failures of falsification to a degree that no other human endeavor matches.

Finally, you claim that our health is far from optimal and a great deal of it is due to our lifestyles. In many ways that's true. We're too sedentary, too overfed, too used to eating unhealthy food (unhealthy for a variety of reasons and components, but yes, unhealthy). We live stressed lives with too little sleep, both of which reduce immune function. It's all true, and in an ideal world we'd fix the problems.

However, most of those aren't medically fixable. Your doctor can't make you eat better. He can't make you sleep more. He can't replace your stressful job with a healthier one. What are we left with? Treatment. If people get sick, deriding them for it isn't useful. Treating them with drugs, acupuncture, or whatever else is effective is better.

—Alorael, who adds a new problem to the list: the fallacy of medical omnipotence. Doctors can't fix Western lifestyle problems. They can only treat the results and make recommendations, and they do both. Everyone wishes there were a better lifestyle solution, but blaming the treatments as inadequate helps nobody.

[ Wednesday, December 13, 2006 09:39: Message edited by: In Times of Tandem ]
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[ Wednesday, December 13, 2006 20:12: Message edited by: Synergy67 ]

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Posts: 1798 | Registered: Thursday, October 4 2001 07:00
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quote:
Originally written by Synergy67:

The quote on the ionizing nature of medicine I can find no further elaboration upon in my notes, and it is one thing I am not personally more familiar with. There was a greater context from which it originated, but I don't have that, so I'll gladly strike that comment as one on which I can't qualify or explain further. I may have written it down poorly or wrongly in some way. The discussion was not about radiation. Is not the general idea of an ionic particle that it is charged and has the ability to split other molecules to form new molecules? I believe it was addressing an aspect of this kind of interaction. But I can't provide any more context, so I will strike it.
The fact of the matter is that that is neither how medicine works nor, indeed, how physics works. Medicine is a lot more complicated than that. If you want to discuss what medicine does, you really do need to learn what it is it actually does first.

It doesn't 'destroy' disease. It might destroy disease cells or suppress certain processes that the disease needs to thrive. Antibiotics kill disease, but they kill it by interacting with molecular components of its cells in a certain way. There are dozens of ways in which it does this.

Your description fits chemotherapy more or less perfectly, which does use ionizing energy and which does more or less destroy cells (it doesn't destroy MATTER, but your assertion there was more confusion as to the nature of physics than anything else). There's a reason that physicians never use chemotherapy unless the usefulness of all other options has been exhausted (including surgery!), and that's because it's pretty brutal, biochemically speaking.

All medicine is not chemotherapy. The belief that it is is ridiculous, and if that's the assumption on which you prejudice modern medicine you really need to do some homework before you wantlessly injure yourself.

quote:
If basic concepts are offensive or seem wrong to anyone's system of thought and belief, fine. It takes a hell of a lot of information and typically also years of gradual shift in thinking for many people to shift perspective. In reality, it usually takes something personally experiental for people to have significant paradigm shifts in their thinking and consideration.

I know plenty of people who have no trouble discussing ideas on the level I converse here without getting irate about the fact that it is not being conducted as a scientific dissertation in a science publication. That degree of nuts and bolts detail is great to read on one's own when one is more interested in the full argument.

You're creating a straw man. I am not 'offended' by this; I have simply stated that unless you can make your case with a degree of intellectual rigor you need to reassess why you're making it.

quote:
So, if I appear to make less than fully qualified statements, it's because I never intended to in the context of how I care to discuss ideas. I' m not trying to change anyone's belief. I don't believe it really ever happens through this level of dialog. That would be rather naive to expect. I present ideas and bits of informations and perspectives in the interest of dialoging with those who might be open and familiar with the topic. I really have zero interest in proselytizing the unbelieving and uninterested. The fact that I offer such things in a very young environment where the preponderance of partcipants are a rather geekily skewed lot suggests I might be wasting any effort to have such dialog here. The friendly or familiarized voices to some such alternate viewpoints are few and far between. I'm not even a glutton for punishment. So when it quickly bogs down into intractible and impossible positions, I won't waste my time futher. If something resonates, great. If not, that's fine. It's not my mission or ability to convince you.
'Geekily skewed'? How patronizing.
And unlike you, I believe in what I am talking about enough to take joy in the prospect of proselytization. Science is a beautiful thing and the more people are familiar with it, the better.

