or the interests of the drunk company are shoved in a drawer

Hey, company, you're drunk, go home!

;-)

Hah -- blogging while exhausted! Will fix.

It's like drunk driving, except that you can't die of embarrassment. (I know -- I've survived making a huge ass out of myself so many times.)

Let me spell out the real meaning of what the humanities mean when they say "deconstruction":

"We're going into a field, and we're going to discredit all mechanisms of finding truth in that field, by calling them racist. That will leave the field wide open for 'truth' to be determined by political power. And we intend to be the ones with the power." Tearing down Western civilization is the main goal of the Left, and since science is one thing standing in the way of that, the scientific method has to go.

"Because 'regimes of truth' such as the evidence-based movement currently enjoy a privileged status ..."

"... ethical obligation to deconstruct these regimes of power."

Well at least they have used the "right" words.

I know we gave up using pitchforks but ...

So, I'm of two minds. Some areas of medicine were "alternative" and now going mainstream. Chiropractic care and, to a lesser extent, acupuncture.

I was totally into Western medicine (or conventional, if you will), until I was up a creek with no paddle and desperate. Several folks I know and respect suggested chiropractic care and I figured it couldn't hurt and might help. The doctor also does acupuncture and other "alternative" medicine practices (kinestheology, etc - assuming I spelled that right). Well, chiropractic helped, and the alternative stuff rocked.

Placebo effect? Maybe. Don't really care. Maybe the studies just aren't being done - or maybe there are some folks who are selling snake-oil and some who aren't, so the studies aren't showing effects.

I leave it open as a possibility that this stuff works, and will try it on myself because, frankly, it works more often than not... at least as often as traditional medicine gets it right.

The biggest problem with evidence based medicine is that with all of the bogus studies out there, much of the *evidence* isn't all that good.

At least half of the various drugs out there, are prescribed and paid for, largely by the government, and insurance companies because some fudged study convinced the FDA that it was an effective treatment for something.

Same is true for a number of other types of treatments.

One good outcome from Obamacare, is doctors don't seem to be routinely throwing chemo at non metastatic localized cancers anymore. Something that did far more harm than good.

Everyone seems to want there to be a bright line test. *good drug* *bad drug*
You feel so smug having these black and white answers to life's thorny problems.

It's *evidence based* Therefore you made the smart choice, you superior specimen of humanity, you.

The reality is quite different. A few drugs can be lifesavers for a select few individuals with a specific problem.

The same drug can cause such severe side effects, as to be life threatening for others.

"I leave it open as a possibility that this stuff works, and will try it on myself because, frankly, it works more often than not."

Would you drink radium water? Lots of people believed in it, and were willing to offer testimonial to its effectiveness, in the early 20th century. Now, admittedly I'm picking an extreme example here; chiropracty is not radium water, and there are some things that are on the borderline -- the evidence sometimes shows positive effects and sometimes not, depending on how you squint at it. And with chiropracty, there are plausible (if unproven) theories for how it works.

But where do you stop with that? You say it's OK with you if alternative medicine provides a placebo effect. There are three problems with that: (1) placebo effects tend to be unpredictable and unreliable; (2) a placebo can make you feel like you're getting better when you actually aren't; (3) by the time they pile on all the mumbo jumbo, those placebos start to get pretty damned expensive.

Hucksters make crap up. It's what they do. And one issue with the "nutritional supplements" is that they can make all kinds of wild-ass claims, because their claims are not subject to FDA scrutiny, unlike actual pharmaceuticals. (We can debate the effectiveness of that scrutiny, but at least it's there.) This tends to make the alternative medicines look better, because while you read all the clinical reports on the pharmaceuticals and get a long flyer listing all of the even slightly plausible side effects with each prescription, you don't get any of that with the alternatives -- you only hear about the success stories. If a medical treatment never has any undesirable side effects on anyone, that's because it's a treatment that does nothing.

I have to admit I don't get this broad hatred of the medical industry that some people have. Modern medicine has been pretty damned good to me; in fact, it is fairly likely that without it, I would not be alive today.

Ohh, I miss Chuck(les). His often pinheaded comments about homeopathy might have eventually included an answer to my question, "Why can't you buy homeopathic gasoline?"

I have to admit I don't get this broad hatred of the medical industry that some people have. Modern medicine has been pretty damned good to me; in fact, it is fairly likely that without it, I would not be alive today.

Posted by: Cousin Dave at February 29, 2016 1:22 PM

I don't have a broad hatred of the medical indstry. I just realize, that not only are they not omniscient, they operate under a Byzatine network of government rules and mandates, which picks and chooses winners regardless of the actual effectiveness of the treatments.

I have a friend who is a heart surgeon. He said he never had to perform a bypass on someone who wasn't a long time smoker.

Meanwhile the government and the medical lobby is trying to convince you that you are going to die, if you don't keep your cholesterol under strict control with a statin, regardless of your lifestyle.

You know what will drop most people's cholesterol like a rock?

A low carb diet.

Cousin Dave,

You took my comment out of context. I'm not saying I'm going to just go and do any old thing because it might work (pushing somebody off a bridge might make this cut heal, right?). Rather, I'm saying that I am open to the fact that some things that aren't traditional Western medicine might work.

I was talking, in that specific case, about chiropractic care, acupuncture, and similar.

This doesn't mean I will whole-heartedly jump in without thinking or looking into it myself, but that if Western medicine isn't helping, I will give it consideration and have, at times, tried it myself with good results. Maybe they were spurious, but frankly, if nothing else is helping, I don't really care.

This isn't to say that there aren't hucksters, but some of these "alternatives" are now quite mainstream. My acupuncturist is an MD, among other things. It costs as much as a visit to my primary and is equally effective for some things (less side effects for others).

There really is a lack of good diagnostics. If you can't separate condition A from condition B it makes it really hard to come up with a useful solution. Chiropractics is a perfect example of that. A good Chiropractor will approach your problem like a mechanical engineer. Look for large scale mechanical defects and misalignments. But most people don't appreciate it if you take their spine out, wash it off, and look for wear spots like you would with a machine. So you have a lot of misdiagnosis simply because people can't see what they are looking at.

It's the same thing with pharmaceuticals. Someone creates a chemical. Then we give it to animals and see what happens. If something useful turns up we give it to more and different animal, then small groups of people, and finally the general populace. But a lot of it is still make a chemical that kinda sorta looks like another chemical and see what happens. The skill and finesse is not yet part of the science.

We are getting there but we aren't there yet.