- Joined
- Saturday January 15, 2011
- Location
- Norfolk, England
Bechet45 said:How did I know the scoffer you referred to was you, Chris?
My personal experience is where allopathic remedies failed to cure I tried Ayurvedic and Ayurvedic cured in no time at all. It is simply an approach, not a threat to your way of being and believing. It may not even seem to exist if you ignore it.
I'm not scoffing, Carl, just suggesting that the reality is more complex than the "conventional medicine = teh eebil corporations, alternative medicine = teh nice, cuddly, friendly stuff" equation that some (not yourself, I hasten to add) make it out to be. I'm not saying that alternative doesn't work - in many cases it does, and, of course, different individuals react differently to the same treatments, just as we know here in terms of blades, soaps, etc. All I'm saying is that, on the whole, I'd rather go with the product of intense research (albeit including the caveat I mentioned earlier) rather than a treatment that is less well-regulated and for which the evidence is purely anecdotal - as much as your experiences have convinced you, science doesn't progress via anecdotes; if it did we'd probably still be diagnosing almost every condition by examining the balance of the patients' four humours and the colour of their urine.
BTW, I've just remembered - the source of that quote about the useful alternative medicine becoming "medicine" was Dara O'Briain, and, before you take your turn to scoff, bear in mind that he does have a physics degree and therefore knows how science works and how to reason in a scientific manner (which, contrary to what many people might like to think) is a skill that, for most people (myself included) needs to be learned. This is because it's far from being universally innate - indeed, humans are infamous for seeing patterns in everything and being spectacularly bad at working-out whether they have any significance or whether they are, in the literal sense, random. In fact, determining whether the results you perceive are due to chance or not is probably the biggest part (and greatest achievement, IMO), of the scientific method, precisely because it helps us to get past our innate tendencies and actually draw valid conclusions from our findings.