I have long wondered about this. In the Asian world, traditional Systems of Medicine focus on "holistic" treatment and the general public often calls Western Medicine, "Allopathy with side-effects". I had intuitively felt that these medicines must have an overall effect on behaviour which may always not be obvious to the observer unless the difference between the before and after were stark and noticeable.
We really need a lot more research on this aspect of all commonly used medicines. A lot of our mood-swings, irritability, anger, anti-social behaviour etc. might be explained by this.
> In the Asian world, traditional Systems of Medicine focus on "holistic" treatment and the general public often calls Western Medicine, "Allopathy with side-effects". I had intuitively felt that these medicines must have an overall effect on behaviour which may always not be obvious to the observer unless the difference between the before and after were stark and noticeable.
Many traditional herbal medications also have significant side effects. It's not accurate or helpful to describe this as Eastern vs. Western medicine. All significant supplements and medications are bound to have side effects to some degree.
Good, evidence-based doctors don't care if the practice is Eastern or Western. If the practice or supplement has reasonable scientific evidence, a good doctor will incorporate it into their recommendations. I've had plenty of "western" doctors prescribe practices like acupuncture, yoga, meditation and traditional TCM supplements like ginger and turmeric.
The real problem with the Eastern vs. Western medicine false dichotomy is when it leads people to choose a side and stick with it. I've known a few people who suffered far too long with ineffective TCM or alternative medicine treatments before accepting proper, evidence-based treatment. The problem isn't limited to Eastern medicine, of course. For example, many depressed patients take Saint John's Wort for its herbal anti-depressant properties and are surprised to experience as many, if not more, side effects than highly targeted SSRI medications. Just because it's natural doesn't mean it's safer or more effective.
You make some good points. However that is not what i meant when i said "holistic".
As an example, in Ayurveda/TCM, "prophylaxis" is given greater importance than symptomatic treatment.
We are what we eat and how we live.
The beauty of Western Medicine is that it is highly targeted and therefore provides immediate relief. However, people go overboard with no thought to other factors, consequences and ramifications. They look at it in isolation. Whereas in Eastern Medicine; controlled diet (with emphasis on stomach/gut cleansing), massage therapy (affecting the circulatory, lymphatic and nervous systems), change in environment(Summer/Winter) etc. are given more prominence. The organism and the environment in which it is embedded are looked at together.
With what we know today, both these approaches need to be harmoniously blended together for the best effect.
I'm asian myself and I am intimately familiar with eastern medicine.
You are largely right on western medicine, it is holistic as far as the scientific evidence is relevant. That means if there is no unbiased experiment on the 20 year effects of some effect of some drug then there is no science behind it and therefore no knowledge and no treatment. Causative treatments are established to a degree as close to absolute as possible using the scientific method. However, because scientific experiments are biased towards things that are easily observable and measurable, treatments are also biased in this direction.
In other words it is very hard to run an experiment on the 10 year side effects of some drug therefore there aren't much treatments of this nature among western medicine.
Eastern medicine is the opposite. It has no basis in science in the sense that none of it's tenants were established in scientific measurement and observation. More it's adhoc trial, error, a lot of bias and a lot of fraud. This kind of treatment can definitely be more "holistic" but this holisticness is based off vague and anecdotal evidence and is very inexact. Some eastern medicine may work and some may not and you may be being lied to.
In fact, the logical theory behind eastern medicine is utter crap. The logic talks about chi flows going through your body of both hot and cold and the logic is to eat medicine to help control balance in the chi flows. These chi flows are a fantasmic concept not observable by scientific experiment.
This does not mean eastern medicine doesn't work. THe reasoning might be off but the effectiveness of the medicine may still be valid because cultural selection would have virtually eliminated this field if it did not actually aid with survival in some form or manner. Just know that every time you ingest some medicine based of of eastern philosophy know that you are making a gamble on evidence that is anecdotal and possibly placebo induced or even fraudulent.
When it comes to the Human Organism and Medicine, in spite of all our advances, things are quite complex, interrelated and not fully understood. While there is a lot of "woo woo" in Traditional Eastern Medicine against which we must guard ourselves, there is still a lot of empirical evidence for it though we may not subscribe to the explanatory models behind them. This is why people/hospitals are trying to introduce the reasonably well understood parts of Yoga, TCM, Ayurveda, Meditation into a more holistic approach towards well being.
