From: sbharris@ix.netcom.com(Steven B. Harris)
Newsgroups: misc.health.alternative
Subject: Re: Homeopathy is "bullshit" (was: Aspartame (diet drinks) good for
Date: 12 Feb 1999 12:02:15 GMT

In <19990211115131.17434.00000009@ng51.aol.com> rushwayne@aol.com
(RushWayne) writes:

>Traditional medicine, when it comes to chronic illness, has little to
>show for itself, scientific or otherwise. It is really just a way to
>exchange one illness for another while helping the doctors and the drug
>companies get rich.


    More tripe quoted second hand from Andrew Weil.  God, I'm sick of
it.  Has it occured to you that saying that medicine has made little
headway against chronic illness is a tautology with no information
content?  That's how we DEFINE chronic illnesses, don't you know.   As
soon as we conquer a chronic illness, it ceases to be classed as a
chronic illness.  Tuberculosis and syphilis and polio and gout and
cataracts and bone-on-bone knee and hip arthritis all used to be
chronic illnesses. And non-union fractures, hare-lips, and scabies.
Not to mention things you've probably never heard of, but were genuine
horrors in their day, like vesiculovaginal fistulas, scrofula,
onchocerciasis, yaws, aortic atresia (and a myriad other now
correctable congenital cardiac and vascular defects), pernicious
anemia, and so on.

   And what exactly do you mean when you say "little to show for
itself?"  When a disease that was once horrible can now be controlled
by remembering to take a pill at breakfast, I think it deserves a
little more lip service than that.  Consider FDR, the most powerful man
on the Earth in 1945, with a blood pressure approaching 300,
hemorrhages in his eyes, and reduced to being a grey old man at 64,
having to eat milk toast alone for dinner, just to keep that cerebral
hemorrhage, sure to come, at bay a little longer.  We have little to
show since then?  Bull.

                                         Steve Harris, M.D.