Sequel Thread To Holistic Doctors, and medicine

Believing that Prozac is more likely to cause harm than SJW might be a valid first guess, but the way you determine the actual potential for harm is through double-blind placebo-based studies. Until you have the same data for SJW that you do for Prozac then you really can't know. The criticism isn't that you're wrong, it's that your opinion is not based on good data and is therefore unlikely to be correct. To the extent that they accept anecdotal over scientific evidence and incorporate it into their care, you should not trust them, and for the same reasons you've been provided over and over and over again. The answer isn't going to change, LindaLou. There is nowhere in this universe where anecdotal approaches to evidence gathering trump scientific approaches. Someone who accepts such approaches as superior to scientific approaches really shouldn't be trusted. Your assumption that a traditional MD is always going to prescribe a drug is a gross overgeneralization. I'm sure that whether such a thing is true varies widely by physician. Probably the distribution from overprescribing to underprescribing physicians fits under a bell shaped curve.Maybe you should introduce me to the traditional MDs of your experience, because the one's of my experience are harder to pry prescriptions out of than barnacles off a boat. If I had my way I'd have prescriptions for diet pills, alertness and sleep, but I don't because my mean MD says I don't need them, just good nutrition and exercise. Sheesh! Uh, okay, they're calling for reform, perfectly believable, but not the same kind of reform that you want (i.e., they're not pushing alternative medicine), and not for the reasons you're providing except when expressed at the most general level (i.e., most people would agree we rely too much on prescription medicine, but definitely would not agree with you that prescription medicine represents a health threat). The editors of prestigious medical journals definitely do not agree with most of what you've been saying here. LindaLou, when are you going to recognize that your personal experience self-analyzed is not a clinical study? How do you know SJW didn't cause your problems? How do you know it was the prescription medication? How do you know it wasn't something else? How do you know it wouldn't have happened to you anyway?The answer is that you don't know, you don't even have enough data to suspect, and that's why I mentioned the example of the silicon breast implant fiasco, which is what you address next: As I said, the studies have already been done. Unfortunately they were completed too late to save Dow Corning from bankruptcy or to save women from unnecessary medical procedures, and these are the kinds of negative outcomes that result when anecdotal evidence is used.That's why I mentioned the silicon breast implant fiasco in the first place, because it is your own situation writ large and famous, surprising you haven't heard of it. Using anecdotal information women were able to convince a court that they had been harmed by the implants. Certainly the women believed this themselves, but later medical studies discovered that the implants were not to blame.You're doing the same thing as these women, reaching conclusions based upon anecdotal information, except that for you the correct information is already available, you've just consciously decided to let anecdote trump scientific evidence. Anecdote again, and a truly weird conclusion. Congratulations to the ND for being the one who figured it out, but what in the world about this story is leading you to conclude that traditional medicine wouldn't consider the possibility of workplace pollution? Depression is one of the known symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning. I presume that inquiring about possible environmental causes of depression is taught in medical school. Except there's no one here saying "it's drugs or nothing" except you. You're creating a monster within your own mind and then trying to convince everyone else that it's real.What I've been saying, and you've seen this so many times by now that you must already know what's coming, is that anecdotal approaches to gathering and interpreting evidence are far inferior to scientific approaches, especially double-blind placebo-based studies.--Percy

