Proponents of alternative medicine make two claims about “allopathic” medicine that I find hard to swallow.
Medical schools do not require classes in Nutrition to get an MD.
Traditional medicine only treats the symptoms, not the cause of illness.
Any doper MDs out there who can say whether the first claim is true. My doctors have always given me advice on diet: reduce saturated fat, eat more fiber, drink more water, etc.
As to the second claim, it seems to me the reverse is true. Doesn’t the name homeopathy come from the idea “like treats like”; i.e., you treat an illness by giving a (vastly diluted) substance that would cause the same symptoms? Real doctors do a diagnosis to find out the underlying cause is and try to treat that. For example, they don’t treat all fevers the same as it may be from a bacterial infection, virus, appendicitis, etc.
I am still amazed that ads for the zinc lozenges blare that they are homeopathic when they do have measurable zinc in them (Each lozenge contains 13.3 mg of zinc). A true homeopathic medicine leaves the solutions with virtually nothing left of the material that is supposed to be the cure.
This is the one that gets my goat, mostly because, A: the symptoms are indicative of the disease, and if you give someone a medication that makes their fever go away, that would indicate that the disease that caused the fever had vanished, and B: some diseases CAN’T be treated… you can only alleviate the symptoms until it runs its course. The common cold, anyone?
Disclaimer
I only work (not as a therapist) at an altmed school, I DO NOT believe in its worth.
Now that this is out of the way, in re of that point, I cannot directly answer, however, my bosses put the emphasis on the European versions of altmed and their take is that it’s the immune system that is not adequately covered in med school.
As far as nutrition is concerned, they don’t know what they’re talking about. I pageset a conference on the blood type diet where the author said that if you don’t like the blood type diet, it’s OK, you can “choose” your diet according to :
your hormonal type
or your homeopathic type,
or your ayur-veddic type,
or your temperament,
or your “humours” (whatever the heck these are supposed to be).
None of these various “diets” are in accordance with each other. When I pointed that out to them, the only answer I got was “Hmmm”. Make what you want of it.
My wife teaches bio-statistics in a med school. Here’s my impression of the answers:
is true.
is false as a generality, although it depends on the particular medicine. There are some medicines that work for unknown reasons.
IMHO both (1) and (2) are red herrings. Medical schools teach things that are true based on science. Traditional medicines are proved to be effective.
With alternative medicines, the same words have different meanings. For some alternative medical school to “treat the cause” means nothing, if ther version of “the cause” is unproved mumbo-jumbo. E.g., some might say that “the cause” of some illness is their God, so that undestanding the cause would mean studying their religion.
Regarding question {1}, it’s not enough for some alternative medical school to teach nutrition. Thier boody of knowledge must also be correct.
As a physician and sometime scientist, I concur with all the responses so far. I don’t really even have much to add. I took nutrition in Med School, but it was a no-test course, while all the others were not, so guess which course didn’t get much attention paid to it? Right!
And a lot of the time, I do end up treating symptoms. If the cause is viral, I have no cure for that (with rare exceptions). So the patient gets told “I can’t cure your virus, so we’ll work on making you feel better while your body takes care of the infection on its own. If you don’t want to treat the symptoms, that’s ok, because you’re going to get better no matter what we do. Now, what symptom bothers you the most?”
And I agree with Cecil, Homeopathy is as effective as astrology and alchemy.
I took Nutrition in med school, but it was taught for 6 weeks for 2 hours on Thursday afternoon while we were in clinics. Nobody really wanted to be there, nobody studied for it, I believe everybody passed.
As has been mentioned, the difference between allopathy and homeopathy is of course the weight of scientific evidence in favor of allopathy. Now, if you are one of the types who thinks science is overrated and really has been of little benefit in our society, then go right ahead and do the homeopathy. Most doctors will tell you that it will do little harm (except in the pocketbook) and if it helps, so much the better. The science behind it, though, is shaky, and most good clinical trials show no effect beyond placebo.
The corollary of course is that physicians are not taught the sort of unsubstantiated bull that you hear on the radio infomercials, about how deficiencies of one nutrient/hormone or another are the basis for a whole slew of diseases (progesterone is one current favorite). Being deficient in quackery is not a problem, except that doctors are sometimes ill-prepared to counter slick appeals from the hucksters.
A solution is to step up training in alt medicine (quack and relatively respectable versions) in med school. It might be more useful than learning the Krebs Cycle and all the other slop you have to memorize in basic science courses.
Traditional medicine wants you to stay sick, because they’re only interested in getting money from you. We alternative medicine practitioners aren’t at all interested in your pocketbook, nosirree, we just want to make you get well. Pay no attention to the fact that alternative medicine is a multi-billion dollar industry.
Nothing substantive to add, but it is confusing the heck out of me the way posters are using “traditional medicine” to refer to modern allopathic medicine. I thought “traditional medicine” meant longstanding medical “traditions” (acupuncture, ayurveda, etc.) rooted in cultures that predated modern allopathic medicine. (Of course, modern allopathic medicine is itself based in one of those “traditions” originally, but let’s not go there, 'mkay?) Can we follow the thread title in using “conventional” as the synonym for “modern allopathic” and save “traditional” for the actual traditions of folk medicine? Thenk yew vedy much.
Along those lines, is allopathic a term made up by alternative medicine proponents to distinguish it from homeopathic, or is it a term used by conventional practioners as well.
Well, isn’t No. 2 obviously incorrect insofar as diseases like cancer are concerned?
When my mom had breast cancer, they didn’t treat the “symptoms” (minor ache in the breast) by whacking her breast off and putting her in aggressive chemo. Maybe I’m missing what the OP is saying in this regard?
No, you’re just not thinking like them. You think the cause means the cause of the symptoms. They think the cause means the cause of the problem - that is, what is it that caused your mother to have cancer in the first place? They have a bit of a point, lifestyle choices can make a difference - you can raise or lower your chances to get cancer, but it’s not clear how much better you can make your chances, or exactly what a person should even do to lower their chances of getting cancer.