You can do science just as badly as you can do religion

I can’t read the Science Based Medicine website, despite my complete agreement with many of its conclusions, without getting annoyed by the priestly attitude of its authors.

They make broad generalizations that could often be equally well applied to the mainstream physicians the site claims are qualitatively superior. For example, from Scott Gavura, Naturopaths offer an array of disparate health practices like homeopathy, acupuncture and herbalism that are linked by the (now discarded) belief in vitalism – the idea we have a “life force”. I’ve certainly never had any difficulty finding doctors who believe in “life forces” and “souls” and such – the churches are full of ’em, seriously. And I’ve heard at least one physician recommend acupuncture, because it had worked on other patients of his.

It will improve blood flow within the penile organs to allow more blood supply to the viagra 50 mg the original source penis. The dose should viagra online cheap be taken approximately an hour before you have sexual session. Take one drug at a time and cost contingency allowance buy generic sildenafil should be set aside for these commensurate with the risk of them occurring. You may be aware of some, and others on this list may surprise you: Unhealthy food consumption Fasting Alcohol intake Stress Intense liver cleanses Certain medications and diabetes. cheap levitra downtownsault.org SBM’s authors also often seem to promote a Medieval doctrine of contagion when they talk about alternative medicine – if any person who claims to be an herbalist or chiropractor does something wrong, this proves that all herbalists and chiropractors are equally wrong. Such a doctrine, if applied equally harshly to mainstream medicine, would make SBM’s own doctors somehow guilty for the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. I can’t abide that kind of sloppy thinking.

I wish I could choose less preachy, more convincing allies. It’s good that SBM names and exposes actual quacks, and homeopathic superdilution remedies truly are outmoded nonsense… but I keep finding myself wondering if perhaps Medieval witch-hunters burned some folks who actually deserved it, occasionally.

Homeopathy as the least worst choice

Interesting thing about homeopathy, that I learned from visiting the Mary Baker Eddy Museum in the Boston Christian Science Reading Room: less than 200 years ago, the best medical treatment you could get was probably homeopathy. It was unlikely to outright kill you, and would keep you well hydrated. The next best treatment was almost certainly prayer (because it might have psychological benefits and at the very least it didn’t involve bleeding or the administration of poisons) followed by herbalism (which could definitely kill you, but might also heal you) followed by a dog’s breakfast of other therapies which mostly involved greatly increasing your chance of an untimely death in the name of healing.

Over time, the bits and pieces of things that actually worked (such as keeping patients hydrated, and various herbal remedies such as willow bark and etc.) became the basis of modern medicine, mostly through the efforts of snake-oil hucksters and patent medicine companies who found ways to profit from them. The profit-driven system has mostly worked rather well (despite numerous debacles like aspirin, thalidomide, Coley’s cancer cure, etc.) because you couldn’t make profit from dead patients (until the development of mass media campaigns, anyway).

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Today it’s popular for self-aggrandizing Internet commentators to hold up homeopathy as a “fake science” that they lump in with whatever other targets of opportunity they think will make them look scientific and clever, such as chiropractery if the pundit is left-wing, and “global warming” if s/he’s right-wing. And invariably these critics know almost nothing of the history of medicine, and they’ll usually characterize medicine as a “science” (or possibly a “Science”) rather than the praxis that it is. But to my mind, today’s corporate medicine is very much the same as the homeopathy of Mary Baker Eddy’s time – it’s the least worst choice.