I'm clear on that Percy. You don't need to keep repeating it to me. Sure I'd like to see gold-standard studies supporting what I've chosen to do. Sure, naturopathic MDs would. Until more of those studies are done, however, none of us are going to sit around wathcing the paint dry while we continue taking drugs for preventable and curable diseases. If anecdote recommends a harmless approach such as using a vitamin, and a doctor or patient finds that it works for them too, then that will have to do for now. You don't accept this. I do. I honestly hope I see the day when what I'm doing becomes mainstream medical practice because it will potentially end a lot of suffering.I'm glad your GP prescribed diet and exercise. There are some who know about these things and I would say you're lucky to have one. You can clean up your diet, try kicking soda or caffeine or whatever, do some regular exercise, and see how much better you feel. I wish more doctors were like this. Many of them really do prescribe a pill for every ill, and it isn't surprising because the pharmaceuticals spend a lot of money on gifts and other perks.I honestly do hope that medical school would teach GPs to consider environmental pollution as a possible cause of depression. I don't think it's such common knowledge but I'd be happy if someone could prove that wrong. Many doctors do not enquire too deeply into the causes of a depression and are quick to prescribe an antidepressant. I've seen statistics on this, though I'd have to dig them out.How do I know what specific drugs caused which specific symptoms? Cause and effect. As soon as I took SJW I had a stomach ache and felt weird. When I stopped taking it that very day, those symptoms went away. When I tried mirtazapine for a day, one single pill knocked me out for three days and I could barely stay awake. The rest of the pills went in the trash and I was OK. As soon as I stopped taking citalopram after 6 months, I got an acute batch of withdrawal symptoms, some of which have persisted to this day. They coincided exactly with the time I came off the drug. I'd never experienced any of them before. I don't honestly think I need any further proof than that.By the way, have you got a link to this breast implant story? I'd be interested in finding out the details.

That link is just to the abstract on pubmed.I looked up the arnica paper itself, on the journal website.Most journals require a subscription for access.I'm assuming you don't want to pay and I'm assuming you don't have access to a University library (which would give you access to their subscriptions), so a link to the paper is useless.

It's remarkable the things you assume.Why would you assume that most MDs are unaware of the link between CO and depression? There are a lot more, but I hope this will suffice. Again. Why do you assume this?A trivial example.I had an allergic reaction. I went to my GP. He noticed it was localized (forearms) and asked:What kind of dish soap do you use?No script. Just a question.I changed brands and poof. No more allergic reaction.You really need to back pedal and take a long hard look at your a priori conclusions.(a priori: (Latin) literally, "before the fact;" pertaining to or characterized by something which does not depend on observation or prior experience)

I'm not making assumptions, I've read statistics. I said I'd dig them up if need be.I don't think the influence of CO on depression is in any doubt. The question is about how many GPs would consider it as a possible cause of depression. My own doctor asked me nothing about my home or work environment.Here is an article from CNN titled Antidepressants most prescribed drugs in US. It says that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looked in a study at 2.4 billion drugs prescribed in visits to doctors and hospitals in 2005. Of those, 118 million were for antidepressants. High blood pressure drugs were the next most common with 113 million prescriptions. Adult use of antidepressants almost tripled between the periods 1988-1994 and 1999-2000. Between 1995 and 2002, the most recent year for which statistics are available, the use of these drugs rose 48%.According to an article in the Washington Post (December 3, 2004) titled Antidepressant Use by US Adults Soars, one in 10 American women takes an antidepressant such as Prozac, Paxil or Zoloft. In 2002, more than one in three doctor's office visits by women involved a prescription for an antidepressant. This includes patients already on the drugs and those getting a new prescription.Biological psychiatry is currently a popular idea, and it is "sold" to the public in advertisements claiming that SSRIs correct a chemical imbalance. My own doctor told me that my depression was caused by a lack of serotonin. He had no objective evidence for this, had done no tests.I would say that all of these factors clearly weigh the scales in favour of receiving a prescription for a drug when depression is diagnosed. Doctors frequently have as little as 5 minutes to spend with a patient. If CO toxicity is the actual cause of the depression, do you really think it's very likely that this will emerge during the tyical visit to the doctor? I honestly think you'd be lucky.

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I'm assuming you don't want to pay and I'm assuming you don't have access to a University library (which would give you access to their subscriptions), so a link to the paper is useless.

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It is also courteous to let people know you are quoting from something that the average person can't access, instead of implying that we just need to have the strength to google.Good Luck!

