Posted by Quintal on April 6, 2007, at 9:41:37
In reply to Re: Advantages to alternative meds?, posted by Klavot on April 6, 2007, at 8:34:01
>True, alternative doctors misdiagnose, but then so do thousands in mainstream medicine.............
Thank you teejay, I was just about to make that point. I suppose my mother is a textbook case of this. She developed severe diarrhea and vomiting in her mid teens, which persisted intermittently until she was 24 (by now a frail, skeletal figure) she was admitted to hospital and finally diagnosed with Chron's Disease. The GP at her local practice had been treating her for dysentery for most of that time, and when that failed he claimed she was neurotic and had an eating disorder. By the time she was finally diagnosed the Chron's was so advanced she needed major surgery, culminating in an ileostomy a few years later. She had to live with that mutilation for the rest of her life, which incidentally was cut short when her lung cancer was misdiagnosed as a chest infection, and later when it failed to respond to antibiotics, asthma. The radiologist had misinterpreted the shadow on her x-ray as an infection rather than a tumour, and the inhalers sufficiently masked the symptoms until the cancer was so advanced it was untreatable.
So I don't necessarily buy the idea that conventional doctors are always more accurate in their diagnosis and always prescribe the most appropriate treatment. Nor do I see why we must reduce ourselves to the tribal behaviour of children and teenagers, i.e. having to belong to one particular group and deride all others.
I use whatever treatment I feel is most appropriate to me given the information available to me at the time. As a result I'm now taking synthetic drugs; reboxetine and pramipexole because they seem most likely to help me right now. However, I'd have no hesitation in using an 'alternative' remedy if it seemed likely it would also be beneficial to me, as I have done in the past.
Q
poster:Quintal
thread:747132
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/alter/20070320/msgs/747483.html