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Comment by OneGuy123 | Hacker News Reader

Western medicine is good if your guts are hanging out after an accident.

But it completely fails to fully cure many chronic conditions. They just give you a pill.

Eastern medicine is more hollistic (meaning it fully address chronic conditions by finding the true source so that not more pills are needed).

So for this statement above: what he was trying to say is that western medicine labels any healing methods that try to use natural remedies or hollistic healing as "alternative".

Or in other words: he is trying to show you that big pharma is controlling everything to such extend that even just trying any hollistic (permanently curing by finding the real cause) medicine is being ignored in favor of permanent pill dispesing.

Why cure it permanently if you can profit from symptom management :)

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Eastern medicine that works would also be labeled as just medicine. Acupuncture is growing in use and legitimacy as it is studied and implemented for chronic pain sufferers.

Studies of Aromatherapy have found nothing statistically significant though, so that’d be down as “alternative medicine”. In the same way as “alternative facts” are not facts. “Alternative medicine” is not medicine. The nice thing about alternative medicine is that there’s a pretty clear and simple path to getting an alternative medicine to become actual medicine if it works. Have it studied and tested using the rigor of the scientific method.

I'm sorry to be glib, but I've never heard of 'just medicine'. I know there are many procedures and medications that doctors are willing or trained to provide, and I know that many doctors only know or prefer a subset of these, even for common diseases. I know some doctors who are very open-minded in their recommendations and some who are conservative to a fault.

Due to the replication crisis, I imagine it's actually much more difficult to get non-standard treatments in now than it was to introduce treatments last century.

Not that I'm disagreeing with you - I'm fully in the Ben Goldacre 'Bad Science' camp - I just wanted to highlight that these things sometimes take generational and cultural change, and for some classes of treatments, it's not always a case of taking something from the 'not yet proven to work' bucket and putting it in the 'proven to work' bucket (both buckets are somewhat leaky anyway).

> Eastern medicine that works would also be labeled as just medicine.

That sounds a lot like the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. If you define "medicine" as "anything that works", then of course "alternative medicine" is crap, by definition.

One big problem with being this dismissive is that a lot of medicine started out as "alternative" and then was scientifically confirmed over time.

If your Western doctor is not suggesting regular exercise and a balanced diet to prevent chronic conditions before giving you a pill then they are not using an evidence-based approach.

No doctor I have gone to in recent memory has said anything like that to me, ever.

I remember once when a test result got close to a threshold, I was told, "this test result is a little high, we should work at getting that down, and if it stays high we can pursue medicine to bring it down."

Could this merely be part of some non-confrontational advice? Maybe waiting for me to ask about exercise before answering?

On the other hand, I have had two friends whose relationships soured with their doctor by giving unwarranted advice.

One friend smoked. The other was overweight.

The doctors pursued the smoking/weight issue to the exclusion of what they were coming in for, and neither friend went back to that doctor.

I think it bears saying that doctors are people too, that includes all the flaws/biases/etc. that we all succumb to.

There is a huge issue that there is no feedback loop when doctors are incompetent or cannot be bothered to actually engage -- as your friends' experience suggests, the doctor has no way (or incentive, really, if they're just trying to satisfy a metric) to find out if they actually helped or not. The only filtering mechanism seems to be either a) passed medical school, or b) gross incompetence which gets reported to an authority, but patients themselves (by definition) usually cannot judge if a doctor is giving them actively bad/dangerous advice.

Metrics are becoming a plague in and of itself... I live somewhere in Scandiwegia, and when I reserve a time slot with my doctor, the biggest time slot I could get was 10 minutes. That's 10 minutes to discuss a complex lifelong pain-related issue which may have genetics playing into it, etc. etc. It's absolutely insane for complex issues, but I'm betting a lot of these issues are essentially invisible to the system because people just give up and take (too many) painkillers. Trying to get a referral to experts in the type of pain I experience is of course heavily gatekept, and means I have to face a whole battery of other non-specialists (neuoroligists, etc.) who can only give wholly inconclusive answers as to whether I'm "worthy" of getting to talk to the specialists who could probably give me a proper diagnosis pretty quickly.

Of course, most things (general practitioner) doctors see are probably pretty simple and can handily be handled in 10 minutes, but it just gets very frustrating when it isn't that simple.

EDIT: Just wanted to add that none of this means that TCM (or alternative medicine in general) necessarily has any worth. The science of 'Western' medicine is overall really solid, but the systems around engaging with patients is really screwed up right now.

The unfortunate reality is that many doctors are actually pretty shit at their job, just like most other professions.

Regular exercise and a balanced diet to not prevent chronic diseases. That’s kind of OP’s whole point. In western medicine we don’t have any philosophy for where a bunch of long term health issues come from. Now if you study aruveyda, they’ll have a lot to say about this

banyanbotanicals.com has some great articles about this, check out their six tastes article for example

Well, this is the disappointment of the day. Never thought I'd see this kind of comment in here.

On second thought, thinking how Steve Jobs died I think it is quite apt.

Even smart people can have stupid and ignorant opinions.

Also there is no such a thing as Eastern Medicine, at best you can call it Eastern Pseudo-Medicine because if it worked it would just be Medicine.

banyanbotanicals.com is a great place to learn more about eastern medicine

There’s a reason why it’s still to this day a huge tradition and there’s countless stories you can read about people benefiting from eastern medicine

As an example... reflexology. All the parts of our body get grounded through our feet into the ground. That’s why touching different parts of your feet can affect different parts of your body

Holistic ways of thinking are extremely alien and foreign to western medicine

And now we have literal spam in here. Great.

Edit: I don’t understand

IMO if your doctor is just pushing pills instead of thinking you need a new doctor. My doctors have always recommended other things before drugs.

There’s plenty of scientific support for treatments other than drugs and this idea is compatible with the definition from Wikipedia.

Eastern medicine is not empirical. Very few treatments outperform placebo.

What do you mean by "empirical"? Are you saying that eastern medicine is not based on empirical evidence, ie. observation and experimentation, but on some other approach?

Isn't the point that "western medicine" is a set of things that have been shown to work based on the outcome of controlled tests - double blind tests and so on. As a result of these tests we say that, in general, statistically, "medicine" cures the condition more than doing nothing does (or, more precisely, more than the placebo effect).

If we put something through that process and find that outcome, we classify it as medicine. My understanding is that tests of some Traditional Chinese Medicine (which I assume is what we're talking about here when we say "eastern medicine") aren't able to replicate successful outcomes and so we therefore don't classify those things as medicine in the west.

That's not to say they don't help trigger the placebo and so on, just that we haven't proven it through double blind studies and so on - which is my understanding of what OP means by "empirical".

0 proof. It's based purely on magic thinking.

If you have any relevant sources that prove other wise I'll be happy to change my mind.

Why should I have to disprove your claim?

Can't the same be said about a lot of conventional medications?

I find it quite frustrating that placebo can be observed to be effective in many scenarios but many scientist seem to dismiss it out of hand.

It really bothers me to hear that; it's a common statement, but I think when you examine what it means to say a placebo is observed to be effective, it dissolves into logical incoherence. It's pretending that a lack of results is a result, that an unknown source of bias is understood through doubletalk/think. It's worse than homeopathy.

This is not true

People who are practiced in eastern medicine don’t bother with rigorous scientific studies as much anyways. What’s the point, you can just see the reasoning and common sense yourself without needing to look at a study, not to mention the countless anecdotes they’ve collected from people they’ve met and who’ve found healing

I regret you’re being downvoted I agree with you 100%

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