Posted: Jun 13, 2010 6:18 pm
DST70 wrote:Arcanyn wrote:What does it actually mean "to treat the entire patient"? If we give someone antibiotics to kill the bacteria which have infected their toe, how is this deficient? Their problem is that there are a whole bunch of bacteria in their toe getting up to no good, and the antibiotics get rid of them. Once this is done, what more is there to do? Why do we need to 'treat the entire patient', when there's nothing wrong with the rest of the patient? It's like criticising the fire brigade for simply dealing with the one house that happens to be on fire, rather than 'treating the entire neighbourhood' that has no fire problems whatsoever.
Well I think it means that if the neighbourhood is surrounded by dry bush, has suffered a drought for 30 straight years and finds itself in the middle of a scorching summer, causation is multi-factorial. And at some point the fire brigade is going to look pretty clueless getting called out every week to the same 'isolated' fire, if they don't consider there may be causative factors of which they're unaware.
Which make perfect sense. However, if the proposed solution to the problem is to wave a magic wand at the dry bush, it's a bit silly to claim that this is "treating the whole problem". And especially if waving a magic wand at the dry bush is claimed to be a solution to the problem of a house that is currently burning down.
Probably one of the most spectacular successes in the history of "allopathic" medicine has been the implementation of public sanitation programs. I can't think of a better example of treating a problem at its roots, and it is the kind of think that homeopathy and "alternative" medicine would have been completely incapable of producing. (Since, as we have seen here, they don't believe pathogens actually are responsible for disease.)