The point is not to fixate on some well known negatives but take a deeper look at what has worked over the ages and employ them for good effect regardless of the theoretical models claimed for them.
>When it comes to the Human Organism and Medicine, in spite of all our advances, things are quite complex, interrelated and not fully understood.
And I have said, if you read carefully that some of it still works despite this. This is not the point, the point is the black box test still needs to work despite a garbage theory. ANd my point is, not only is the theory wrong, but there is very little overall scientific evidence for the efficacy of the treatment as well.
>there is still a lot of empirical evidence for it though we may not subscribe to the explanatory models behind them.
There is actually very little scientific and experimental evidence behind it. There is some but compared to the body of experimental work that is western medicine the research on eastern medicine is miniscule.
> This is why people/hospitals are trying to introduce the reasonably well understood parts of Yoga, TCM, Ayurveda, Meditation
The above mentioned things like meditation actually have scientific evidence behind them. You can google it.
>The point is not to fixate on some well known negatives but take a deeper look at what has worked over the ages and employ them for good effect regardless of the theoretical models claimed for them.
That is the problem. There is very little scientific evidence for what has "worked" for eastern medicine. The problem with anecdotal evidence is the placebo effect; people are delusional. Some people believe in scientology and who is it for you to say that a belief in eastern medicine isn't similar? The dividing line is scientific experiment. IF an experiment verifies a hypothesis then it is likely to be real. For efficacy of a treatment to be measured you cannot just ASK people, you have to conduct a massive scientific experiment in a double blind study. This simply has not been done yet for eastern medicine. You do not know the "good" just like you don't know the "negatives" because there is no scientific data.
I never said there wasn't but the definition of western medicine is scientific research meaning that it is the primary method on how such treatments are developed. Scientific research on eastern medicine is not only minuscule in number but backwards in creation.
By backwards I mean that treatments are made up adhoc based off of the faulty chi logic then tried adhoc on people without rigorous double blind experiments. Only in modern times are we actually running true scientific experiments on the treatments to verify them. This is basically like the FDA allowing some random person to distribute drugs touting some miracle cure only to run experimental tests after the drug is released. More than likely most eastern medicine treatments will fail tests as this majority failure rate is already what happens in western medicine during clinical trials.
It is amusing to me the sort of detached love people have for Eastern medicine. It's really a feeling of grass is greener on the other side.
In India and a few other SE Asian countries, the predominant killer disease is heart disease. There is no "Eastern" medicine for that.
"Eastern" methods work really well on innocuous diseases and symptoms because they really aren't medicines nor a treatment. Sure Ayurveda and other "techniques" tackle a few simple problems. But people actively seek such treatment for important medical problems: "a little knowledge is dangerous".
The troubling fact is none of the Ayurveda nor Eastern medicine is based on a deep understanding/exploration of human beings: instead they rely on folklore and guesswork. Very dangerous after seeing the amazing progress vaccines, statins and so on have contributed to the world.
This article talks negatively about "statin" painting it as some sort of a bad word based on one potentially problematic drug: the number of lives saved by the simple Atorvastatin-like medicines is really astonishing. I really hope a nuanced discussion about important life-saving drugs can be had in forums such as this instead of quickly reverting to the tropes of Eastern magic medicines.
There might be side effects to modern medicine, but there's no reason to assume that traditional beliefs re: health and medicine are more correct; The arguments behind them are usually epistemologically unsound, and they are often out-and-out superstitions.
Somewhat True, but "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater".
Much of "traditional medicine" is empirically based. The models they came up with to explain the mechanisms may not be valid in light of today's Scientific Knowledge but they are instructive nevertheless (rungs in a ladder leading to better understanding etc.) As an example we still don't know how exactly Acupuncture works but do know that it works for many cases.
Right, but we don't have any reason to assume it to be true if there's noe evidence to support it - which would be step one in determining whether its a reasonable belief, and integrating it into modern medicine.
As for your example, we do not know that acupuncture works - conclusions are inconsistent in systematic reviews, which would suggest that it's not effective. Most researchers I've heard speak about the subject seem to believe any perceived reduction in pain to be due to placebo.
You’re right, but I’m quite sure the “Asian world” doesn’t use that term, since homeopathy / allopathy / osteopathy are all western invented classifications.
“In the Asian world, traditional Systems of Medicine focus on "holistic" treatment”
[rant on]
I believe the term you’re looking for here is “fabulist bullshit”.
