Is Modern Medicine Superior to Traditional Remedies?

[quddusaliquddus]

Statistics show a Lot (millions?) of dollars is spent on treating side-effects of
modern medicine. Which is better - modern or traditional medicine? Why?

 

[enigma]

Modern medicine is the only type which needs to be proven that it works.

I have a friend who got swindled out of several thousand dollars and her illness got much worse as a result of "traditional dentistry". A desperate person is easily swindled. If the cure you're peddling can't be proven to work scientifically, it's garbage.

The human body heals itself naturally. If you get better after drinking boiled dog urine (for instance), odds are it's your body's natural healing, and not the dog urine which was the cure.

 

[quddusaliquddus]

True. But things like acupuncture work (I think) and we'ren't proven to work for quiet a while. The thing is - I don't mean traditional medicine to be medicine that isn't proven. I mean it to be medicine of which the mechanisms might not be explained properly yet - but use over hundreds of years has shown it to work. I almost always expect traditional medicine to be cheaper than modern medicine - if not the same in price. Tradition medicine has never been confined to one or two individuals - and most of the time takes things from nature that seem natural - and not repulsive (there are the exceptions).
Do you think there exists any area of modern medicine that traditional medicine is equal/better at?

 

[Njorl]

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

 

[Esperanto]

There are many things in orthodox medicine that aren't backed by scientific evidence, there are lots of stuff backed by scientific evidence not in orthodox medicine. Saying garbage like, Doctors make a lot of money ergo you should be one, is probably a reason why pharmaceutical companies own medicine and you must respect the ritalin. When people decide to refuse to believe in traditional medicine can be because of many things, but I can't imagine they sincerely believe their criticism unless they were really cheated by a hoax.

Given all the crap on alternative medicine you can find at any bookstore, it's pretty easy to see new perspectives without spending a few thuosand dollars. There are loonies out there, and sometimes submitting yourself to being a human pincushion is the only way for sure to see if we cheated you or not.

The body does have the natural ability to heal itself, and orthodox medicine does not respect that. It's all about covering the symptoms and forgetting about the underlying illness. Yes, that's right. Evolution says you need ritalin and other increasingly toxic drugs to keep your dopamine high on amphetamines like this .

 

[Kerrie]

have to agree with quddu, accupuncture is a very effective way to treat certain illness and pain. i have known many people who will visit an accupuncturist once and their ailment is cured. modern medicine at the same time has given us longer healthy lives, but in general, i think most of america (don't think as much as other nations) relies on prescription drugs too much to stay "healthy". i would be curious to know what adrenaline says about this topic.

 

[quddusaliquddus]

Thanks for that Njorl and Esperanto. I don't see how anyone can reject all of traditional medicine (unless they've suffered @ the hands of a con). I forgot exactly what - but there's something in traditional Chinese medicine that was only 'discovered' in the 1920's. I 'll post it when I remember.

Lol@:
"Evolution says you need ritalin and other increasingly toxic drugs to keep your dopamine high on amphetamines like this"

 

[quddusaliquddus]

Maybe this is a little off-topic, but IMHO there is a nice analogy I like to use to understand the difference between modern and traditional medicine:

If you're trying to lose weight- you're told to go on a diet. But people don't think to themselves "I will to stay on the diet for the rest of my life or change my eating habits permeamently (e.g. eat less/avoid this type of food) in order to not lapse back into bad health".
Another (better) analogy I like is that of the Headache. Now, we get a headache and we take an Asprin and that's it. We never stop to think "Why did I get that stupid headache ? Maybe I should stop the source of the ache instead of numbing the brain. Maybe I should get more sleep etc..." This is a non-traditional attitude towards health.

 

[enigma]

My feeling is this:

If something works, it will "cure" or at least make more people feel better than a placebo. Western medicine, in order to be distributed goes through many, many trials to make sure that it actually does something.

There are no such restrictions for traditional medicines (at least in the US). Anyone can say anything is a new cure, you find a few people who had it work for them, and pow: instant fortune.

If traditional medicines work, excellent. More power to them. The danger lies in people believing they work when there have been no trials to prove they do anything except for placebo effect.

 

[quddusaliquddus]

True. The more advanced traditional medicinal are not unaware of the placebo effect -I'm apealing for open-mindedness. It's true that health is not a subject to be taken lightly. A danger also lies in people rejecting Or accpeting whole-heartedly anything without due consideration. It's called stereotyping and is against the scientific spirit.
I think we agree on this - but the problem lies in the fact that when the theoretical explanations of the way the medicine operates is not done in modern scientific terms. People are sometimes put off by the explanations (and yes...I know...also by the con artists and hoaxes..).

