TheDude wrote:
Gisteron wrote: alternative medicine "Doctor"
Wondering what alternative medicine is supposed to mean, and why it's implied to be a bad thing.
Well, alternative medicine in my understanding is pretty much any sort of treatment that is being sold as medical when meantime in actual medicine it is either not proven effective or proven ineffective. I do fail to see where in either the passage quoted above or the rest of the post it is quoted from I implied that it is somehow a "bad thing", setting aside what that means.
Basic herbalism is alternative medicine, but it works perfectly well.
The extent to which it works, it is incorporated into medicine and pharmaceutical production. The extent to which it is alternative medicine is the extent to which it has not been demonstrated to work.
Psychology and the practice of various kinds of talk therapy methods have been (and still are) looked down on as a fake science or an alternative medicine by some (this has been changing over time), though even Freudian psychoanalysis has demonstrable effectiveness.
See above. The extent to which those things are effective is the extent to which they are part of medicine and used as such. I am not myself an expert in matters of medicine but I have yet to meet one who would dismiss all of psychology as unscientific, though I also have yet to meet one who
wouldn't dismiss Freudian psychoanalysis as just that.
Chinese medicine is often called alternative medicine, ...
If you would kindly specify what exactly "Chinese medicine" means, we can discuss that. From what I understand, there is medicine and then there is everything that isn't it. Much like with the examples before, the extent to which the set you mean by "Chinese medicine" overlaps with the set that is medicine, it is - tautologically - part of it. And the extent to which it doesn't it, well, doesn't. Is there some nuance or difficulty I am overlooking here?
And aromatherapy has helped quite a few people with things like migraines...
I'm not sure how that is a problem for anything either. The extent to which it does help with things it is recognized as helpful. The extent to which it doesn't, it isn't.
Is the person who heals me not my doctor?
No. A doctor is a person who holds a doctorate. That can be an MD, an academic title or a Doctor h.c. A physician is a formally educated and practicing medical professional. Someone who heals you is just someone who heals you. It implies nothing about either their job or their education or any titles to their name.
If my doctor tells me to drink more ginger tea instead of writing me a prescription to some pill for a stomach problem, does that make the doctor an alternative medicine doctor? And if so, what's wrong with that?
No, it doesn't. Earlier you wondered what alternative medicine means. Well, if it meant something as concrete as actual medicine does, there would be some standard one would have to meet, and some rule one could break. If I'm not mistaken, there is no such thing as an alternative medicine license that can be revoked the way an actual medical license can, is there?
