I hate the medical profession
 

They're all fucking superiority-deluded asswipes. So there. (With apologies to the rare exceptions).

A doctor dies and goes to the waiting room in the sky along with everyone who are being sorted into groups for heaven and hell. Eventually, the doctor is sent to the line for going to heaven.
The doctor looks at the length of the line and walks to the front of it and demands to be put at the front of the line,
"I'm a very impootant doctor, I can't be kept waiting in a line like everyone else."
Saint Peter says, "I'm sorry, in heaven everyone is equal, there's no preferential treatment, you'll just have to wait like everyone else."
Not to brushed off the doctor insists that he be put at the head of the line and demnds to speak with someone else with higher authority.
Saint Peter says, "Sorry, I'm the final arbiter and I say get back to the end of the line and wait your turn."
Just then, a man in a white coat, with a stethoscope walks right past them both and enters the pearly gates.
Incensed, the doctor shouts at St. Peter, "That guy's a doctor and you just let him waltz on in infront of everyone. How come you won't let me in?"
St. Peter says, "That's god, he only thinks he's a doctor."

one of my current favorites, thanks

Wow. I guess that's it; there's no more to say. Sorry that whatever angered you today happened, monster.

Said the fucking superiority-deluded asswipe.

.

It's part of her charm. :)

Yes, but you're OUR fucking superiority-deluded asswipe. :p:

(Pretty sure you fall under the rare exception disclaimer)

Monster's a math doctor where everything is cut and dried, right or wrong.
Quite unlike a medical doctor who can only make educated guesses, a thousand times a day, under the lawyer of Damocles, trying to find a treatment with minimum collateral damage.

Because of that, the system to train medical doctors is designed to promote maximum self assurance and minimum doubt in their own abilities, so they don't have a nervous breakdown everyday.

I will admit the only time I heard my mother the nurse say fuck(after too many glasses of wine), was describing the superior attitude of the doctors in the hospital.

But this ain't no stinky island, this is America :f207:, where you have the freedom to not go to the doctor if you choose.

What kinda doctorin' do you do?

orthopedist?

Occupational Medicine, Public health, Environmental health. Used to do urgent care, far northern 'do everything' practice, tamer family practice down south (south of the arctic, not southern US). The 'ortho' stands for something else.

I had a long post about doctors. But there's no point.

Oh c'mon, now. This is the cellar, when has pointlessness ever stopped anyone from posting? It's what we do here.

Besides, some of us are interested in what you have to write.

(The ortho means she's right)

I protest orthodoc.

I read your post, though I can't easily recover it now. You wrote about how you had the terrible duty to pronounce two young men dead and break the news to their families, and how you had to fight off an addict who attacked you for not giving him a prescription that he would sell immediately and how you counseled a young wife/mother from a suicidal gloom due to her abusive home life.

Those are not pointless experiences. *I* respect medical professionals, and I like and respect you and your experience. Please don't accept other people's shit. Like footfootfoot's recent video post from "To This Day", it's important to remember "They were wrong."

I hope I haven't offended you by reiterating what you edited out. You wrote it, I read it, and it's in my mind. Now it's here.

Exactly, that's what Monster was doing, venting here the frustration we've all felt,(even/especially Ortho), with the medical pros. No one in that field should take it personally.
I hate to think how any lawyers lurking here must feel. :haha:

Don't take it personally ortho. Monster has her own issues just like the rest of us do. We've all made statements here from time to time that have personally offended someone else, but 99% of the time, it's not intentional.

You've had your problems. You're allowed to vent. So is monster. ;)

I'm not offended, V. That was my first day of work in a small northern town. But I feel like it just comes across as whiny self-justification to try to explain a doc's life to a largely hostile audience. Monster didn't ask my thoughts; she was venting her opinion that everyone in the medical profession is a fucking superiority-deluded asswipe. Why would she welcome vignettes from a doctor's life in her thread?

Thank you for being interested. I have a lot of stories, although I have to be careful especially about the ones from up north - when a place is small enough, people can be identified. For now - bad day, bad visit with the onco, haha yes everyone has bad doctor visits. But we're not all asswipes, not all the time, anyway.

Is this an appropriate moment to quote Carly Simon? :bolt:

Monster, you put the lime in the coconut and drink it all up. Put the lime in the coconut and drink 'em both together. You put the lime in the coconut, you're such a silly one. Put the lime in the coconut and you'll feel better. Put the lime in the coconut and call me in the morning.

:eek: No. It has another meaning.

You mean you're not hetero?

orthodoxy

Winners :blush:

Ok. Officially confused. Orthodoc is a non-hetero Orthodox something????

Sorry to confuse. The ortho is for Orthodox. Non-heterodox just means Orthodox - nothing to do with preferences. I'm an Orthodox doc.

I no longer believe in modern medicine. I believe that despite all the super technology and elite bedside manner..., the greatest danger to your health is the doctor who practices modern medicine. I believe that modern medicine's treatments for disease are seldom effective, and that they're often more dangerous than the disease they're designed to treat. ...

