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Re:Save My Life: an update by oliveoil on Wednesday June 09, 2010 @10:42AM (#1417102)
On the other hand, the story is not upvoted to the top of HN for no reason.
Re:Save My Life: an update by grandalf on Wednesday June 09, 2010 @10:53AM (#1417130)
I think it's due to a fascination with the failure of medical science to "fix" this guy after 18 years.

If there is one bias that intelligent, technologically oriented people suffer from, it's an over-confidence in medicine and an excessively mechanistic view of the human body. The body is more like an aquarium full of a variety of species than an engine in which a part may or may not function.

Re:Save My Life: an update by hariis on Wednesday June 09, 2010 @01:52PM (#1417699)
All the ancient treatment modalities treat the body as a whole. It only makes sense. Holistic care is what is missing in the Western medicine.

Having said that, no one modality is better than the other. Each one has its own place.

There is one more striking difference also between the Western and other modalities and You made it clear by using the word "fix".

For certain conditions, "fixing" does not work. If my arm is broken, sure you can fix it but for chronic conditions, certain lifestyle changes will have to be made and that requires the individual to be willing to undertake shifts in their behavior. For example, what you eat, when you eat, where you eat, how the food is cooked, when you sleep, the ambiance of your work, home and not to mention exercising etc.

So in that sense, the holistic medical practitioner becomes more like a guide and the individual takes on a active role.

For most people, this is too much to do. So they prefer Western Medicine where the mindset is, someone is going to "fix" me while I am busy with my life getting stressed up. The role is passive. Big difference.

It is funny that Western Medicine practitioners are called doctors whereas holistic practitioners use the term heal and are called healers. (The root of the word heal is related to whole)

Re:Save My Life: an update by philwelch on Wednesday June 09, 2010 @04:27PM (#1418163)
To be fair, Western medicine has completely eradicated multiple fatal viral epidemics, developed a rather good series of antibiotics to handle bacterial infections of all kinds, kept a lid on flu epidemics year after year, and made vast strides in the treatment of multiple cancers.

Now that Western medicine has got most of the low-hanging fruit and is now banging its head on the hard problems, it may appear to fall short in the "what have you done for me lately?" sense. But that's just because we take it for granted that we aren't going to get polio or smallpox.

Re:Save My Life: an update by dgordon on Wednesday June 09, 2010 @06:27PM (#1418518)
I thought that was the parent's point -- Western medicine has done superb work for acute diseases and injuries, but doesn't have solutions yet, and may not even have the right approach, for chronic ones.
Re:Save My Life: an update by philwelch on Wednesday June 09, 2010 @08:52PM (#1418834)
Western medicine works pretty well for a lot of chronic diseases, actually. A few blood tests and a daily pill are all I have ever needed to take care of mine. Show me a working alternative treatment for not having a functional thyroid gland and I'll reconsider my opinion.[1]

A lot of Western treatments for chronic conditions aren't that great, but is there anything that's been proven better? It's not exceptionally pleasant for people with sleep apnea to have to wear masks and have pressurized air blown into their breathing passages at night, but at least they get some real sleep. Living with diabetes still sucks, but wouldn't it suck more without the treatments scientific medicine has developed?

[1] "Western medicine" is really a bad name for it. My specific condition was first discovered by a Japanese doctor, hence the name Hashimoto's thyroiditis.

Re:Save My Life: an update by hariis on Monday June 28, 2010 @02:27AM (#1467264)
While I cannot address your particular conditions since I am not qualified, what I can tell you is that alternative treatments generally require you to change your lifestyle along with the pills - and it is mandatory and not optional and hence the results vary from person to person. Hence it cannot be proven in a way a pill alone can be. Examples of lifestyle change would be reduce your anger, be more understanding, take walks in the nature etc. In essence, The treatment is a guide while you fix yourself. Are you getting me? This is the underlying philosophy of all the ancient treatment modalities of every civilization.
Re:Save My Life: an update by philwelch on Wednesday June 30, 2010 @03:58PM (#1475993)
Any doctor would recommend most of those as well. The effects of exercise and reduced stress on overall health are very well documented, along with the effects of eating properly.

