Alternative medicine...

[thiosk]

Chinese traditional medicine has some grounding in reality, but that is NOT because of energy fields of Chi. Acupuncture is not interacting with your chi flow, because there is no such thing as chi.

Compare this to Indian traditional medicine, which is usually doing strange things like nasal flossing, swallowing 6 feet of gauze and then vomiting it up, cutting, and many things involving cow urine. "Do this for two weeks and your will be cured!" What human can do these things for two weeks? Very few, and that failure is attributed to the failure of the individual, rather then the methodology.

The big red flag for all alternative uses of medicine is energy. There are no auras, good energy, bad energy-- the average person doesn't understand what the word energy means, so is easily fooled into believing what ever nonsense the "healer" is out to promote. Usually for profit.

 

[YawningAngel]

You read the topic title so... your thoughts please...

Personally, I'm unsure. Some of the time, I find myself agreeing with Richard Dawkins and his rather... acerbic comments about it. However, having grown up around a couple of people (read: my parents) who know a lot about Chinese herbology, I can vouch for 'TCM' (traditional Chinese medicine) which I/they have tested... primarily on myself/themselves/my sisters...

You find me recovering from a cold (I actually recovered a few days ago after a couple straight days of having herbal teas and manuka and just debased myself on a truckload of junk food) with a slight niggling cough and I've spent the last half hour alternately sipping and sniffing a hot concoction of nin jiom (I haven't the faintest idea either how it is anglicised from Cantonese or what it is in English).

Quackery? Or legitimate?

At the end of the day, 'traditional' remedies became traditional remedies because they were useful to some extent or another. I'd never advocate using it for some serious ailment for which an actual medical solution exists, but if you've got a cough or cold then you might as well take whatever makes you feel better about it.

 

[sramota]

Alternative medicine is called alternative because it either hasn't been proved to work,
or has been proved not to work.
You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work?

Medicine.
(Yes this should be repeated every 2 pages, as the video shoots down the argument that medical companies are just suppressing these medicines. Case in point: Aspirin)

 

[Tanis]

Most of it is crap, sugar pills, and homeopathy is utter bullshit.

 

[pffh]

Credentials: I'm a pharmacology student working on my masters degree.

Alternative medicine is bullshit. Homeopathy is a scam, chi points don't exist, hypnotism is a placebo etc

Herbal medicine has some thruth* to it but you can always get better results with real medicine since almost all tribal medicine and herbal stuff has been tested (those that haven´t been tested are being tested RIGHT NOW, it's one way to discover new drugs and the problem is we've almost exhausted that resource so we are turning towards the sea more and more for a place to locate new cemicals that can be used for drugs) to see if it really works and then the active ingreadients identified. When taking a herbal medicine over a real drug you don't get an exact dosage, the drug won't be absorbed as easily by the body and there will be impurities in it.

*About 30% of modern medicine have originated in plants, animals or fungi. These chemicals are now either extracted from the plant and purified, synthesised in a lab, used to give us an idea for a chemical that will be synthesised or for protein drugs produced in gene-modified bacteria.

If anyone has any question I'll be more then happy to answer them.

 

[Da Orky Man]

Medicine? Medicine in general makes me raise my brow. Why? Because I know some 'medicine experts'. I know some geniuses up there in their pharma-corps, and just EXACTLY how much brains they've got going on.

Let me tell ya what, if you had half a clue the kind of shit they put in those pretty little pills of yours and call them 'medicine'... well... you'd probably drop over dead. Of course, you might just drop over dead anyways, from taking the things... but hey.

That's the price you pay for 'wellness'.

Sadly, I signed an NDA. So I can't say anything. Or rather, I won't... because I'd like to continue doing business with these folks.


But hey. Don't take my word for it. I would never ask anyone to do such a thing.

But I'm just as disgusted by modern medicine as I am distrustful of the old school herbalism route. It's all quackery and half-baked science, if you ask me. Because there's never a time that potentially killing 20-goddamn percent of your user-base is acceptable.

That's a game of Russian Roulette I refuse to play.

It's the internet. You are essentially anonymous here. Will you put some proof out here, or continue to skip around it? Modern medicine does seem to work, and since it does, I really don't mind what the put in it. After all, most antivenoms are derived from the venom itself.

