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Western medicine has removed from the individual a sense of personal responsibility, and this must change. I must heartily disagree. Well, perhaps not so much

Western medicine has removed from the individual a sense of personal responsibility, and this must change. I must heartily disagree. Well, perhaps not so much disagree as clarify: Western medicine as it is practiced, perhaps discourages personal responsibility (and how many times would you tell patients to eat better and exercise more if they never did?). Evidence based medicine is just that: based on evidence. There's no "removal" of personal responsibility, there are simply facts, as in your case you have brilliantly demonstrated: when something works for you, you continue to use it. My immediate reaction to "trying something" that you mentioned, however was "how many things did you try?" How many people won't research different options, much less put them into practice, simply because it would require them to try something different, or something hard (like exercise)? How many people would rather take some snake-oil to lose weight than eat less and exercise more? How many people will refuse vaccines because they believe it's a government conspiracy? And let's not forget all the other confounding factors, such as big pharma with 85+% of their money dedicated to marketing, or the placebo affect, etc, etc.

jostmey 13y ago
Western medicine has removed from the individual a sense of personal responsibility in the following sense. We are told to ignore what may work for us and to instead try what works a large number of other patients. While the advice may be good advice, it leaves the patient with an attitude that their own ideas about how to treat themselves may be worthless. And this could encourage the patient to place their doctor upon a pedestal - only the doctor knows what is best for you. Of course, some advice is just always good advice - eat right and exercise. But you don't need a doctor to tell you that. I have observed that it is the same people who take the best personal care of themselves, by eating right and exercising, also engage in alternative medicine. The very act of trying to take control of your own health leads you to focus in on what works (or what you "think" works) for you.
- kps 13y ago
  > it leaves the patient with an attitude that their own > ideas about how to treat themselves may be worthless. Well, they probably are.
- pekk 13y ago
  How do you know what actually works for you, and what simply coincided with a change that happened for some other reason? It is literally impossible to tease out these questions without some kind of control. edit: For example, you like drinking diet coke and one morning you find you don't have cancer. Was it the diet coke that drove away the cancer? Did you even have cancer? Just doing things you want to do and approving yourself for them, claiming that they cured you or something, is not responsible and in many cases isn't really even honest
  - glenra 13y ago
    > How do you know what actually works for you, and what simply coincided with a change that happened for some other reason? It is literally impossible to tease out these questions without some kind of control. It depends on the question. For lots of medical issues you could serve as your own control. If your medical issue is a rash or acne or trouble sleeping well or high blood pressure or any other condition that persists over time and is measurable, you can just start tracking it then try various changes and see how the metric matches with the changes. Do two weeks on and two weeks off a few times - either there's a break in the chart - a big noticeable improvement - at the appropriate times or there isn't. I agree this wouldn't work for cancer, but it would work for a lot of things. If the effect magnitude is large enough you don't need a big clinical trial to see it. And if the treatment is cheap and available enough there's no chance in hell that anybody is going to fund a big clinical trial - trials are really only done for drugs that can be patented, so whoever sponsors the tests has a way to get their money back. So long as it takes hundreds of millions of dollars to get a treatment past the FDA's tests, there are inevitably going to be a huge number of perfectly valid treatment options that nobody has financial incentive to pay for testing in that particular way.
    - DanBC 13y ago
      It really wouldn't work for a lot of things. Many illnesses just get better over time. Doing nothing is as effective as doing something. But the patient does something and correlates that with getting better and then thinks there is a causal link.

jostmey 13y ago

Western medicine has removed from the individual a sense of personal responsibility in the following sense. We are told to ignore what may work for us and to instead try what works a large number of other patients. While the advice may be good advice, it leaves the patient with an attitude that their own ideas about how to treat themselves may be worthless. And this could encourage the patient to place their doctor upon a pedestal - only the doctor knows what is best for you. Of course, some advice is just always good advice - eat right and exercise. But you don't need a doctor to tell you that. I have observed that it is the same people who take the best personal care of themselves, by eating right and exercising, also engage in alternative medicine. The very act of trying to take control of your own health leads you to focus in on what works (or what you "think" works) for you.

kps 13y ago
> it leaves the patient with an attitude that their own > ideas about how to treat themselves may be worthless. Well, they probably are.
pekk 13y ago
How do you know what actually works for you, and what simply coincided with a change that happened for some other reason? It is literally impossible to tease out these questions without some kind of control. edit: For example, you like drinking diet coke and one morning you find you don't have cancer. Was it the diet coke that drove away the cancer? Did you even have cancer? Just doing things you want to do and approving yourself for them, claiming that they cured you or something, is not responsible and in many cases isn't really even honest
- glenra 13y ago
  > How do you know what actually works for you, and what simply coincided with a change that happened for some other reason? It is literally impossible to tease out these questions without some kind of control. It depends on the question. For lots of medical issues you could serve as your own control. If your medical issue is a rash or acne or trouble sleeping well or high blood pressure or any other condition that persists over time and is measurable, you can just start tracking it then try various changes and see how the metric matches with the changes. Do two weeks on and two weeks off a few times - either there's a break in the chart - a big noticeable improvement - at the appropriate times or there isn't. I agree this wouldn't work for cancer, but it would work for a lot of things. If the effect magnitude is large enough you don't need a big clinical trial to see it. And if the treatment is cheap and available enough there's no chance in hell that anybody is going to fund a big clinical trial - trials are really only done for drugs that can be patented, so whoever sponsors the tests has a way to get their money back. So long as it takes hundreds of millions of dollars to get a treatment past the FDA's tests, there are inevitably going to be a huge number of perfectly valid treatment options that nobody has financial incentive to pay for testing in that particular way.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    It really wouldn't work for a lot of things. Many illnesses just get better over time. Doing nothing is as effective as doing something. But the patient does something and correlates that with getting better and then thinks there is a causal link.