Studies far superior to your anecdotal approach already exist. What you actually mean is that you'll ignore the studies until some are performed that tell you what you've already made up your mind is true. A true scientist follows the best evidence wherever it leads - he doesn't start ignoring the evidence when it takes him in directions he doesn't like. This is just another way of saying what you already said - you're going to ignore the best evidence until it tells you what you want to hear. If you had a bad experience and have now chanced across approaches that work for you then I think that's great, but the corollary is not that modern medicine is wrongheaded when it comes to prescription drugs.You shouldn't be demonizing modern medicine on the basis of anecdotal evidence, or anything else, for that matter. There is not "a lot of suffering" out there at the hands of modern medicine. One of the reasons for the world population problem is modern medicine. When modern medicine is brought into a 3rd world region, populations skyrocket. This is not a claim that modern medicine is perfect, but it sure beats the hell out of anecdote. The next time you're in a primitive region of Africa where people are suffering from West Nile Virus or malaria, why don't you get everyone together and share stories so you can develop effective treatments?To a great extent what you're doing is just taking advantage of the luxury and safety of living in the western world. In a region as healthy as ours, medical advances can provide only marginal benefit because all the big benefits occurred years ago with advances like smallpox and polio vaccines. The complaints of the healthy and wealthy often tend to run toward the "difficult to detect" end of the spectrum, like depression or diastolic dysfunction, and it is easily possible that for some individuals the risks of drugs for these conditions might outrun the benefits they provide.For every anecdotal story with a bad outcome there's an anecdotal story with a good outcome. Concerning depression, my wife's experience cancels out your experience. We could gather stories and stories and put them in lists of good and bad outcomes and count them up and try to weigh them, but it would all be meaningless because you don't learn anything much about the real world with anecdotal stories. And you certainly can't use them to conclude that big pharma is evil and mainstream doctors are prescription-crazy. Oh, good grief. I've lived long enough to have had plenty of doctors, the current one is typical. I've never run into a prescription-crazy doctor in my life. I'm sorry, LindaLou, you're a sample size of 1, plus it's anecdotal, and because it's also personal it's highly subjective. Your story is meaningless by itself, and it stays meaningless no matter how many other anecdotal stories you combine it with from your website. The plural of anecdote is anecdotes, not scientific evidence. This is just a relatively recent event in American history, not as big as Watergate, of course, but maybe as big as Exxon Valdez or the Texaco/Pennzoil trial. I imagine that if you typed "silicon breast implants" and "dow corning" (including the quotes to make them phrases instead of individual words) to Google that you'd find a lot of stuff on the web. It wasn't that long ago, maybe a decade or so.But the story is very instructive, because it is an illustration in real life of what we're telling you here, that the actual nature of the real world isn't derived from anecdote, but from scientific investigation.--Percy

So you thought that the one paragraph that you linked to (the abstract) was the entirety of the paper?That's a new one.

I'll have a Google then Percy.It feels like we keep rehashing the same ground again and again. You and others on this thread are quick to accuse me of having extreme views which are not justified, because medicine and drugs are actually very safe and effective. You do not seem to see the vulnerability of the trust you are placing in that system. You will not consider for a moment, even hypothetically, that I could be right. That's OK, and I honestly wish you well with the approach you choose to take.You can talk about improvements in Africa if you want. I've never said here that all medications are bad. When they start taking antidepressants, statins, and all the other drugs associated with poor lifestyle and diet choices of the Western world, then I will be concerned.You asked me how I knew about the symptoms I had. I told you. I am not extrapolating here. Casue and effect were pretty obvious to me. Do you not ever notice effects of things you've eaten or pills you've taken? Do you decide you have no logical basis for any decision unless a clinical trial is conducted on your symptoms?It's late. I'm tired. This whole discussion is getting tiresome. I think, if anything, I've seen proof here that very few people tend to be willing to look critically at their own trust in the allopathic system until something happens to destroy that trust. If you haven't been in that situation then truly I am glad.

Well since we're both done with MBG, have you ever looked at Dr. Rath's research?
His research deals with vitamin C.His Illioforte™ formula for digestion had a very interesting result for me although my husband and I didn't care for his basic vitamin program.I also like Dr. Mercola's site. Have you read any of his books?
His practice is actually about 2 hours from me.
Very tempting.

Fabulous.However, this says nothing about MOST doctors. Just yours. Fabulous.Let's see the statistics that "most" MDs are unaware that CO poisoning is related to depression.Let's see the statistics that most MDs "prescribe a pill for every ill".Your AD stats are unimpressive, btw.Centers for Disease Control and Prevention What a surprise! Prozac was introduced in 1988. Of course its use "skyrocketed" after 1988.The use of penicillin "skyrocketed" after it hit the market too.