 

[mb16]

its all nonsense. If there was anything in it (real) medical group would be using it

as said by Dara Obrian
"ooh herbal medicine has been round for 1000s of years, and indeed it has... But then we tested it all and the stuff that actually worked became medicine!"

 

[Jonluw]

ALternative medicine, by definition, is not proven to work or proven not to work.
Do you know what they call alternative medicine that's been proven to work?

Medicine.

Now, I'm not saying that all alternative medicines are placebos. Some of them may certainly contain chemicals that help with recovering from diseases. Such as willow-bark for example. But in most of the cases, the chemicals are probably present in too low amounts to have a significant effect, or they're not present at all.

 

[Toby Kitching]

Traditional medicine is just medicine that was developed in a European context. The denial of non-European medicine (alternative medicine, because I won't call it that) comes from something called euro-centrism. Basically the idea that Europe and European things and ideas are inherently better. They aren't.

what in the name of all that's holy makes you think that all modern medicine was developed in europe?
Transplant surgery as we know it took off in africa, insulin therapy came from canada, surgery started out in the middle east. The reason alternative medicine is disregarded by most of the medical community isn't because it's asian/african/whatever, it's because there is are no studies demonstrating any effectiveness above placebo level.

 

[BiscuitTrouser]

if its one less trip under the knife or put on horrible drugs to fix something then ill do it... ive had a couple of things fixed by alternative medicine in the past and they were the same things that modern medicine had absolutely no idea how to fix or what they were.

You DO realise the ONLY difference between alternative medicine and medicine is one has been tested and proved to work. "HORRIBLE DRUGS". Hmmm i remember taking a "horrible" drug derrived from the bark of a willow tree...masperin? Hasperin? AH asperin!

Modern medicine tests MANY things carefully.

If you are suggesting a medicinal testing facility sees a potential natural cure that can be tested and adapted into medicine and ignores it for petty reasons you are saying they dont like money. Hundreds and hundres and hundreds of tests have been done on alternate medicine and its a common cry from those who love it that "MODERN SCIENCE DOESNT EVEN BOTHER TESTING IT!". They do. Trust me, read Ben Goldacres bad science. They test them to bits. And they dont work. Or if they do work better than nothing, thats useless anyway. Better than nothing is meaningless, it has to be better than the best working alternative.

some of it is quackery and some of it might work.
just don,t use it when you have something live threatening (like cancer or AIDS).

Terrible advice.

I have successfully used TCM to cure my chronic bronchitis and have seen multiple people fight Cancer for years when "modern" medicine considered them "dead within a month".

At this point of time in modern science we dont really understand the human body or how everything interacts with it. Chinese Medicine somehow does this through experience - and while some of it might (and probably does) not make any sense a lot of it has proven successful over millenia for Billions of people.

And this is coming from a native german that lived in china for a long time.

Dont always trust "modern" medicine.

Good advice actually. A LOT of alternative medicine is a complete crock and trying it for cancer WILL KILL YOU. Homeopathy for example is just stupid hogwash. And PFFFFF at we dont understand the body. Are you joking? Is that a joke? I hope so. Maybe you dont understand it, but i wasnt accepted to study biomedical science at university because no one understand this mysterious "biology". We know plenty, we know LOADS, i can tell you in insane detail how your heart beats and why it beats and why it speeds up and slows down. And people have tested alternative medicine. If it works it becomes medicine. If it doesnt it stays alternative medicine, IE hasnt been proven to work or has been proven not to work.

 

[Mr.Tophat]

Also many "modern" treatments for heart disease were developed in China by Chinese doctors.

But as to the general point. Most alternative medicine's perceived effectiveness is likely just the placebo effect. Granted, their are some alternative medicine treatments that do likely have some actual active effectiveness in treating symptoms or the root of various illness, granted, it is likely staggeringly few in comparison to "modern" medicine.

But I would also like to note that just because it is the placebo effect doesn't mean it is not worth while. If it fixes the problem, who cares if its just the placebo effect. Hell, most medical practitioners agree that the placebo effect has a place in medicine. If you can make the body cure itself with a placebo, why make someone take something that can have potential negative side effects. Of course, once you start to deal with illness that no amount of placebo could ever hope to counteract, cancer and heart disease and such, it should be criminal for someone to heavily recommend, or, for the love of all that's decent, FORCE someone to take medicine that's likely ineffective over sometimes-life-saving "modern" medical treatments.

