General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: And people wonder why I have deep concerns about MDs & their drugs [View all]tkmorris
(11,138 posts)There are always those who put profit above principle, are incompetent, or the rare few who are outright malevalent. That is unfortunate but it is a part of life. Caveat emptor, and all that.
The trouble is that if you need the service they provide, there is no superior alternative. If you need your car repaired you might quite rightly worry about the competence and/or honesty of a mechanic picked sight unseen from the phone book, but choosing instead to have a random person off the local street corner do the work instead is pure folly. A competent mechanic is ALWAYS going to be better than some clown with automobile healing crystal pyramids. Medicine is no different in this regard. The trick is to find the right doctor, not to dismiss all medicine and look for answers elsewhere.
And no, it is not fair to compare criticism of conventional medicine here with the scrutiny given to homeopathy or the like. Say what you will about conventional medicine; the fact remains that it DOES work. Perhaps not as well as you would like, and it is not without nefarious individuals practicing it, but it DOES work. Homeopathy does not. It CANNOT. The two things are not comparable, and it is absurd to claim that they are. The same goes for the vast majority of "alternative" therapies. There may well be a few (out of tens of thousands) that have some positive benefit but I can assure you that if they do they will not remain alternative for long. That's how science works.