Just because you don't have the energy to address everything I have to say, which I understand, doesn't mean you can ignore any of it. I've made a lot of forceful points; whether or not you consider this a debate, it'd probably be best to reconsider why you believe what you do in light of them.

quote:
I can mention one source for some of the basic dialog I have been referencing on genetics, if anyone is actually interested. Bruce Lipton, who began as a cell biologist at the University of Wisconsin's School of Medicine and later performed pioneering studies at Stanford University's School of Medicine. He has a book titled, "The Biology of Belief" which elaborates on how what we can term "perception" is our genetic determinant. How you take in and perceive information from your environment through your senses and processing is determinant in the genes that are activated and selected in your body.

I'd be about ten times more interested talking with people here about concepts of approaches to health another decade or two into their life. It is a very different experience discussing things with people who have lived longer, who are more steeped in experience than in collegiate knowledge. There is a very different mindset one cannot have till one has a longer-reaching perspective and experience of life. People get more interesting the older they get, at least potentially. They also tend to have greater capacity to mellow out, lighten up, expand, or let go of things. There's a reason our soldiers and Hitler's brownshirts are teens and twenty-somethings. There's nothing wrong with being any age. I'm just commenting that I'll wager the arguments and perspectives coming out of many mouths here will sound startingly different in even another decade.

My father is older than you and he is the direct source for 90% of this. Then again, I suppose his life experience doesn't count because he's a physician.

quote:
I love details and explanations, and they are important to me and in my process for deciding how viable a thing is for consideration. I am not here to dig deeply into any one of them., Others have done he work and have commented on it 100 times better than I will ever be able. I am not a scientist, and I don't need to be to be concerned, interested, capable, and informed beyond a certain degree to make reasonable observations and decisions for myself. We all have a threshold of burden of proof upon which we ally with a perspective.

These things are worthwhile to discuss with people who have arrived at a place where they are interested in other paradigms. It is not worthwhile to serve as proof or argument for the fixed skeptic, It might as well be arguing religion or politics.

Yes it is! Unless what you believe can weather skepticism, it isn't worth believing, damn it! You might not convince me, but the least you can do is rebut me, or anyone else in this discussion!

quote:
As a one with a philosopher's musing upon things, I am looking at the bigger picture I perceive, which is the nature of what we believe and choose to embrace, whether science or mysticism. I observe the behaviors and parameters of various approaches to life and systems of believing or requirements for proof, and there is much that can be said on that process.
Once more, I stress that you are not a philosopher, and any student of philosophy would be insulted by your claiming to be. Philosophers offer concrete defintions for terms, which you do not. And when you do, your definitions are contradictory with reality and one another.
Just because you maunder like a philosopher doesn't make you one. Like Slarty said, sticking yourself with needles doesn't make you an acupuncturist.

quote:
So, if we can be so humble, let's recognize, that when it comes down to it, at some point we have made a decision to invest our faith in some person, some system, some organization, some dogma, some theory, becase we were not there, we did not investigate the matter or personally create the "proof." We are trusting in the integrity, sincerity, infallibility, and accuracy of someone else who has gone before us. We can examine what goes into the decisions human beings make in whom to trust. How we do things is in many ways more significant than the mere what we do. Every person has surrendered faith to someone else at some point. It's just a general point to ponder when it comes to the things we have gravitated toward and may come to deeply invest ourselves and our belief system within.
I will admit I exercise a degree of faith, but that faith is based on experience, like all reasonable faith. When I am sick, medicine makes me well; the same is true of everyone I know. Whether or not I am up to a higher standard than you is irrelevant: what matters here is that my faith in science is justified and your faith in naturopathy is not. If you ask me to justify my faith, I can do so all day; when I ask you to justify yours, you try to escape in an ink-cloud of misapplied physics jargon, and when that fails start complaining I have faith as well.

