- #36
quddusaliquddus
- 354
- 2
Lol...it Is unnerving...did you just take that photo?...
hypnagogue said:Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe I've seen statistics showing that the recent bump in age expectancy is correlated far more tightly with an improvement in global conditions of sanitation than with an improvement in specific medicinal practices (such as invaccination).
quddusaliquddus said: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.
Njorl said: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
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.quddusaliquddus said: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.
swansont said: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.
russ_watters said: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.