EdGr
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EdGr
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- Comments (2)
EdGr's comments (2)
Blog Post: Does osteopathic medicine have a future? - 1 out of 3 total comment(s)
- Fri., 11/09/12 - 22:01 PMInteresting post and follow-up discussion. Isn't there a third group of physicians, namely podiatrists? They seem to have a completely separate structure but to function as full physicians. No?
Blog Post: The Limits of Magical Thinking - 1 out of 8 total comment(s)
- Sat., 11/19/11 - 21:38 PMI found Mike's post to be thoughtful and reasonable. I found Cara's commentary to be interesting, but I believe it is based on a false comparison. Orthodox medicine tries to uphold a high standard, namely that treatments should be demonstrated to be effective, with sufficient effectiveness as to outweigh their potential risks. A few people who die from the side effects of, say, an antibiotic used for a deadly disease, pale in comparison to the many lives saved by the drug. It's a tradeoff that medicine accepts.
By contrast, the vast majority of alternative medicines have never been shown by any method better than anecdote to work at all. Some have support in good studies, like randomized trials, but that evidence is rarely good enough as to be convincing to those who hold to a high standard.
I'm not going to deny that people die needlessly in medical settings, from overdoses, inappropriate medications, and unnecessary surgeries. Of course they do.
But overall, medical treatments are used because they work, and can be demonstrated to work. We accept some side effects in that context.
Even a few deaths because of a medication that has never been shown to work, or because users of it declined a medication that might have, are 100% unnecessary. These deaths can be avoided by the kind of oversight Mike suggests.
I don't think that's demonizing. It's a call for alternative medicine proponents to show that what they do works. All medicines should be subject to that standard.
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