Of course, that's not going to accomplish anything if my immune system has decided to destroy my thyroid gland, or if a stray gamma ray or two has turned a lump of otherwise-useful tissue into a malignant tumor, or if my breathing passages are shaped in just the right way to obstruct my breathing at night.

Re:Save My Life: an update by ledger123 on Wednesday June 09, 2010 @12:35PM (#1417448)
Homeopathy takes the body as a whole instead of independently working parts (hearts, lungs, brain etc.). You cannot prescribe correct homeopathy medicine for headache, for example, without taking into account all the mental and physical symptoms.

Though I am not going to start another controversial thread (about homeopathy), I just wonder why the mainstream medical science does not looks at human malfunctioning as a whole system. In other words why there are so many organ/tissues/functions specialists?

May be (with main stream medical science) we are on wrong path and have made things so complicated that it has impossible to consider the whole human body in one shot in any particular disease. Though we fully know that analyzing/treating the parts in a complex system won't take us too far.

Re:Save My Life: an update by amalcon on Wednesday June 09, 2010 @12:50PM (#1417503)
Though I am not going to start another controversial thread (about homeopathy), I just wonder why the mainstream medical science does not looks at human malfunctioning as a whole system. In other words why there are so many organ/tissues/functions specialists?

I'm only answering this part, because I also don't want to get involved in a homeopathy debate.

They do look at human malfunctioning as a whole system. The people who do this are called "internists". Your primary doctor is probably one of them.

The reason that there are so many specialists is that the human body is really complicated. As much as we would like it to be simple, there's just too much to know about it for any one person to know everything, even if all the information is available. For the same reason that mechanical engineers specialize in things like mechanism design, aerodynamics, or materials, doctors specialize in different areas of the body. An internist simply does not know enough to figure out everything that could possibly be going wrong with a person's body.

To my mind, the big problem is not with the specialization; it's with the coordination. All of the above specialties, and more, were involved in the design of any given vehicle you're likely to encounter, from a performance bicycle to the Concorde. Yet, it's really hard to get doctors from different specialties to collaborate to tackle a complicated disease. This is not a problem with medical science, so much as a problem with the way things are done right now.

Re:Save My Life: an update by grandalf on Wednesday June 09, 2010 @01:09PM (#1417572)
That is true, however even your internist is interested in your "primary complaint". There is this idea that one problem should be addressed at a time.
Re:Save My Life: an update by amalcon on Wednesday June 09, 2010 @02:00PM (#1417726)
Not so much for anything serious or unusual, in my experience. If you have multiple complaints, the first thing doctors look for (in my experience) is something tying them all together. If you only have one complaint, they often ask if you're having other symptoms that you've just overlooked. I found out that a number of... corner cases that my body has just always had, were not normal, because of this. (There was fortunately nothing serious).

Of course, for very common symptoms (like headache and nausea), they usually just treat the symptom.

Re:Save My Life: an update by carbocation on Thursday June 10, 2010 @01:21PM (#1420807)
We always try to balance Occam's razor vs Saint's Triad.
Re:Save My Life: an update by grandalf on Wednesday June 09, 2010 @01:20PM (#1417598)
Homeopathy as it's commonly known describes the practice of giving very small doses of chemicals known to cause a problem in an attempt to cure it.

I think you should clarify what you mean by homeopathy before arguing that it is superior. I suppose it's possible that someone administering homeopathic remedies may have a belief about the body as a whole, but I think it's a stretch to consider homeopathy an improvement on western medicine in any way.

Re:Save My Life: an update by jedbrown on Wednesday June 09, 2010 @01:31PM (#1417625)
You know what they call 'alternative medicine' that’s been proved to work? Medicine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0W7Jbc_Vhw