Is Modern Medicine Superior to Traditional Remedies?

[swansont]

For the purposes of this discussion I decided t ohave my own definition of traditional medicine to that which doesn't have the same explanation (of how it works) as that of modern medicine or doesn't necesseraily have a theoretical basis of how medicine works. But rather - it stands on time-tested tradition and experience of it working. The same definition almost applies to modern medicine (for me anyway) but the defining difference is for me is the explanation of how it works.

A problem with "time-tested tradition" is that it's anecdotal. You gobble some herbal remedy and get better, but that doesn't mean the herbal remedy caused you to get better. The body heals itself in many cases, so doing nothing out of the ordinary is often a reasonable course of action (especially compared with some cures based on superstition). That's why homeopathy seems to work - you are doing nothing, rather than doing harm.

Modern medecine isn't necessarily different in terms of what you do, but for medications it's passed the hurdle of double-blind testing to weed out stuff that doesn't work.

 

[jimmy p]

woah Shawn you look like one of my cousin's friends... but he is called Greg...

 

[quddusaliquddus]

The main difference in my mind is not that one is 'airy-fairy' and other clinically proven. It's more that one needs a mechanism to explain how it works - the other accepts anything as a cure as long as it works. One is superficial i.e. is only about getting rid of symptoms (modern med.), and the other is about getting rid of the actual cause of the problem.

Now, the bulet-wound thing. Traditional medicine practioners were well versed in surgery (no longer a live tradition), anesthetics, etc...

 

[quddusaliquddus]

Much of "modern medicine" is actually traditional medicine. Clinical trials are fairly new. Much of accepted medical practice was never tested as rigorously as new treatments are today.

Much of traditional medicine has been subjected to hundreds of years of trial and error. It turns out, even leeches and bleeding, in very rare circumstances, do have beneficial effects.

I think there is a specific type of blood clotting ailment that occurs in injured joints for which there is nothing better than a leech. Still, if a doctor recommended it to me, I'd get a second, maybe a third opinion.

Njorl

I have a feeling Njorl is correct. Surgery, aneasthetics, differentiation between symptoms of very similar deadly deseases, and other major portions of modern medicine originate from traditional methods - whether the source of the knowledge is aknowledged or not. The psychological and physioligocal factors are nowadays specialised by psychiatrists and doctors instead of being taken into account together by individuals versed in both sciences.

 

[ShawnD]

The psychological and physioligocal factors are nowadays specialised by psychiatrists and doctors instead of being taken into account together by individuals versed in both sciences.

Excellent point. Stress causes a lot of problems, but people don't try to relieve stress. Instead, they try to fix the problems caused by stress. Seeing a therapist could probably fix a lot of physical ailments as well as psychological ones, but instead, people choose to see doctors who only try to look after the physical aspect of things.

 

[hypnagogue]

Well, I can't say whether you've seen such statistics, but I wonder how well you can separate the two effects. It may be that doing one without the other isn't nearly as effective as both. Certainly a vaccination isn't going to do much for a child that ends up dying from poor sanitation before the vaccinated disease would have had a chance to kill him or her.

It's tough to draw a valid conclusion without knowing more details.

I found something. Here's a graph that should straightforwardly challenge the notion that age expectency has increased as a result of vaccines:

http://www.healthsentinel.com/Vaccines/Vaccines_files/image002.gif

A more thorough graph would have marked off some salient moments in the improvement of sanitation over the years, but suffice it to say the majority of such improvements came well before the introduction of vaccines. (graph from http://www.healthsentinel.com/Vaccines/ )

Plenty of other links to be found on google on this subject. The net impression I get is that vaccines have not been responsible (hence, not really needed) for the continued decline of the various diseases they treat-- and to compound things, this purportedly unnecessary technique itself can sometimes go wrong and kill the patient, which amounts to doing more harm than good. So there are many parallels to be found here with the critique of traditional medicine (widely held but statistically unsubstantiated belief in efficacy, an overall effect ranging from neutral to damaging, etc.). One important difference is that invaccinations presumably do protect against disease to some extent (ie they are presumably not placebos), even if they have not been directly responsible for the global decline of those diseases.

 

[adrenaline]

I came upon this thread late. I will define modern medicine as allopathic medicine (and incorporate osteopathic as well) vs. homeopathy, naturopathy etc.