quote:
qb[]What amuses me about the scientific sort, is so often they like to describe themselves and what they do in objective, mechanistic, seemingly superhuman terms. They seem to have little acknowledgement of human nature and fallibility in the processes of science, as if by virtue of having a scientific attitude, they are above the pitfalls of being human. I don't buy the scientists as gods assertion. They are just as riddled with ego, limited insight, fallibility, dogmatism, selfishness, even fraudulence, as any other kind of human being. It's beyond me why we choose to trust the scientists and their institutions more than politicians or lawyers, who are also very sincere in their belief that they do what they do is for truth and the betterment of humanity. [/qb]
Because there's no one scientist doing all of what we know. Yes, they're egotistical, limited, fallible, dogmatic, selfish, and fraudulent; they're human. But the entire point of science is a system by which human failures are reduced out of the equation as much as possible. No one man developed the antibiotics or the epinephrine I use, but they were developed by a long, wide committee of flawed human beings doing their best work to study objective data.

For that matter, allow me to ask you: you're all of those things too, and unlike a scientist you do not offer a paradigm on which to judge or falsify your work. Why should we treat what you believe on the same level as science, let alone with preference to it?

quote:
Alec, if you actually demonstrated a shred of the compassion and respect for your fellow human being you appear to value in your views in some fashion, your words, argument, and perspective might have some actual weight. You fail to come across as someone who really cares about sick or starving people in Africa, when you can't even treat the people around you in your own country with respect or dignity.
My dear Synergy, were you starving I would be just as enthusiastic about your basic human right to eat as I am about attacking your ridiculous beliefs. This is not only an ad hominem attack, but a dumb one.
quote:
I call that fraudulent. You attack in others on a large scale (the cold-hearted and selfish behavior of the pharmaceutical industry, let's say,) what you do not demonstrate on even a small scale in your own environment.
I am not a Kantian, Synergy. I don't believe in crap like universal maxims; for me, what works works. I am capable of fighting both the cold-hearted and selfish behavior of the pharmaceutical company and the false congeniality and warmth of your cultish babble, both of which have limitless potential for abuse of hapless victims.

quote:
I have also noted, Alec, that you continually lump me in with persons, beliefs or categories I have not mentioned. I am not a proponent of homeopathy, for instance, but you keep refering to me as such. In your mind, evidently, certain categories of people all get lumped together automatically.
Hey, if you're gonna believe in one worthless nostrum, how am I supposed to know you don't believe in another? Like I said, Synergy, you don't have a falsification process. How am I supposed to know you're not a homeopath? I'd say that I respect you more because of that, but honestly, it just seems like a matter of random chance you don't believe in like-cures-like and the memory of water.

I never specifically called you a homeopath; I just said that naturopaths believe in stuff like that without falsifying it. I didn't claim you believe in trepanning either, I'm just saying that's the kind of nonsense you get in the absence of a scientific process of falsification.
quote:

Again, that kind of accusatory and derisional systematic categorization of your fellow human being betrays your real attitude toward others. It's not fair. It's not really interested in nuance or actuality. It's interested in gross labeling and mockery. Whatever, dude. It's tired, and it only wins support from the similarly discriminatory and hateful. You disrespect me by categorically lumping me in with some perceived belief system you carelessly equate with any number of other things.

And you disrespect me by boiling everything I have to say down to 'disrespect'. I am a bitter, disrespectful little man, Synergy, but that doesn't change the fact that I've torn your absurd belief system a new hole. If you want to ignore that, it's your loss, not mine.

quote:
If anyone wants one more basic, simple, but vital example of what we should be doing to maintain our health? Walking. The lymphatic system, unlike the circulatory system, has no heart to pump its fluids. The calf muscles pump the lymp fluid through your body, which affects the functioning of your immune system. If you want to be optimally healthy, walk regularly and walk more. The more sedentary we get, the sicker we are going to become.
Walking is good for you, but not for the reasons you describe. As I said earlier, and as you seem to have ignored, the human immune system under normal circumstances operates at the upper limit of its healthy parameters. 'Strengthening' it will do nobody any good.

