calling conventional medicine scientific medicine is not good for science since such a large percentage of conventional medicine isn’t scientifically proven and some is scientifically disproven, and certain alternative medicines are scientifically proven…as i’ve repeatedly pointed out. I guess this is why “scientific medicine” is not the commonly accepted term for conventional medicine, but rather your own.
Logically scientific medicine would be used to mean conventional or alternative medicine that has been scientifically confirmed to be effective, which is contrary to the deliniation you are using it for and the main point i’ve been repeatedly trying to make.
I’d say the logically this is a semantic argument since you are not using “science” to refer to specific treatments that are scientifically proven regardless of being conventional or alternative, but rather as a blanket term for conventional medicine which is redefining “scientific” imho.
again this is reframing the argument into one i’ve never made. again i’m all for scientific validation of treatments. blanketing all alt medicine as “negative results” is ridiculous, and been pointed out to be wrong. how many times can i point out the flaw in this deliniation…too many. signing off.
I was thinking we could start with a little Mengele, then seque into a little Chomsky on the nature of linguistic context, then dive right into a big gene pool of Richard Dawkins. Then maybe for dessert, we could top it off with some Charlton Heston and then skip on over to the Trump thread for the afterparty. Who’s in?
Science based medicine should be the goal. “Alternative medicine” will never reach that goal. “Conventional medicine” has some flawed pharmaceutical endeavors like “Female Viagra”. The two are not as equally fucked.
I agree. Science based medicine should absolutely be the goal. Alternative medicine is a big blanket applied to everything outside of conventional medicine. Much of which is quackery and will never be scientifically proven because it doesn’t work. Some of it is already scientifically proven. This is the problem with blanket delineations and statements. I agree that they aren’t equally fucked, not even close, but in discussing this I was startled at how much of conventional medicine isn’t scientifically verified, I’d always assumed that it was a much higher percentage.
I’d argue that we keep the scientifically validated treatments regardless of their categorical provenance and discard the bollocks and quackery regardless of where it is found.
Your jokey post made me realize how many people probably take medication from their doctors and don’t bother to read the big sheets about effects and warnings or who don’t bother to look up the drug on the internet. Scary.
If only that were always true! There’s a bit of a tradition in medicine where doctors won’t admit there’s nothing they can do. It used to be (and still is, in some quarters) very common for doctors to prescribe antibiotics, for example, when they knew it was a viral infection and would do no good. I.e. prescribing harmful placebos. So compared to that, homeopathy starts looking good. The problem for homeopathy is that when you only look good compared to the absolutely worst medical practices, that’s saying something pretty terrible about you.
Well, maybe someone had a medical condition that could be treated by ingesting a small quantity of water, in which case a homeopathic treatment could be effective. (Ok, I guess that “medical condition” is actually known as being thirsty…)
Exactly. You don’t buy fido the food he chooses. At least most people don’t. You buy what you think is right for the dog. The human is the one with the wallet after all.