And so your sample size is...one? Doesn't sound like a very good doctor, but I have the same question. So your sample size is...one?Even if two or three or four or five, I would ask the same question: And so your sample size is...six?Tiny sample size, subjective assessment, plus this is still anecdotal. I truly don't understand why you keep citing anecdotal evidence. How many times do we have to tell you how worthless it is? Like PurpleDawn said about MBG, at some point you have to figure out that you need a different approach. My doctors tend to spend a lot of time with me. It would be a rare appointment where I spent only 5 minutes with the doctor. If I were to guess at an average I would say it is 15 or 20 minutes.LindaLou, the problem with your conclusions is that they're anecdotal. They can be contradicted with other anecdotes, such as the ones I offered about myself, but this will never lead to any reliable conclusions. For that you need to apply the scientific method. Did you mention this just for purposes of comparison? Or are you now challenging the safety and efficacy of blood pressure medications? And what criteria should we apply in determining whether this is good or bad news? If in the real world 10% of women suffer from depression, then helping them is good news, not bad. Also bear in mind that if 15 million women are taking antidepressants, then if the dangers were truly as common and severe as you've been attempting to portray then it would have become bloody obvious long ago. Your own statistics reveal the impossibility of your claims.--Percy

http://www.drrathresearch.org/...scientific_discoveries.html Heart scurvy.Yes. This does sound ... interesting.http://www.drrathresearch.org/...rature_books_brochures.html Yes. Very ... interesting.

Welcome to the NHS. They would prefer to spend more time, but they don't have any of that due to the patientoctor ratio. This source suggests that it may now have increased to about 12 minutes. A less comprehensive study has this table:

Actual consultation length (real time) 	     8.96  4.36 min (1-25 min)
Perceived time                               8.37  4.42 min (1-32 min)

Half my time seems to be spent correcting your mischaracterizations of this discussion, so allow me to correct you yet again. You are not being accused of having extreme views, though they are extreme, but of reaching those views based upon poor evidence, a type of evidence known to invariably produce flawed conclusions.And we're not saying you're wrong because "medicine and drugs are actually very safe and effective." We're saying you're wrong because you cannot support your position with valid evidence, and the quality evidence that does exist in the form of FDA approved studies contradicts you.You're also wrong because you're already on record as saying you won't accept scientific studies until they confirm what you already know to be true, meaning that you'll ignore evidence that isn't consistent with what you already believe. This, too, is untrue. We're not placing our trust in the system, but in the vast superiority of the scientific method at ferreting out what's really going on in the real world. The "system", as you call it, that exists today takes advantage of the scientific method, and the flaws and biases and cheating and finagling that may go on are simply part and parcel of all human activity, including alternative medicine - in fact, especially including alternative medicine. You've affiliated yourself with a system that prefers anecdotal evidence, that rejects scientific evidence, and that includes a seriously significant component of flim-flam. Wheatgrass juice, anyone? Cures all that ails ya! But you'll be concerned for the same poor reasons. Once again I have to correct you. The criticism is not that you're analyzing your own symptoms in order to decide a course of action. I don't know how many times I've said now that I think it's great that you've chanced across a diet regimen that works for you. The criticism is that you're generalizing from your own experience to conclude that what is true for you is true for everyone, and that quite obviously and self evidently is not the case. What is clear is that you're so emotionally tied up in what the "system" did to you that you can't think straight, can't even consider the arguments that are put to you. You've offered nothing but anecdotal arguments, it's been pointed out how poor these are and that there are counter anecdotal arguments and I've even given you a few, yet you just ignore these points and continue criticizing with subjective evidence a "system" that uses validated scientific practices that have produced a remarkable record of medical progress.The bottom line is that scientific methods are the best way to figure out what's really going on, and it is still apparent that you don't understand this as you continue making anecdotal arguments, and now even making critical characterizations and false accusations such as that we're making the discussion tiresome or that we're not looking at things critically.Here's some advice: instead of seeking only the easy evidence that comes to your website and that agrees with you, seek the best scientific evidence available and follow it where it leads. Wherever you end up you'll be immune to criticism that you were unscientific, which would be a good thing.--Percy