“the general public often calls Western Medicine, "Allopathy with side-effects"”
Aaaand… No, it doesn’t. SCAM calls it that. Which is ironic, as “Allopathy” is a term coined by Hahnemann to mean “Everything BUT Homeopathy”, and that was in a day when “Western Medicine” was itself rank quackery still laboring under Galen’s “Four Humors” nonsense. Thus Chiropracty, Reiki, TCM, Acupuncture, etc are all “Allopathy” too.
Conversely, what you so casually misnomer “Western Medicine” (the term itself is borderline racist) is just “Medicine That Works†”.
(†“Within Limits”, as any sci fule kno.)
I mean, the only really significant difference between Traditional Chinese Medicine’s explanation of disease and Galen’s is that TCM believes in five humors while Galenites believed in only four. [Insert Emo Philips/Picard joke here.]
Otherwise “Chinese/Eastern Medicine” is the same mix of ungrounded herbalism and bloodletting that stalled out western healthcare for 2000 years. Until the Arab/Persian world, during its all-to-brief scientific golden age, came up with the brilliant idea that one should actually test one’s beliefs to find out if they’re bullshit or not… a process that Renaissance Europe finally distilled into modern scientific method 500 years later and determining Galen was full of it shortly after that.
..
Of course, getting the actual institutions to change took a lot longer; it wasn’t until Pasteur gave us a working model of disease that Galen’s bollocks and its attendant “worse than doing nothing at all” so-called treatments were finally buried down a very deep hole.
Germ Theory gave us sanitation, vaccination, and surgical hygene. Untested herbalism was usurped by pharmacognosy, modern chemistry, and reliable mass manufacturing. And so on.
Alas, China was been quite so lucky. Thanks to Mao and his vast “barefoot doctor” scam (which got around the problem of not having enough real doctors or money to provide everyone else with medicine that worked), TCM/Acupuncture is still around, not least as the CPC is now selling it for export as much as for use at home.
Incidentally, Mao himself (like most wealthier Chinese nowadays) had no truck with that homegrown crap and happily availed himself of your “Western Medicine”, thankyouverymuch. (You might want to take note of that.)
Incidentally #2, just as TCM was, and is, badly-tested herbalism marketing often poor-quality and fraudulent product, pre-Mao acupuncture was really just Galenic-style bloodletting sticking bloody great bamboo trocars into people. Worse, it had almost (rightly) died out until Mao reinvented it its modern form using fine steel needles, bad sterile practice, and total Qi bollox. “Distracting the patient while nature all does the work” as Voltaire used to say.
Incidentally #3—and considering that western researchers invested decades in figuring out how to reliably blind acupuncture studies before finally producing results showing it no better than placebo—every acupuncture study out of China is still positively glowing. Someone recently posted a FP link regarding China’s massive ongoing medical research crisis; I’m sure you can dig it up if you want.
..
TL;DR: You can take your “holistic treatment” and “traditional Systems of Medicine” and stick ’em where the pathologist’s light does shine, because that is where they all belong.
[rant off]
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Real medicine does in fact study and treat the whole person. Unfortunately, it’s also a victim of its own and industrial nations’ success. General practices and hospitals are slammed with demand, increasingly with inevitable diseases of very old age (since so few of us die young now) and diseases of sedentary urban lifestyles.
And while doctors can tell us to eat less and exercise more till they’re blue in the face, they can’t make any of us do it; so it’s not surprising things like statins get widely (over?) prescribed as a workaround for our fat lazy butts.
I’ve no doubt too modern medicine desperately wishes more public would understand that all Medicines (that is, pharmacologically-active compounds) have multiple Effects; and that the only meaningful distinction is between Effects that are advantageous in treating a patient for a particular condition and Effects that are disadvantageous in that same patient. We commonly call the latter “side-effects” [not counting intolerance and allergies], but that’s misleading.
For instance, aspirin (descended from willow bark) is commonly used both as an NSAID and as an anticoagulant; thus what is a “side-effect” in pain patients is the therapy in those with blood disorders. (And vice-versa. And, of course, aspirin’s other common effect of giving you stomach ulcers isn’t a benefit in anyone. Although if you think aspirin is bad, just try original willow bark instead.)
Thus, we should not be surprised that modern pharmaceuticals have multiple effects across a wide range of biochemical and physiological systems; if anything, it’s a minor miracle they don’t have way more unwanted effects. Alas, familiarty does breed laxness, if not contempt, even in scientific and medical professionals; so it can never be re-stated enough that education, awareness, and due dilligence are essential to keeping that system operating as well as it can.
