Posted: Jun 20, 2010 11:32 am
OK, TMB. I'll follow your assumption that my failure to agree with you is because I have not adequately understood what you're trying to say, and not because your argument is flawed or has not been presented clearly.
Is this what you're trying to say: That "conventional medicine" is at times guilty of rigidly following a "protocol" rather than taking all available evidence into account, including that evidence pertinent to the particular patient in question? And that this rigidity also constitutes a failure to adhere to the scientific method? Am I getting it right now?
If so, I still fail to see how that is an argument in favour of homeopathy and other "alternative" treatments. These "treatments" are distinguished from "conventional" medicine by one feature only: A rejection of empirical evidence as the basis for determining the efficacy of a treatment, relying instead on unverifiable (and often frankly nonsensical) theoretical models and anecdotal "successes" as being sufficient to determine efficacy.
If you need evidence for this, simply read Nancy Malik's posts in this thread.
Once an "alternative" treatment has garnered enough empirical evidence to support its efficacy, it ceases to be "alternative" and instead become absorbed into mainstream medicine.
By abandoning any empirical basis to its "treatments", complementary medicine does not achieve flexibility and open mindedness. Rather, it exemplifies the very rigidity and inflexibility you decry in "allopathic" medicine. This is demonstrated by the fact that Nancy Malik (or any other homeopath of whom I am aware) has been unable to list a single homeopathic treatment that has been abandoned over the past 300 years. Either you believe homeopathy is the only discipline in which its practitioners have achieved a superhuman infallibility, or that they are rigidly and dogmatically insisting that their treatments work in the face of all contradictory evidence.
Is this what you're trying to say: That "conventional medicine" is at times guilty of rigidly following a "protocol" rather than taking all available evidence into account, including that evidence pertinent to the particular patient in question? And that this rigidity also constitutes a failure to adhere to the scientific method? Am I getting it right now?
If so, I still fail to see how that is an argument in favour of homeopathy and other "alternative" treatments. These "treatments" are distinguished from "conventional" medicine by one feature only: A rejection of empirical evidence as the basis for determining the efficacy of a treatment, relying instead on unverifiable (and often frankly nonsensical) theoretical models and anecdotal "successes" as being sufficient to determine efficacy.
If you need evidence for this, simply read Nancy Malik's posts in this thread.
Once an "alternative" treatment has garnered enough empirical evidence to support its efficacy, it ceases to be "alternative" and instead become absorbed into mainstream medicine.
By abandoning any empirical basis to its "treatments", complementary medicine does not achieve flexibility and open mindedness. Rather, it exemplifies the very rigidity and inflexibility you decry in "allopathic" medicine. This is demonstrated by the fact that Nancy Malik (or any other homeopath of whom I am aware) has been unable to list a single homeopathic treatment that has been abandoned over the past 300 years. Either you believe homeopathy is the only discipline in which its practitioners have achieved a superhuman infallibility, or that they are rigidly and dogmatically insisting that their treatments work in the face of all contradictory evidence.