Also, to remind myself this is the internet and this conversation shouldn't be taken so seriously.

"Penis."

Tee hee.

edit: Stupid forum, I was meaning to reply to "Toby Kitching" with my first line.

 

[dvd_72]

Alot of alternate medicine may just be a placebo effect, but what's so wrong with that? If it helps you because it actually does something, or because of mind over matter, you feel better regardless.

So yea, I'm all for homeopathy, if only because I know it'll make me feel better even if it is a load of bollocks. As long as I know it isn't harmfull, and there isn't any actual medicine that we know can fix whatever's bothering me, then why not trick yourself into feeling a little better?

 

[Togs]

Some is quackery some is accidentally stumbling onto something with a medical basis.
The rest can just be explained away by the placebo effect or our lack of knowledge in all the bodies mechanisms.

Personally if Im going ot take something to make me better Id rather go for the proper medicine.

 

[TriGGeR_HaPPy]

"By definition, alternative medicine is medicine that has not been proved to work, or has been proved not to work."

You know what they call 'alternative' medicine that actually works?
Medicine.

As far as I can tell... No one has quoted you yet.
I mean, c'mon guys, when I saw the title, this is exactly the kind of reply I looked for. >_>

EDIT: Lololol, while only looking for quotes of TheVoodooFrog, I didn't see the masses of replies along this same line anyway. My bad, guys. :$

As for you, TheVoodoo Frog,
http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~rkhosla/cookie.jpg

Back OT: As others have said, some of it really is legitimate and can truly help you. But "Alternative Medicine" is such a huge umbrella of different methods for almost every affliction known to man, that you must keep in mind just how much bs is amongst the small amount of stuff that actually works.

Really, though... Just find what works for you.

 

[DracoSuave]

You know what they call 'alternative' medicine that actually works?
Medicine.

Ninja'd.

Seriously tho. let's look at one 'alternative medicine'.

Willow bark tea. Sounds kinda dopey, sounds all hippy, but yes, this works as a pain reliever. Why?

The active ingrediant in willow bark tea is salicylic acid, which is the main component of aspirin.

The idea here is that stuff that works should be tested rigorously. Sometimes the claims are true, but often the claims aren't scientific but based on anecdote.

I'm not concerned if you feel better, I want to know if the treatment is better than a placebo and by how much.

 

[Griff]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0
This sums up my views.

 

[thiosk]

Chinese traditional medicine has some grounding in reality, but that is NOT because of energy fields of Chi. Acupuncture is not interacting with your chi flow, because there is no such thing as chi.

That sounds strange. You say something involving vague ingredients like tiger claws, rhino horns and cow urine does have some working, and then you bash another branch of shamanist/folk healer rituals doing exactly the same for not working.

How can two identical things both work and not work? Especially if the one that alledgedly works has zero proof and zero reason to assume it would work.

I must specify, not ALL chinese traditional medicine involves that. Acupuncture, which I specified in my post, has a long history of inexplicably working.

Yeah, the tiger claws rhino horns and bear bile, no thats garbage.

Some. Aspects. Nothing in any traditional medicine that is thought to "improve stamina" is of any value. You can swallow all the goat testicles you want, but viagra is gonna work a lot better for you. There is a significant amount of spending involving the chemical analysis of many of the non-retarded ingredients in chinese medicine, which is a complex and varied herbology.

 

[similar.squirrel]

Using plant extracts isn't quackery. It hasn't been adequately researched, is all. From what I've heard, the Chinese haven been doing for a lot longer than Westerners, so their efficacy may have something to do with local physiology as well.

Homoeopathy and eating tiger dicks, however, is still nonsense.

 

[CM156_v1legacy]

I knew a bloke who tested "alternative medicine" for a science fair project. He went to 10 doctors with a problem (A actual problem, mind you). 8 prescribed the same drug. The other two prescribed a similar drug in the same class of drugs.

He then went to 10 "alternative medicine" shops with the same problem. The result? Every single one told him to do something different. Two were even contradictory to one another.