Walking is good because it is cardiovascular exercise, which strenghthens the heart, burns calories (usually the American diet includes more than we need), and strengthens muscles used in day-to-day life. The immune system has nothing to do with that.

quote:
As to the point that we are living longer than ever, this may be true for many reasons. We are are living in a generation where it seems virtually every American child has allergies. A generation back, when I grew up, a child with allergies was a relatively rare exception.
Something is changing. We have been eroding the constitutional integrity of our bodies for three generations now with a toxic diet of processed food and other modern factors which are new. The human species is very resilient and it takes a lot to kill a person. It's been said that it takes three generations to erode the healthy constitution. I predict we are not going to see the same kind of longevity in the next three generations.

I'd prefer to live 80 years with allergies than 40 years without them, thanks. And as for the increase in allergies: allergic reactions are due to the immune system being too strong in respect to certain proteins. What happens when I haplessly consume peanuts or soy is that my immune system kicks into overdrive trying to expel a nonexistent threat and I go into something called anaphylactic shock as a result.

Maybe the modern lifestyle has lead to more allergies, but modern technology can fix a lot of them. My father's cat allergy would have been unassuagable two generations ago, but now all it takes is a single injection. And allergies are not something new; they're as old as time.

quote:
Far more importantly, Alec, you seem to equate quantity with quality, which speaks a lot once again to a person's value system. Which is more important? How many years you live, or the quality of the years you do live? We are dying of a lot of diseases we did not used to suffer from in any significant number. I can't look around me and see that we are enjoying a better quality of life and health overall. I have seen a notable decline in immune function alone in my lifetime.
As I have said before, 'immune function' is not an appropriate meterstick for health.
As for quantity versus quality: the reason we're dying of heart disease is that we're living to an older age. By all appearances our bodies were adapted to live for a fairly short time, and with modern medicine we've been eking decades beyond our normal limits out. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the developed world, Syn, but not the third world - this is precisely because heart disease is a death for the old and well-fed. And don't make the mistake that they live healthier lives in the third world - it's a harrowing nightmare of disease, pollution, and other toxins and stressors there. The reason they don't live as old as we do and have the chance to suffer from heart disease and cancer is that they don't have the medical care to do so.

That's why organizations like Medicins sans Frontieres exist. Contrary to what you seem to believe, physicians are not a single-mindedly avaricious lot; their first interest is saving or improving life. It's a vocation that is VERY difficult to get into, and that difficulty weeds out those interested mostly in the money pretty quickly. (Seriously: if you were in it for the money, why would you even put up with the 8 years of education and half-million dollars of debt?)

quote:
I am sorry you have a deadly allergy to peanuts. Of course I have great compassion for anyone in that boat. I'm not going to try to predict how or why you wound up with that ailment. I have no way of knowing specifically. Generally, we wind up with such compromises to our immune function through the passing on of systemic conditions and weakness from the environment (and therefore genes) of our parents and the generations before them. Maybe your mother encountered something toxic and damaging during her pregnancy which damaged or compromised a part of your fetal development. Who can say? It's happned to all of us in some fashion.
That's pretty doubtful, especially considering the prior family history. All I know is that at the end of the day, what you recommend doesn't work (peanuts and soy would be healthier for me, in dietary terms, than what I eat to substitute them out, e.g. meat) and what medicine recommends does.
By your own paradigm, you know what that means, right?

quote:
It's not about blaming you or those who went before. So much occurs in ignorance, and at times, things beyond our control like coming into contact with destructive toxins. The point is, we who have so much knowledge and awareness are the ones who can make choices to change behavior to get the pendulum swinging the other way.
Well, if you want to do good for the world, start doing studies on this. I have no doubt some of what you believe is true, but the only way to make sure is to conduct studies set up in a scientific fashion (double-blind tests, falsifiable hypotheses, etc.). That's what makes it any different from mere belief - the weight of evidence.

quote:

It might or might not be possible for you specifically to overcome your allergy in your lifetime. The choices you make with your health, attitudes, and lifestyle will affect the genes you pass on to the next generation, if you choose to have children, and I seem to recall you stating you have no such intention. We can give our offspring a step up or a step down from our own lot, and we have more ability to change even our own lot than our current culture has given us credit for. We are still steeped in victim and deterministic mentality, even if science is moving beyond it.

