To wonder why so many otherwise intelligent people are so against modern medicine?

[toptramp]

I do have time for some complimentary medicine but i knoe some people who would rather do homeothapy than vaccines etc. Am i right in thinking that modern medicine is fab generally?

Really pakdooik? I just see it as yet another thread where people are judgemental and criticise and insult people who have choosen to do something differently even though they have no idea about their reasons for doing so. That's MN for you :)

I am intelligent, educated blah blah and I am not against modern medicine as such but I do believe that there are big gaps in the education of medical students. I would like to see a greater emphasis on the history of medicine- so that students can see clearly that it was only x number of years ago that autism was considered to be a condition caused by attachment issues from the mother or that before MRI scans, MS was thought to be caused by hysteria. I believe that underlining the history of medical knowledge/beliefs about illnesses may help medical professionals to locate current treatments or ideas about specific conditions within a time frame and be more aware that this may change.

On a personal note, I had CFS/ME for years and found that the fact that the condition cannot yet be measured by a test or scan far overrode my personal account of illness in the mind of the modern medic and this led me towards the alternative sector (where I was listened to but also had some very negative experiences) I'm sure attitudes towards CFS/ME will change in mainstream medicine the future as more is known about the illness and a good diagnostic tool is developed but what that experience has taught me is to be much more open minded and simultaneously skeptical about both sectors.

An example of how this plays out in my life is that my children have not had their vaccinations. i understand there is a strong evidence base for these interventions preventing certain illnesses but I don't necessary believe that all the changes in the immune system caused by jabs can be mapped at this point and as my kids are strong and healthy, I would like them to go into this century (which is likely to have increased levels of antibiotic resistant bacteria) without artificially changing their immune systems. I can not treating them with unevidenced homeopathy or believing I am providing alternative protection through another unevidenced practice- i have made the decision to not intervene.

I guess what i am trying to say is that there are plenty of people like me around who have rejected certain interventions offered by modern medicine and have made these decisions based on clear critical thinking, personal experience and logic. And that it also does not follow that just because I reject one evidenced treatment (vaccinations) i suddenly believe in unevidenced treatments (homeopathy woo whatever you want to call it)

What gets me is the double standards. Take lesley33's first example of someone with no real serious illness. They go to their doctor, he/she may well mention stress, lifestyle changes etc. They take offence and leave complaining that their doctors thinks it's "all in their head".

They go to their complementary/ alternative medicine practitioner, who talks to them about all aspect of their lives; and says that their symptoms have to be looked at in the context of their whole body eg. that they have headaches because they are tense because they are getting aggro at work. That is more or less exactly the same as the doctor tried to do, but suddenly it is viewed as being "holistic treatment" and as being marvellous.

Actually I think that a lot of intelligent people are able to understand that modern medicine does have some big failings as well as some astounding successes. Unfortunately money talks, for both modern and alternative medicines, and doctors don't have time to spend looking at holistic treatments. In an ideal world both areas would be working together, as they already do in some small way with thing like massage/reflexology for cancer patients.

I often think of the situation in terms of taking aspirin for a tension headache. Modern medicine is the aspirin - the sticking plaster that fixes the problem, whereas holistic medicine would probably aim to ensure that the headache trigger didn't happen in the first place.

A few years ago I was crippled with a back problem to the point where I was unable to walk. I used both modern medicine and holistic medicine and was up and back at work a full 4 weeks before modern medicine said I should be. Perhaps a large part of that was placebo effect? I don't know. I do know that the couple of hundred pounds I spent saved the NHS a couple of thousand and my workplace another thousand or so. I think maybe if both sides worked together this saving could be extrapolated and reach a win-win situation.

Cogito, Chinese herbs are a bit different from homeopathy. They contain chemicals, just as modern drugs do. They may not have been as rigorously researched but they can work in the same way: they are not woo.

I tend not to use them for fear of being poisoned, but I am sure a good Chinese doctor could do some useful things for conditions such as my very heavy periods, etc.

toptramp you say what she said about your kid being a heroin addict was "absolute bollocks in your opinion". If she had pulled out a double blind controlled 20 year peer reviewed study from the Lancet would you think differently? If an OB/GYN said what your doula said, would you be more likely to believe them?

As an ex-statistician and applied mathematician, I do have great fun probing people like your doula who say things like "xxx is more likely to happen if you do yyy". My mother is one of the worst for this - most recently she told me hospital births are safer than home births for all babies and home births caused complications. Ok, show me the evidence, the correlation, the p-values, the sample size, the controlled trials...of course she couldn't, she had just heard an anecdote from a friend of a friend, read something on the internet etc.

I guess I'm pointing out that often we use the qualifications and backgrounds of people who tell us things as a heuristic which enables us to accept or reject what they say on the basis of who's saying it, rather than the evidential basis of what they're saying. I think confirmation bias is quite a significant factor as well.

My sister spent a significant amount of time on a liver unit (probably a couple of years in total). On her stays there, there would often be people with liver damage caused by herbal medicine (NOT homeopathy).

In some cases the patient had ignored instructions ('oh, it's natural, so it's safe'), but in other cases the 'natural' aspect of the medicine meant that the quantities of the drug in the herb varied enormously - and so a so-called 'safe' dose was actually harmful. And of course in yet other cases the herbal medicine practitioner was untrained, or a charlatan.

Modern medicine has faults - and I suspect any drug that's likely to have any effect on anything will have side effects. But at least you know exactly what's in the medicine.

