Paulatic wrote:Annoying Twit wrote:Why would you ask a forum of people who are mostly not medical experts, rather than asking your GP?
You sound like someone who has faith in GPs. Perhaps you've a good one?
There is sufficient evidence floating around this forum to show diagnosis and prescriptions are far from foolproof and sometimes detrimental. I see nothing wrong in asking lay persons on their experience of particular symptoms.
I've seen a variety of GPs in my lifetime. Some good, some bad. I'm basically healthy myself, so rarely need any sort of treatment. However, I have seen relatives and friends go through treatment for severe, in some cases life ending illness, and have seen exaples of what can and can't be done. But, these are anecdotes and pretty damn useless in evaluating the effectiveness of treatment.
More importantly than my own personal observations or other anecdotes, there is plenty of published research on the effectiveness of treatment. E.g. that cancer survival rates have been improving.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-cance ... KD20150423There's also evidence that for cancer, people live longer with treatment than they do without. You need to look at each illness separately however
http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/about-c ... r/survival Further investigation of this shows that mainstream medicine does have a beneficial effect overall. But note that I chose liver cancer as my example. It is a difficult to treat cancer, and for stage D there are no effective treatments. The treatment is more effective the earlier the cancer is detected. This comes back to the OP. Night sweats are often not a serious problem, but they can be a symptom of a serious disease. If the OP delays going to their GP while chasing 'alternatives', then an underlying condition may go untreated for longer than it should, which could have very serious effects.
In our own family my wife has two brothers. Both have always had good jobs and private medical insurance along with them. They and their wives have had more tests and drugs for this and that and stays in hospitals which I can't keep track of. All four of them are now far from healthy. How much of the attention they received was necessary is anyone's guess I'll guess a lot of it was to send an invoice to the insurers.
Here you have anecdotal evidence based on a very small sample. You appear to be trying to claim that having medical treatment makes people unhealthy. People vary greatly in their health status. Some experience considerable illness throughout their lives. Some remain robustly healthy to an advanced age. You have no idea whether or not these people would be even less healthy if they hadn't received medical treatment. If you want to claim something, then (a) you should be clear about what you are claiming, and (b) you should provide proper evidence. Anecdote is not evidence, discussed further here:
https://thelogicofscience.com/2016/02/1 ... worthless/ We've all heard about some great aunt who smoked a packet every day and lived to 100. That does not mean that cigarettes are healthy. If you had swapped strategies so that your wife's brothers had used herbalism, while your side used conventional medicine, but all else stayed the same, what would have happened? You have no idea.
Meanwhile we've been the 'cranky, knit your own yoghurt' side of the family. We've always eaten Wholefoods, brought our children up on goats milk and homemade bread. We have a lot of faith and evidence of herbal treatments. Always followed Juliet de Baracli Levy in natural rearing of dogs. I can't remember how many sheepdogs I've had in 40 yrs, must be something like 30, but I can remember how many times I've been to the vets with them. Three times.
This doesn't mean I don't go and seek medical advise. There are some things, like antibiotics when needed, that conventional medicine is good at. The many options we have at our disposal can compliment each other.
You say that you have a lot of faith and evidence in herbal treatments. Well, it's possible to find people who have faith and claim to have evidence in any sort of claptrap you care to name. Crystal healing? Ghosts?
You mention your sheepdogs. How healthy are sheepdogs in general? Are you using the correct method of measuring their health - as someone who is following a 'natural' method does that depress the number of visits to the vets. If they weren't getting ill, then would they have gone to the vets even if you'd believed in it.
That's why in medicine we need to have robust, repeated, experiments to work out what works and what doesn't. There are myriad ways in which people can fool themselves that a treatment is effective. Various forms of placebo effect. Reversion to the mean. Spurious correlation. Selective memory. Social proof. Etc. That's why there are randomised double-blinded controlled trials. As otherwise there's too much risk of ending up believing something that is wrong.
Returning to your sheepdogs, there are a small number of dogs (in terms of medical research) that you've raised with a 'natural' lifestyle. But, you have no control group of a randomly selected half of the dogs which will be raised differently. And, you have a measure of fitness, trips to the vets, that is based on your own decisions. To really know if the lifestyle is beneficial for dogs and most importantly to know which aspects of the lifestyle are effective (if any) you need proper experiments which you as an individual can't do. Again, you have no idea what would have happened had you believed more in conventional medicine for them but all else was equal.
I'm not immune to this. At one time there was an over the counter cough medicine that I believed far more effective than any others. So, I'd buy it every time I had a cough and it seemed that the cough would just melt away. However, when over the counter cough medicines were robustly tested, it was found that they were no more effective than placebo. I'm not arrogant enough to claim that my personal experience over-rules properly conducted medical research. However, many people are and this leads to the propagation of medical BS.
It's easy to claim that something like herbalism 'complements' mainstream medicine. But, the problem is where people start to believe in the effectiveness of alternative medicine to the point where they eschew conventional medicine to use alternatives, and therefore do not receive effective treatment. That is far from being complementary. Particularly when something becomes a meme, such as St John's Wort which has been shown to be no better than a placebo and to have side effects:
https://nccih.nih.gov/health/stjohnswor ... ession.htmHerbalism is a case where if a herb has an effect, then medical research will reveal this, the active ingredient will be extracted, purified, and supplied in a controlled dose. It becomes mainstream medicine and can be delivered more reliably. What is left under the 'alternative' banner is the stuff that doesn't work, or inefficient and unreliable delivery. Such as St John's Wort.
