Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Traditional medical practices need to be skeptically examined.

Traditional medical practices need to be skeptically examined.: "To a much greater extent than most people realize, medical practice is determined by adherence to tradition and by reasoning from plausibly related research or personal clinical experience. "

1 comment:

  1. Dear Dr. Malpani,

    Contrary to the statement that modern medicine has been based upon a study of traditions, the fact is that modern medicine started off by declaring all traditional healing methods as "superstition".

    The whole of modern medicine was based upon the discovery of "germs". Therefore the fight against germs became the centre stage rather than the immunity building exercises of traditional medicine and even the more recent discovery of homeopathy.

    As a result the immune system was severely jeopardised. This was noticed but ascribed to "drug resistant bacteria". Only later when immune deficiency disorders like cancer and AIDS became endemic that modern medicine realised that something was wrong somewhere.

    However the basic premise still remains the same. While AIDS is recognised as a severe immune system failure, the fight continues against HIV.

    However in Cancer where no "germ" has mercifully been discovered, some sanity can be observed.(Though certain scientists still pursue the germ theory here stating, for example that the papilloma virus is responsible for cervical cancer. This hypothesis has been doubted recently.)

    The Oncologists of today are being forced to study alternative approaches as success cases seem to be heavily loaded in favour of the latter. However even here there is no serious attempt to give alternate approaches their due. Rather the term "complementary medicine" is being bandied about. Modern medicine doesn't want to loose its grip on the health industry for obvious reasons.

    Regards,
    Jagannath.

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