What we do with our health is ours, as we decide whether to live in harmony with how our bodies optimally thrive, or against it. All our choices have consequences, whether we are aware of them or not, whether we care or not. The body is not forigiving of either our ignorance or willful disregard. Tragic, yes.

The laws of nature are not moral. They do what they do. If you want to spend your life ingesting soda and saturated fats and simple carbohydrates against the requirements of your body for optimtal health and functioning, it's not about right/wrong/blame/deserve. Your body will manifest the degree of health you have furnished it. We can't control what we are handed by birth and much of what we are given or taught in childhood. We can control what we do in adulthood for the rest of our lives.

-S-

See, you have a lot of good ideas, but the problem is that you have no idea why you have them. Take soda, for instance. It's bad mostly because most people have too much sugar to begin with; something like diet soda, on the other hand, is basically harmless, but I don't imagine you'd agree with that.

Proper nutrition is vital, and so is exercise. But there are other solutions for disease that we must pursue at the same time. A healthy body requires both internal strength and the lack of disease, parasites, or malfunction - each of which can be reached most efficiently by the tools offered to us by modern medicine.
Posts: 794 | Registered: Tuesday, October 11 2005 07:00
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quote:
Originally written by Synergy67:

So, Alo, I'm in concurrence with what you just wrote. I am not against scientists or science. They are the ones who have done so much of the work I see as more helpful and hopeful than allophathy has been, for instance.
Let me rephrase what I said so you no longer agree. Allopathic research has led to great advances in medical understanding and treatment. Alternative research has mostly led to nothing. There are occasional treatments that work, but it's been left up to the allopathic scientists to figure out why and what else can be done.

quote:
I resist dogmatic attitudes wherever they are found, whether in science, religion, or psychology. I question the values that may drive science and technology. Things often get done because they can be done, not because it is better for us that they be done.
But your opposition to the current standards of medicine seems pretty dogmatic to me. If you don't understand how and why it works, how can you legitimately reject it?

There are two values that drive research. One is the bottom line, and that takes precedence in industry. Pharmaceutical companies aren't trying to make the world a better place, although their work often does. The other side, which I'd argue is really the more important side, is basic science. Figuring things out because we can leads to most real advances in medicine (and other fields).

quote:
I believe we have many such alternatives available and a great number of ongoing discoveries and exploration in this regard, thanks to science as well as to long-held practice. I believe we could be well-served to open up our vistas for consideration of a wider range of treatment for ourselves than the prevailing paradigms encourage.
But here's where you need to be a scientist. You are no more qualified to judge where the frontiers of medicine are than I am to determine the most promising future prospects of particle physics. It's the MDs and PhDs doing the research who are in the best position to know where the research should go.

I'll admit that most medical professionals have a knee-jerk rejection response to alternative medicine. Not all of them, though, and it's the ones who study homeopathy, acupuncture, and other alternative medicines in a serious and scientific way who are doing what you wan. All too often, though, the results aren't glowingly positive. Many therapies have no effect beyond placebo, which is not worthless but also not medicine. Some therapies have definite negative effects, because compounds ingested are drugs no matter how natural they are.

I'm willing to concede that there could be untapped knowledge in alternative medicine. It's not there in all alternative medicine, though, and there is known potential and power in surgery, drugs (including chemotherapy), gene therapy, and the like. Yes, they have toxicities, but those toxicities are known and documented (and part of the push for personalized medicine based on genetics, incidentally).

—Alorael, who would like to know what should be done for cancer, bacterial infection, autoimmune disorders, and so on and so forth. If there is a standard therapy that has documented efficacy, why is that therapy automatically inferior to alternative therapies that don't exist?
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[ Wednesday, December 13, 2006 20:14: Message edited by: Synergy67 ]

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