Think of it like this: Medicine [which works] is just a rolling bug-patching process of the most heinously complicated, tightly-coupled, under-documented Big Ball Of Mud known to man, and proceed accordingly. And that even that thing we call “self” is just a synthesized fiction, the product of countless biochemical and electrical interactions constantly occurring in just one[-ish] of numerous intricately interconnected organs, which together make up “Us”.
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Dear Dog, I really need a drink now. Never been so glad I that crashed out of premed and landed up in software dev instead. :)
WTH ? That is a nice rant but one with some validity :-)
First see my other responses in this thread so i don't have to repeat myself.
>Real medicine does in fact study and treat the whole person.
In Theory; Current practice has all but forgotten this. That is why many Physicians themselves are looking at Yoga, Meditation, TCM, Ayurveda etc. to supplement their treatment.
>Medicine [which works] is just a rolling bug-patching process of the most heinously complicated, tightly-coupled, under-documented Big Ball Of Mud known to man
Somewhat True but there are also multiple models/architectures within it all of which gives us a framework to hang everything else off of i.e. there is a method within the madness.
The point is not to throw away centuries of empirical evidence on what has worked regardless of theoretical models used to explain them. Two different examples, a) The importance of quieting/calming the mind using Meditation independent of any religious connotations. b) The importance attached to Turmeric which has been validated today by identification of the Curcumin active ingredient.
“In Theory; Current practice has all but forgotten this. That is why many Physicians themselves are looking at Yoga, Meditation, TCM, Ayurveda etc. to supplement their treatment.”
Eh, no. If many Physicians are looking at TCM, Ayurveda, etc†, it’s because there’s piles of Money and Ego in it. Shock: some <koff> physicians really do miss the Good Old Days of “Doctor-as-God” Paternalistic Medicine, and are only too delighted to bring it all back for their neurotic wealthy patients who miss it too.
“The point is not to throw away centuries of empirical evidence on what has worked regardless of theoretical models used to explain them.’
Centuries of “empirical evidence”?
Get. Tae. Fuck. And take your Appeals to Antiquity and Special Pleading bollocks, and stick them up your ass with all the other balls that Gwyneth Paltrow and Alex Jones and the CPC are flogging this week too.
†I exclude Yoga and Meditation here because (ignoring any woo-woo gateway bullshit) those are essentially Exercise and Relaxation, which along with Diet are standard mainstream medical advice. Only real difference being that Medicine says “Eat right and exercise, or you will Dieeeee!‡”, whereas AltMed says “Eat right and exercise and stick our super-magical expensive coffee up your ass, and you will have an orgasm in your pants!”
‡Okay, it doesn’t really say “Die”, but that’s what neurotic high-maintenance muppets hear anyway; which is what makes them such suckers for the AltMed con. And I really wouldn’t care about that because that’s their funeral, except that they make others dead too.
Are you just an ass or are you just trying to get a rise out of people? It is hard to have a conversation when your tone is combative rather than rational.
You are trying to employ the "Gish Gallop" and throw all sorts of irrelevant noise to muddy the waters. What do Gwyneth Paltrow, Alex Jones etc. have to do with Medicine?. If you think physicians are looking at Ayurveda/TCM/Yoga etc. only for the money/ego/fad then you really don't know what you are talking about. Don't waste my time with nonsense.
You are also cherry-picking articles with sensational headlines eg. your last link about usage of Turmeric is an article which is very clearly sheer stupidity and nothing to do with the medicine itself.
Read the book "Herbal Medicine: Biomolecular and Clinical Aspects" for scientific research on a variety of traditional herbs. Centuries of "Empirical Data" is what is being put to test to identify efficacy. This is the proper scientific method and not the offhand dismissal that you seem to embrace.
You are also very wrong about "Yoga and Meditation" being merely "Exercise and Relaxation". Read the following;
* A Physiological Handbook for Teachers of Yogasana
Mate I agree with you but people on HN don't appreciate this sort of way of speaking. Just tone it down a bit. You're making a lot of really good points and it'd be a massive pity to see you banned for making them in a way that is so antagonistic.
We really need a lot more research on this aspect of all commonly used medicines. A lot of our mood-swings, irritability, anger, anti-social behaviour etc. might be explained by this.