Allopathic medicine's one big strength over all the others is its rigorous application of deductive thinking in diagnosisng a disease. It's one big weakness... it sucks when it comes to managing chronic illnesses (things like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, chronic pelvic pain etc. etc.) and I see the other fields as a complementary adjunctive therapy.

For instance, if a 55 year old woman has a headache on the left temporal side, an allopathic doctor will ensure she doesn't have temporal arteritis (inflammatory disease of the temporal artery that if left untreated can cause blindness and is not uncommon as a cause of temporal headaches in 55 yr old patients) before prescribing headache drugs. Now, if the same woman referred herself first to a homeopath, they would not be as vigilante. Now if the same woman has chronic left sided temporal headache due to chronic migraines, accupuncture, biofeedback, nutritional therapy with magnesium and b complex vitamins may be just as successful as the allopathic's treatment.

In addition, only allopathic medicine (osteopathic as well) will conduct the clinical trials in an attempt to ascertain the efficacy of their treatment rather than basing it on empirical reasoning and case testimonials by patients(As someone mentioned, our body has the amazing capacity to heal itself).

Allopathic medicine as we know it is one of the newest "scientific fields" around, which is why it is still experiencing birth pains.

Naturopathic , homeopathic medicine , herbal medicine etc. has been around and practiced essentially the same for centuries.

The practice of medicine using rational or deductive reasoning (which defines allopathy vs. homeopathy based on emperic evidence) has been around since Hippocrates, of course, but look where "rational" medicine got us until just recently? (Blood letting during shock , lobotimizing gay men and aggressive women etc.) But also look at its astounding succeses...the erradication of small pox.

When I say the modern allophathic medicine is new I mean how it is now based on gathering large amounts of data and clinical trials rather than pure "deductive" reasoning and this has only been around for less than a century.



In other words, I think the human body is too complex for one field of medicine to claim monopoly about how to fix it.

 

[quddusaliquddus]

ShawnD:
"Excellent point. Stress causes a lot of problems, but people don't try to relieve stress. Instead, they try to fix the problems caused by stress. Seeing a therapist could probably fix a lot of physical ailments as well as psychological ones, but instead, people choose to see doctors who only try to look after the physical aspect of things."

The lack of a certain vitamin B is meant to cause paranoia! Imagine a person sufferring from that illness - both the doctor and the psychologist will find it hard to pipoint the problem coz both would think its in the mind!

Don't forget - heart attacks are caused by stress (as well as other factors). I think this is a big hole in current medicine - that the stress side of things are hardly handled by the doctors in heart-attack victims.

Hypnagogue:
"I found something. Here's a graph that should straightforwardly challenge the notion that age expectency has increased as a result of vaccines:"

I guess treatment has less impact on the life-expectancy when there are fewer people actually catching the desease due to better sanitation?

The thing is (for me anyway) - I don't consider traditional medicine to be those corner shops. These are a modern development - pseudo traditional. Unfortunately what I consider to be traditional medicine is now almost dead. Unani (Greco-Indian) medicine and maybe Chinese medicine are the only taditions that I am aware of - that is not quiet dead yet. Traditional medicine as it was - was not static but dynamic. Somehow I don't see a chinese herbal shop owner writing-about and developing chinese herbal medicine like the sages of the past had done. That's one of the reasons why I think most of these practices are pseudo-traditional.

 

[quddusaliquddus]

Not even a little bit (and no, 100 years is all you have to go back). Just because there was a treatment, doesn't mean that treatment did anything. What you are calling "tradition medicine" is unrecognizable as such.

How would traditional medicine deal with (for example):

Smallpox?

Appendicitis?

A bullet (arrow) in your chest?

I really think you take it for granted how extrordinary modern medicine is. Things that 100 years ago were pretty much guaranteed to kill you are now either nonexistant or easily treatable.

First of all traditional medicine is very much preventative - I don't
know the statistics but i reckon people living within the philosophy of such a medicinal tradition would have less of these occurring at the first place. Bullet in your chest - easy. You'd be surprised to hear about the sophistication non modern surgery. Small pox had been dealt with by africans, chinese, etc ... by innoculation for thousands of years. The chinese had turned it into an art.