 

[russ_watters]

My view of the overall value of "traditional" medicine comes from the difference in average life expectancy from now vs 100 years ago.

 

[quddusaliquddus]

I know this will sound controversial, but life-expectancy is pretty useless when you got a low quality of life. As for 100 years ago - let's look further back because 100 years ago I'm guessing traditional had disapeared (of whatever there was left of it) in the Europe and America. I have a feeling the statistics are different for China for example - before the traditional medicine had almost been totally replaced by modern medicine.

At the risk of sounding brash I will take a stab at saying - there is almost nothing in modern medicine that traditional medicine didn't have an equivalent treatment for. I am very sure the latest technology has developed modern medicine far beyond traditional techniques in certain areas and in the recent decades. But a Lot had already been dealt with fully 100's or even 1000's of years before being taken up by modern scientists. Would you agree>

 

[motai]

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 heard somewhere that the old method of using maggots is still in common use because the maggots eat through the dead tissues and leave the living tissues alone. Its probably more uncomftorable than an IV solution but if it works, then it works.

 

[russ_watters]

At the risk of sounding brash I will take a stab at saying - there is almost nothing in modern medicine that traditional medicine didn't have an equivalent treatment for. I am very sure the latest technology has developed modern medicine far beyond traditional techniques in certain areas and in the recent decades. But a Lot had already been dealt with fully 100's or even 1000's of years before being taken up by modern scientists. Would you agree>

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.

 

[swansont]

There are no such restrictions for traditional medicines (at least in the US). Anyone can say anything is a new cure, you find a few people who had it work for them, and pow: instant fortune.

They can't actually say it's a cure, and you can often tell that they are careful not to make any claims in that direction. But they can have the testimonials and let the consumer draw the erroneous conclusion. "I took XX and got better" is not the same as "XX cured me," but that's the direction they want you to go.

 

[russ_watters]

I know this will sound controversial, but life-expectancy is pretty useless when you got a low quality of life.

Something is pretty much always better than nothing. Also, we're not talking just a small difference in life expectancy: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/tables/2003/03hus027.pdf In 1900 it was 47 (and remember, that's even including the fact that someone born in 1900 did get the benefit of some 20th century medicine depending on how long he lived). Today its 77. In the US, quality of life in old age is measured at retirement - something people today look forward to and the average person born in 1900 never lived to see.

 

[quddusaliquddus]

Without meaning any offence towards to the traditional medicinal community in the USA I want to say that it is more pseudo-traditional medicine. I don't mean to make out as if traditional medicine and modern medicine oppose each other ,because they overlap.

russ_waters: I will get back to you on the three examples you have given. Though I have no qualifications in medicine whatsoever I am expressing my opinion on the
topic. I am confident traditional medicine had made some progress on the health problems you cited.

 

[quddusaliquddus]

You're right on the life-expetectancy statistics. Maybe it can be made better by allying with traditional medicine?

 

[quddusaliquddus]

Ok. Some quick searches on Google for Smallpox, Appendicitis, and chest-bullet-wound haven't shown much stuff. The bullet-wound is kinda unfair on ancient traditional medicine don't u think :D - I'll come up with something.
But I want to ask you something russ_waters - do you know how ahead-of-their-time the Chinese or Arab became in medicine? We we're still lessons from it during the late 1800s to the early 1900s. There are still a few things here and there that they're better than modern medicine @ I reckon. I'll give examples to illustrate he point. :D

 

[Esperanto]

Homeopathy believes almost everything in modern medicine is bullcrap, me too. Excluding its ability to treat things like bullet holes everything in modern medicine is bad in my opinion. In 1900 1/4 of U.S. physicians practiced homeopathy. Now it's getting more famous but it's getting a bad name because it's hard to do it correctly and doing it right means less money.

How would traditional medicine deal with (for example):

Smallpox?

Appendicitis?

A bullet (arrow) in your chest?

There's lots of different traditional medicines and weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. History isn't always passed on. History isn't often read when it is passed on. I am Canada!

The more advanced traditional medicinal are not unaware of the placebo effect -I'm apealing for open-mindedness.

You bring a tear to my eye =(

There are no such restrictions for traditional medicines (at least in the US). Anyone can say anything is a new cure, you find a few people who had it work for them, and pow: instant fortune.

