Comment on Alternative medicine
Senal@programming.dev 4 days agoYeah, I saw it after I’d posted.
I need to be more specific in how I mean “alternative” here.
What I mean is “not of the current scientific consensus” , which I realise isn’t exactly the same wording as the wikipedia definition
Thats my bad.
I also failed to mention that it also works the other way as well, where current science is discredited(fully or partially) , due to flaws in it’s methodology, reproducibility or some other reason.
fizzle@quokk.au 4 days ago
I think there are actually very few interventions which were “not of the current scientific consensus” which later became accepted medical practice.
Also I think in the current era there are practically no alternative therapies by that definition which will later become medical practice.
A salient example might be ketamine therapy. It’s been a party drug since at least the 90s but in the last several years has become a government subsidised therapy for PTSD in Australia. That doesn’t mean kids at ravfes were doing the therapy in the 90s, because the manner in which the ketamine is administered is the key to the beneficial outcome.
That said, I think the treatments a medical doctor can prescribe or even recommend are less than a third of the treatments or behaviors that can manage a chronic illness. What I mean is, if you have a chronic condition there’s (hopefully) medications that will help you manage it, but it’s the lifestyle changes that will influence your quality of life in the coming decades.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Yeah the only ones I can think of that used to be used the current medical way are cannabis for appetite and analgesia and psychadelics for ptsd and addiction. Both of these examples are obvious to anyone who’s used such substances.