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A 90's Aerosmith song goes, "There's something wrong with the world today, I don't know what it is..." I don't know either, but I've a few observations... With

A 90's Aerosmith song goes, "There's something wrong with the world today, I don't know what it is..." I don't know either, but I've a few observations... With regard to the "wellness" industry. Mostly it's a sham, but so too are many medical treatments. Women are particularly vulnerable to medical profiteering - I posted about this yesterday [1]... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14708472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14708472 There’s something grotesque about this industry’s emerging at the moment when the most basic health care is still being denied to so many in America and is at risk of being snatched away from millions more. People are focused on Wellness because they're not getting it from their doctors. Sometimes a conventional medical practitioner's diagnosis is helpful, but usually they miss the big picture. I took lots of people to & from their doctor appointments. Sometimes all a person really needed was to feel safe, but their doctors couldn't prescribe that. So they'd go from doctor to doctor to doctor looking for answers, but never finding them. But what’s perhaps most striking about wellness’s ascendancy is that it’s happening because, in our increasingly bifurcated world, even those who do have access to pretty good (and sometimes quite excellent, if quite expensive) traditional health care are left feeling, nonetheless, incredibly unwell. This section reminds me of one passenger in particular... She wanted help, and had a few resources, but her doctors only made her condition worse. Sometimes doctors do good work, sometimes they don't know when to stop. "Wellness" is for those who've given up on conventional medicine.

zzalpha 9y ago
"Wellness" is for those who've given up on conventional medicine. You mean, given up on medicine. All this other stuff? It's not medicine. It's snake oil. Chicanery. Placebo wrapped up in meaningless ritual to make it "feel" real. It's the new iteration of numerology, tarot, psychic reading. The only thing that it, in some cases, brings to the mix is empathy, something frequently missing in our overburdened medical system. And in that respect it has value. But medicine? That it is not, unless you define "medicine" as anything that makes you feel better, in which case you've basically robbed the term of its meaning.
- taxicabjesus 9y ago
  You must have missed this ProPublica piece: When Evidence Says No, but Doctors Say Yes - https://www.propublica.org/article/when-evidence-says-no-but-doctors-say-yes https://www.propublica.org/article/when-evidence-says-no-but... There's a slander against "alternative medicine" that goes something like, "What do you call alternative medicine that works? Medicine. " The inference is that Medicine adopts what's useful. If a herb is actually useful, the pharmaceutical industry will figure out what the active ingredient is and figure out how to synthesize it, etc. My corollary to the slander is the truism: "What do you call medicine that doesn't work? Medicine. " The ProPublica story linked above says that heart stents [are now known to not be] helpful for anyone that's not actively experiencing a heart attack, but thousands get inserted every year anyways. [edit - clarification [] above]
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    Why do you care about what doesn't work? If the things that work are in the set "Medicine", that's the only set we need to be concerned with. Sure, it's worthwhile to try and figure out which medicine doesn't work, but we know for sure that anything non-medicine does, by definition, not work.
    - tvanantwerp 9y ago
      Except the range of possibilities isn't ['works', 'doesn't work']. Rather, it's ['works', 'no effect', 'harmful', 'works and is harmful at the same time']. A banal example: proton pump inhibitor drugs used to treat acid reflux will, over very long timeframes, cause nutrient malabsorption resulting in more brittle bones. They also have what's called a rebound effect, where dropping them cold turkey leads to a huge jump in stomach acid production and worsening of symptoms. So while effective to reduce stomach acidity, they also have long-term negative effects and a sort of withdrawal that makes the original problem worse. It's a weird and complicated situation, and certainly not the most intense example.
      - StavrosK 9y ago

zzalpha 9y ago

"Wellness" is for those who've given up on conventional medicine. You mean, given up on medicine. All this other stuff? It's not medicine. It's snake oil. Chicanery. Placebo wrapped up in meaningless ritual to make it "feel" real. It's the new iteration of numerology, tarot, psychic reading. The only thing that it, in some cases, brings to the mix is empathy, something frequently missing in our overburdened medical system. And in that respect it has value. But medicine? That it is not, unless you define "medicine" as anything that makes you feel better, in which case you've basically robbed the term of its meaning.

taxicabjesus 9y ago
You must have missed this ProPublica piece: When Evidence Says No, but Doctors Say Yes - https://www.propublica.org/article/when-evidence-says-no-but-doctors-say-yes https://www.propublica.org/article/when-evidence-says-no-but... There's a slander against "alternative medicine" that goes something like, "What do you call alternative medicine that works? Medicine. " The inference is that Medicine adopts what's useful. If a herb is actually useful, the pharmaceutical industry will figure out what the active ingredient is and figure out how to synthesize it, etc. My corollary to the slander is the truism: "What do you call medicine that doesn't work? Medicine. " The ProPublica story linked above says that heart stents [are now known to not be] helpful for anyone that's not actively experiencing a heart attack, but thousands get inserted every year anyways. [edit - clarification [] above]
- StavrosK 9y ago
  Why do you care about what doesn't work? If the things that work are in the set "Medicine", that's the only set we need to be concerned with. Sure, it's worthwhile to try and figure out which medicine doesn't work, but we know for sure that anything non-medicine does, by definition, not work.
  - tvanantwerp 9y ago
    Except the range of possibilities isn't ['works', 'doesn't work']. Rather, it's ['works', 'no effect', 'harmful', 'works and is harmful at the same time']. A banal example: proton pump inhibitor drugs used to treat acid reflux will, over very long timeframes, cause nutrient malabsorption resulting in more brittle bones. They also have what's called a rebound effect, where dropping them cold turkey leads to a huge jump in stomach acid production and worsening of symptoms. So while effective to reduce stomach acidity, they also have long-term negative effects and a sort of withdrawal that makes the original problem worse. It's a weird and complicated situation, and certainly not the most intense example.
    - StavrosK 9y ago