Modern medicine is indeed fabulous but:

• not all doctors are good doctors. In fact, some are quite frankly rubbish
• there has been a tendency (though it's being cut down on now) to over-prescribe things like anti-biotics, leading to resistant strains
• some doctors over-prescribe. My grandfather went through a really horrible time when he was on a lot of different medications (he'd had both his legs amputated due to gangrene) and had developed a morphine addiction and was deteriorating day by day. My dad went through the selection of medicines he had, took them all to the GP and then found out that various doctors had prescribed various medicines, without checking exactly what my DGF had been on before.

However, I think a lot of people are ignorant about basic science, and biology (how many FREAKING adverts are there going on about "killing viruses") so sometimes it feels better to go for the nice touchy feely option.

and, as Riven is saying, when modern medicine goes wrong, it can go spectacularly wrong. I was a at a talk by someone who's family runs a charity that provides support for the parents of severely disabled children. They set it up, because his brother was left blind and deaf with severe behavioural disorders because he was innoculated as a baby with a faulty batch of vaccines. Hundreds of babies were affected.

It's a question of having a historical perspective, and an understanding of politics and economics.

My mum recently died of mouth cancer and she was misdiagnosed so treatment was delayed. Yes I would rather she tried to lead a better lifestyle and sorted her stress levels out so as to try and prevent cancer (although she was a non-smoker). I do realise that modern medicine has it's failings (take the thalidomide scandal for example) However, i am very glad she got a chance to do chemo and radiotherapy to give her a fighting chance.

I know that chemo and radiotherapy are alos quite controversial and I do hope that they come up with something more cell specific.

By the time she was diagnosed she had not time to twiddle around with herbs, acupuncture and diet. She wouldn't have tried the alternatives anyway being dead set against them. Cancer treatment is a contentious issue and I do believe that the causes of cancer can be lifestyle and emotion related but the surgery my mum recieved was amazing. They reconstructed her whole tongue from a piece of her arm and it gave her an extra 8 months of life.

The palliative care was outstanding also (morphine of course from a poppy is amazing stuff) She died a pain free death.

That's a very moving post, toptramp. I'm sorry to hear of your mum's death; you must have been very relieved that she was able to die a pain-free death.

Aw thanks lemonbalm. My first mn bunch of flowers. Mum's death was aawful but it makes you realise how we have to savour life whilst we have it and how we should look after ourselves without being too obsessive.

Yes, I agree, both my mum and dad died of cancer; dad's death in particular taught me a lot about how to live.

"Maybe we're against it because we're intelligent."

Very nice

Although I'm not against it. I just don't bow down before it.

Toptramp: I didn't realise my flippant post would follow yours. A bad x-post. Sorry.

Hmm, I don't think it's a matter of bowing down before anything, though.

I can only speak for myself of course, but from what I can see nobody is claiming that modern mainstream medicine always gets it right and never produces adverse results. Or that there are no problems it cannot solve and that all the doctors and nurses practising it have passed an official no idiocy test before receiving perfect training.

In my view what matters is the acceptance of the idea that medicine (and science in general IMO) should be evidence based. The demand that claims be backed up with something more than assertions that "it works".

Some ideas may simply be crazy. If a person honestly believes that 2+2=5 "just feel right" this may not have much of an impact on the rest of us. In other instances though, people's insistence on their special woo can range from extremely selfish to downright dangerous.

One of my all time favourites in this respect is the whole anti vaccines thing: so you're basically refusing to vaccinate your children because of potential adverse effects? At the same time you're relying on them not getting polio because almost everybody else has vaccinated their own children against it and it therefore not being something they cold catch in many places.

This is only not unethical if you'd do the same thing in a country where polio occurrence is actually high, i.e. if you think polio itself is less risky than the vaccine. Otherwise it's simply cynical exploitation of the fact that other people's children shoulder the supposed risk for yours too.

Notadude can I just clarify - are you arguing that a parent should get their child vaccinated against polio just because 'everybody else has vaccinated'??

(apologies for going OT)

It's easy to be anti vaccine if enough other people have vaccinated their children so the unvaccinated child is protected by herd immunity. I think that is the point notqdude is making.

It is also easy to be anti polio vaccination if you are too young to remember how terrified people used to be of the illness, and to have contemporaries who were damaged by it.

TBH I've given up arguing with the "ant-medicine" brigade as their beliefs are based on, well, belief - so you can't shift them with any form of rational discussion.

I just sit secure in the knowledge that that they and their progeny are more likely to die (statistically) without issue than me and mine, and thus hopefully there are less of 'em in a few generations time :o

god, the "it's easy to be anti-vaccine because of herd immunity" argument is just so lazy

I do not know anyone who has not vaccinated because they have the luxury of knowing everyone around them has vaccinated, so they are sure their child will be ok.

my first attempts at refusing vaccination (I say attempts, because they were ignored, and the nurse jabbed dd1 without consent) were in a developing country.

and no, I would not vaccinate dd2 even if our whole county was unvaccinated.

I have not reached these conclusions because I can sit back safe in the knowledge that she will never contract the diseases (unlikely anyway, imo, given the efficacy rates of most of the vaccinations). I haven\t a clue of the other children at dd2's school (or dd1's, although I expect I can hazard a fairly accurate guess on that score) vaccination status - so how on earth am I meant ot have taken my decision based on the luxury of apparent herd immunity?

whatmeworry: you've expressed your hope that we'll all die before, and you did seem to find it tremendously amusing then as well

shall i sit secure in the knowledge that people using prescribed drugs are more likely to die before me?

or would that be rather unpleasant?

One of the issues is that most people with young children in this country have never seen diphtheria or TB or polio so they are balancing a known risk- vaccination- against a theoretical one- a life threatening illness. Ask the queues and queues of mothers outside vaccine clinics in the developing world which side of this particular risk/benefit analysis they willncome down on!