As I understand it, licensed physicians in the US, even after like 12 years of higher education, never even study nutrition...what could possibly be more fundamental to human health than the food you eat??
Refreshing to see a comment like jacquesm made here.
As opposed to magic like Chinese medicine? Animal Spirits? Shaman? What exactly are you comparing to?
Western medicine, for all its serious flaws, has done more to increase life expectancy and save lives than any other system. By many orders of magnitude.
> Healthy people (or any other life form) do not suddenly get sick and die
Demonstrably false, all throughout human history. In some societies people simply reused children's names and didn't mourn the way we do because it was an absolute certainty that at least a few of your children would die young.
People have been suddenly dropping dead from cancer, flu, random infections, et al for all of human history. In my mother's youth every summer random kids came down with polio. They woke up one morning saying "momma I can't move my legs" and that was the end of their dreams.
Animals also drop dead. Why do you think there are so many animal rituals designed to avoid actual combat? Why do you think males of species that fight each other chest pound, yell, stomp, leap, or otherwise put on these displays? Because one injury can mean death. Even a scrape can easily get infected. Such displays are designed to avoid this scenario as often as possible.
> Instead of focussing on healthy diet, lifestyle, exercise, managing stress,
Western medicine does focus on these things. They aren't magic cures any more than pills are... but peddlers of woo and unscientific nonsense often like to pretend diet can cure every disease, so I'd urge caution lest someone think you're one of those people.
Through my own health challenges that have extended back 10+ years, I've avidly used both conventional medicine and natural/complementary treatments (acupuncture, naturopathy, emotion-based therapies, therapeutic breathing exercises), and through extensive experience I know better than most that both have their place and both serve very different functions.
Nobody doubts that modern medical innovations like antibiotics, complex surgery and many other western medical approaches have done tremendous good in terms of curing previously incurable illnesses and extending lives.
But on the matter of "people have been suddenly dropping dead from cancer, flu, random infections, et al for all of human history", it's uncontroversial that people's propensity to contract these illnesses and die from them is heavily influenced by their underlying state of health, i.e., factors like organ function, immune system fortitude, inflammation, hormone and neurotransmitter levels, nutrient intake/absorption and emotional state - all of which interact in vastly complex ways.
It's not a damning dismissal of Western medicine to say that it doesn't do so much to focus on these factors that are further upstream; it's too busy dealing with people who are acutely unwell or at risk of mortality.
Of course when you visit a general physician for a checkup they'll tell you to avoid smoking, to not consume too much alcohol or junk food and to eat plenty of vegetables.
But if you really want to go deep into understanding and optimising your underlying health - which I needed to do, due to having impairments that conventional medicine couldn't help with - less conventional approaches can be highly beneficial.
And for what it's worth, I do know a lot about the placebo effect!
There is a saying in medical education that med profs often like to quote: "Half of what we teach you will be wrong in four years, the problem is we don't know which half"
When I was in medical school we were just emerging from the 'fat is bad', towards what I see now as a more 'carbs are bad' (this is a dumb oversimplification but I think sums up the trends). Thumbing through my 2001 copy of 'Harrison's Internal Medicine' there is just a 40 page section on nutrition (out of 2600 pages), and most of that is on various forms of malnourishment (rickets, scurvy, etc...)
The biggest problem with studying what is good nutrition is that it is really hard to control what people eat in a randomized study and there are so many confounders when you try to look at retrospective studies on healthy populations (for example, 7th Day Adventists live longer, is it because of the diet, or because of community, etc...?)