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Alumbrado -> RE: What is Homeopathic Medicine? (6/6/2008 9:23:04 PM)
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ORIGINAL: velvetears
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ORIGINAL: pinksugarsub
Sorry about causing confusion. i was looking for additional treatments for insomnia, not an eye doctor, so it'd be a DO, not an OD.
pinksugarsub
Have you tried melatonin?
i had a good experience with a homeopathic doctor. When my daughter was born she developed an eye infection. i took her to the doctors, who treated her, but the infection wasnt going away. i lost faith in their credibility when one said to me she got the infection from me by coming through the bith canal. i informed him she was a c-section.
i sought other alternatives and am very glad i did. The homeopathic doctor prescribed her belladona drops under the tongue and her infection was gone in under a week and her eyes was clear as crystal. 3 Pediatricians (one an eye specialist), several treatments which lead no where (in fact i think they made the eye worse) versus 1 Homeopath with one remedy and her eye was clear in less than a week. i'd say they have some contributions to make. i might not go to one if i had cancer but i do believe they help people and i know they helped my daughter [:)]
Well, this is the sort of thing that keeps the conversations going round and round...
There is no doubt that mainstream medicine screws up, and plenty...differing even within their ranks as to who knows how to cure what, and who is a quack. Linus Pauling was a multiple Nobel prize winner, and he was ostracized and vilified for embracing Vitamin C's benefits later in life...benefits that are now considered good common sense.
And there is no doubt that many controversial and even disproven therapies have reports of successes.
The thing is, that 'science' as commonly understood, benefits from controversies, failures, questioning, and discarding theories in the long run... an inexorable march, not toward perfection, but toward a better way of doing things than the previous century, or the one before that, and so on. So polio rates go down, infant mortality goes down, lifespans go up, survivability goes up.
The old joke about 'practicing' medicine has more than a grain of truth in it.
Kuhn gives a pretty good explanation of the process.
Alternative/complementary/traditional/folk/mystical/paranormal therapies on the other hand, tend to share a different quality...the way things purportedly worked when they were first codified is usually the way they purportedly work today...
The 'universal life force', or 'Qi', or the 'law of infinitesmals', or 'Orgone', or 'engrams', or what have you, is the be all and end all answer... and one that never lets you pay attention to that little man behind the curtain. Just accept the results and the cool sounding jargon, and let the next patient in, please.
Which is why you will even find the occasional bit of usefulness from the alternative side making its way over to the scientific side, as science adapts and refines its abilities, and provides explanations for things previously only explained by the paranormal.
But you won't find that process working too well in reverse...because the supertitious explanations don't want revising.
So my first toss into the discard file is anything that claims a universal mechanism which never needs to be updated, and which fails to survive critical analysis or scientific testing.
Doesn't mean that some people didn't get better... but to me it means they don't really know why they got better, and are just happy to have a convenient label to hang in place of the 'why?'
And I'm just too much of an iconoclast to settle for things being that easy...[:D]
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