Traditional medicine aren't great money makers otherwise they'd be owned by the pharmaceutical companies who already own medicine. Unless you're thinking about those a dollar a pill penis enlargement pills touted as traditional whatever medicine.

Maybe I should get more sleep etc..." This is a non-traditional attitude towards health.

I am confused.

Anyway, I think life-expectancy went down because of the industrial revolution. I'm also of the opinion that long long ago a sicko ancestor of us decided to torture an animal by roasting it and then take a bite out of it and said Hmm, that's delicious. Now we got clogged arteries. When I look at the things I am given by living in this suburbia hellhole, I realize, there's nothing increasing my life-span from living in this hellhole. They give me tapwater, woohoo! Modern medicine hides the illnesses from modern livestyle so you can keep on working for the giant corporations bent on world domination. Statistically vaccines do jack. Smallpox can kill itself. Get high on adderall. Get high on marijuana. Hurray for legal pillpushers, for illegal pillpushers, for everyone! Life-expectancy? I don't expect people to know 1/10 of the ingredients of the food they ate for breakfast let alone suspect annual rates of death can significantly increase when aliens blow up half the world. Because of modern medicine there's an increase of chronic diseases and decrease in acute diseases. Surprise!

Money is the goal of modern medicine. If you disagree with me then you are an enemy of the REVOLUTION LAW ARMY Please see this thread.

There are lots of alternative medicine crap you could learn, there's so many factors in determining life-span and taking into consideration how medicine works is one of them. You owe it to yourself not to believe at face value what crap people heard on sitcoms and regurgitated. I spread freaking new-age propaganda and I make me sick. I just want to say there's no reason why you haven't gotten a book on alternative medicine at your local bookstore.

 

[Chi Meson]

Homeopathy believes almost everything in modern medicine is bullcrap, me too. Excluding its ability to treat things like bullet holes everything in modern medicine is bad in my opinion.

Does penecillin count? I don't believe that homeopathy would have saved me from that infection I had when I was 8. But penecillin was an accidental discovery of a naturally occurring compound, so is it modern? I don't think you have to decide to go entirely one way or the other.

There's lots of different traditional medicines and weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. History isn't always passed on. History isn't often read when it is passed on. I am Canada! ...
I spread freaking new-age propaganda and I make me sick.

Did you eat mushrooms?


Seriously, I do not doubt that the BIG corporations are in it for the money, but so are many "traditional medicine" companies. "Snake oil" has a long tradition in this country. What really gets me angry is that some traditional medicines are primarily responsible for the unneccessary slaughter of animals such as tigers, elephants and, especially, rhinoceroses.

 

[quddusaliquddus]

I may haver made a mistake in trying to ignore the actual practices if people and the theoretical benefits from traditional medicine...will rethink position...

 

[Esperanto]

Homeopathy has very bad things to say about penicillin and it doesn't like the way you were prescribed it. You probably think I am quite full of sh*t. I don't want to decide between modern, widespread medicine and traditional/alternative. Unfortunately I figured it's accurate to judge the difference by what makes money and kills and what doesn't. And modern medicine is full of snake oils. The traditional medicines companies are more likely to get screwed when they're sued. And we must respect the ritalin.

Homeopathy is scientific and sophisticated, and I'm the cheshire cat. Whether or not you believe it, your choice is ultimately yours. I don't want to spread propaganda. I want YOU my future PEONS to become propaganda-seekers yourselves so my UNABOMBER NATION will become PARADISE.

http://www.ecn.cz/alternativa/book/hocu13.htm

 

[russ_watters]

Homeopathy...

...is junk science of the worst kind. I only heard of it recently, but its just plain shocking to me how people can believe that a medicine with no medicine in it can help any more than any other placebo.

The bullet-wound is kinda unfair on ancient traditional medicine don't u think :D - I'll come up with something.

I said "[or] arrow"... The point was that such a wound used to have an extremely high mortality rate. Have a look at the stats for the American wars. These stats are telling because not only do they include wounds suffered in battle, but disease and infection as well. So you don't just get the improvements in surgery, but also hygeine and medication associated with modern medicine. Boiling the stats down to be more readable, the ratio of killed:total casualties in several wars:

War...killed:total casualties
Civil...0.57:1
WWI...0.36:1
WWII...0.38:1
Vietnam...0.27:1
Gulf I...0.39:1

Note, modern warfare tends to push the ratio up (there aren't many injured pilots - you either survive or you don't, whereas a bullet wound is usually survivable if assistance is nearby). In the Civil war though, there were more deaths than injuries - meaning if you got injured (or sick), odds were that you'd die.

But I want to ask you something russ_waters - do you know how ahead-of-their-time the Chinese or Arab became in medicine?

Ahead of their time or not, they were wholly impotent to deal with the 3 medical problems I listed. Quite frankly, it seems you are ignorant of how far we've actually come. The smallpox vaccine for example is one of the most extrordinary scientific achievements of alltime:

The SMALLPOX vaccine was first developed in about 1767. Smallpox has a fatality rate of about 20-60%. Despite widespread vaccination, smalpox killed roughly 300-500 MILLION people in the 20th century alone, including about 2 million as late as 1967. A worldwide push to vaccinate everyone resulted in total eradication of this disease only 13 years later (most developed countries were rid of it by the early 70s).

Can you grasp the enormity of that accomplishment for modern medicine? Smallpox killed more people this century than all of our wars combined and now its completely gone.

I am confused.

Anyway, I think life-expectancy went down because of the industrial revolution.

Yes, you are confused. Life expectacy prior to the industrial revolution was much, much lower than even the 47 I listed for the US at the turn of the 20th century. How does twenty-five grab you for ancient http://www.utexas.edu/depts/classics/documents/Life.html ? Of note, a lot of that is infant mortality. Also, the link says many scholars consider 25 too optomistic. Anyway, that's Rome! The pinnacle of ancient civilization. They had plumbing and basic sanitation! Imagine what it was like in a feudalistic village in Europe at that time (you have of course heard of the plague...).

 

[Esperanto]

Well I pee in my pants a lot.

"According to the laws of chemistry, there is a limit to how many serial dilutions can be made without losing the original substance altogether. This limit is called Avogadro's number, and it roughly corresponds to a homeopathic potency of 24x (which is equivalent to 12c). Thus any potency beyond 24x or 12c has virtually no chance of containing even one molecule of the original substance. One would think that further potentization would cease to be effective at this point, but in actual fact potencies ranging far beyond this "limit" continue to increase in power. Thus far, there has not been found any limit whatsoever, even though homeopaths often successfully use potencies over 100,000c! To give the reader some idea of how extremely dilute such a potency is, let us describe the dilutions in terms of a numerical fraction; Avogadro's number would correspond roughly to a dilution represented by 1/1000 . . . to a total of 24 zeroes. A potency of 100,000c would be represented by a dilution of 1/100,000 . . . to a total of 100,000 zeroes-inconceivably far beyond the point at which not one molecule of original substance is left!" Excerpted from The Science of Homeopathy.

And what an outrageous claim! Boogaaboo? As if you believe what you're saying. Modern hygiene and medication are not necessary when we can run around hugging trees and getting food is as easy as roasting a buffalo or picking an apple. Allopathic medicine is GREAT for bullets. Smallpox is a result of bad hygiene and smallpox fatalities were gradually lowering without a combined effort to vaccinate everyone. Modern medicine cannot claim to have cured smallpox because I say so. I see both perspectives and I wish you'd look at some whining about vaccination. How many animals live as bad as we do unless we domesticize them? They get cardio, I sit in front of the computer. They used to breath fresh air, I used to breath fresh air. I eat poison, they probably eat paint chips too. They drink tap water, I drink tap water. Honestly? I'm disbanding my Revolution Law Army. I only have faith in turtles now. We'll pray for mojo.

 

[FZ+]

...is junk science of the worst kind. I only heard of it recently, but its just plain shocking to me how people can believe that a medicine with no medicine in it can help any more than any other placebo.

Proposal: Have legitimate drugs companies sell placebos. At least then, we can be sure that they are not in fact harmful (as many traditional medicines turn out to be), and we can recycle the money to some useful purpose. Such as research into real drugs.

-FZ, who is deeply annoyed at his parents' obsession with plying him with herbalism...

 

[hypnagogue]

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]

I think that modern medicine might still have a few things left to learn from traditional medicine. I don't mean from your local herbal medicine shop. I didn'y say you should not see your doctor etc... and just go to some quack down your locals. I mean the science of modern medicine might not have all the treatments that there are on earth. Of course I don't know any 'miracle cures', I'm not saying there are any 'miracle cures'. We shouldn't assume that modern medicine has exhausted all treatments and checked out all the traditional medicine there is on earth.

 

[quddusaliquddus]

I have found some examples: Purslane (Portulaca olereacea). A herb still eaten in the West. The Chinese knew since at least a good thousand years ago that a Lot of murcury maybe be extracted from it i.e. it is a murcury-loving plant.
To suggest there were Circadian Rhythms of the body was laughable even in the 60's. Chinese knew about it - and used it as part of the treatment and diagnosis since second century.
Until 1927 the modern world was not aware of sex-hormones and such things (from urine). By the second century, the chinese had isolated sex and pitiuitary hormones and were using them for medicinal purposes. Mass production insued (using urine) in industrial-scale chemical processes.
Inoculation against smallpox is another ancient process the chinese had perfected. The process is more hazardous than vaccination - but the chinese had turned it into an art.

 

[Njorl]

I'm curious as to how people in this thread define modern medicine and traditional medicine.

The Chinese surgically removed cataracts over a thousand years ago. To me, that doesn't indicate that traditional medicine is good so much as it indicates that modern medicine is over 1000 years old.

The pain-killing drug Darvon, didn't kill pain, but it did kill people. The only thing that allowed it to get to market was that it cost a lot of money to develop. That is not modern medicine; that is a primitive superstitious belief in the power of money.

So, what is the defining difference?

Njorl

 

[quddusaliquddus]

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.

Do you define modern medicine to be that which works?

 

[ShawnD]

I tend to think of traditional as being stuff that that is not refined. For example, drinking snake oil to cure whatever isn't refined so I would say that is traditional. Eating coca leave is traditional; shooting cocaine is modern. Eating whatever plant it is that has aspirin in it is traditional.
Refining that plant into pills (or synthesizing pills) and taking pills is modern.
Acupuncture and acupressure are real sciences so I call them modern; if it was about sticking pins in random places (and not exact places), I would consider it traditional. Religious based stuff like praying and voodoo are traditional.

Basically anything that is not understood well is traditional (IMO).

I greatly favour modern things because most of it really works good, but I'm not adverse to traditional approaches to things. For example, right now I'm drinking green tea which is getting me stoned (I'm serious). I don't know what's in this tea but it's pretty cool . One time, I ground the tea into a fine powder using a coffee grinder. The tea I made with that powder was so strong that I was completely out of it; I couldn't do anything productive and I had to lay down for a while.
I'll post pictures of the box the tea came in if anybody wants

 

[quddusaliquddus]

Lol. I like you're approach Shawn_D. Yeah...post the pic. You're definition of what tradition is from a common sense angle ... I think.

I'd agree with you're definition: "Basically anything that is not understood well is traditional (IMO)." ... and I'd add that 'understood' here means not scientifically verified, and I'd add that it works. If something doesn't work - it doesn't matter if its modern or traditional - it's useless.

 

[ShawnD]

Ok here's the picture of it

http://myfiles.dyndns.org/pictures/green_tea.jpg

 

[jimmy p]

The "gunpowder grade 1" is a bit unnerving...

 

[quddusaliquddus]

Lol...it Is unnerving...did you just take that photo?...

 

[ShawnD]

Yep. Why would I just have a photo of it laying around? lol

 

[quddusaliquddus]

When you suggested posting it ... I thought 'how's he going to get a photo?...from his personal collection .?..' then I thought 'There's the net! Jus go and get a photo from some store or sumfin'...but then io c someon holding it and..I asked u if you took it...lol

 

[Njorl]

Mmmm ... gunpowder grade.
Explodilicious.

Njorl

 

[ShawnD]

Last Christmas was the first year digital cameras outsold conventional cameras; digicams are getting popular.

Man this tea is good. I'm on the third [big] mug in like 40 minutes. The mug is 9cm tall with a diameter of 9.5cm. That makes the size about 637mL.


http://myfiles.dyndns.org/pictures/tea_cup.jpg

 

[quddusaliquddus]

Lol

Whats with the darkness?

 

[ShawnD]

It's dark because the camera is a POS. It doesn't measure light to well.

 

[quddusaliquddus]

OK ... what's POS?

 

[ShawnD]

piece of s***

 

[quddusaliquddus]

LOL...and there i was - thinking it to be some technical abbreviation

 

[Njorl]

Surely it is a Photonic Optical Scanner!

Njorl

 

[ShawnD]

Yeah but it doesn't carry the Shawn Seal of Approval

http://myfiles.dyndns.org/pictures/shawn_approval.jpg


I should put that as my desktop wallpaper

 

[quddusaliquddus]

Lol. Good sketch man - the cartoon is uncanny...lol

 

[ShawnD]

Actually the sketch was done by Pete Williams, but thanks anyway.

 

[swansont]

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).

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.