I believe that more than ninety percent of modern medicine could disappear from the face of the earth - doctors, hospitals, drugs and equipment - and the effect on our health would be immediate and beneficial. I believe that modern medicine has gone too far, by using in everyday situations extreme treatments designed for critical conditions. Every minute of every day modern medicine goes too far, because modern medicine prides itself on going too far. ... the product of this [medical] factory is not health at all. So when you go to the doctor, you're seen not as a person who needs help with his or her health, but as a potential market for the medical factory's products.

JMO no offense against any person intended.

My wife felt slightly unwell the last couple days, but then yesterday felt pretty crummy. She suspected a UTI. So she phoned her doctor's office and spoke to the nurse practitioner there who sent her to a specific lab 5 minutes from our house. She had to hurry because it was going to close within the next 20 minutes. She got to the lab to leave a sample, and meanwhile the doctor's office had called in a prescription to the local pharmacy. She went to the pharmacy and got the antibiotics. Took her first one at 5pm last night, and felt much better this morning. If the results come back that the prescription needs to be altered, the doctor can do that, but it looks like it's working great and all she has to do is finish the course.

I love modern medicine. If we were cave men, she'd just have to suffer through it and hope for the best. Drinking lots of water would be her only option.

Real cranberry juice is just as effective and far less time, effort and $$$$ Cranberry capsules are even better.

If not for modern medicine I would have died in 1985 along with my oldest son. If not then, it would have been late in 1986 when I went septic with peritonitis.

Public health interventions have had enormous impact worldwide. Clean drinking water; immunizations; general hygiene and sewage disposal; more recently, reductions in tobacco use.

Acute care innovations that ironically came out of battlefield medicine have made things better, not worse: trauma principles and protocols save lives today that 50 years ago would have ended tragically.

We've adopted a consumer culture, sedentary lifestyle, and dietary habits that are killing us. The fallout of those factors is what we really need to address in the next few years, I believe.

I find it interesting that people jump up and down about antibiotics being in the food chain but they readily take them at the first hint of any minor ailment. You perfectly illustrated my point Glatt, about modern medicine going too far. Look at all the hoops your wife had to jump thru to find relief. [which certainly is your right to have whatever medical care that you want] Look at all the money that was paid for medicine, the doctor who never even saw her, the NP, your gas... I think cranberry caps are about $10 or less.

The difference between "modern medicine" and anything else is whether it has passed double-blind studies on its effectiveness.

Cranberry may help prevent UTI, but has not been shown effective as a treatment.

I don't have an all or nothing approach to my opinion but modern medicine would rather you die using its remedies than live by using what some physicians call "quackery".

Orthodox=the right or true doctrine
Heterodox=that other doctrine

So, it could mean you are right :p:

Have you ever used it?

My wife drank cranberry juice for two days after the first symptoms and it did nothing she could notice. It was only then that she called the doctor's office.

edit: And I thought that there were very few hoops to jump through. I don't see how it could be any more convenient. An oral history was taken over the phone instead of in person. I figured that's how a UTI is diagnosed since the infection is internal. Lab results take a day or two, and it's inhumane to make a patient wait that long before treatment. The doctor's office is 25 minutes away and the result would have been the same. I agree that antibiotics can be used too much and should only be used when needed, and I think this is one of the times they are needed. (We'd probably bash heads on this Nirvana, but I think antibiotics should be banned for animal use. Save them for humans.)

Most cranberry juice is high fructose corn syrup cocktail which just feeds bacteria. Real 100% cranberry juice or caps is effective for most people that I know that have taken this remedy. Not all things work for all people.

Why are there commercials promoting drugs and lawyer's commercials with class action lawsuits for the same drugs? Because people are the experiment and 'oopsy so sorry that did not work for you and now you have to wear a colostomy bag.' Natural remedies if not effective will not cause you permanent harm.

The savage truth is that most medical research is organized, paid for, commissioned or subsidized by the drug industry (and the food, tobacco and alcohol industries). This type of research is designed, quite simply, to find evidence showing a new product is of commercial value.

I hope this is not what they prescribed for your wife Z-Pak

FDA: Z-Pak Antibiotic Could Have A Deadly Side Effect

As CBS 2’s Dr. Max Gomez reported, azithromycin – known by the brand names Zithromax and Z-Pak – could cause fatal heart problems.

More than 40 million prescriptions a year are written for azithromycin, for everything from bronchitis to urinary tract and skin infections. But like all drugs, azithromycin has its side effects.

The FDA said one rare side effect could be lethal. It could cause an irregular heart rhythm that in some patients has caused sudden cardiac death.

LINK

babies and bathwater.

In a hive, the individual is not only unimportant, but effectively doesn't exist. Only the group exists.

Imagine for a moment there were no drugs as we know them. When a human gets sick either they live or they die, and presumably the gene pool gets stronger over time. Not treating the sick makes for a stronger, healthier hive. It also has other consequences, but for now I'm limiting to discussion to health of the hive, not individual cases of "Well, I wouldn't be alive." I doubt I would be alive today if not for medicine. I might have lived but maybe not for long.

Selfishly speaking, of course we want medicine of some form or other, but if we weren't self aware and only knew "the hive", any individual from the hive would be expendable. Even the queen. If she dies, a new queen takes her place.

I'm not promoting eugenics, I'm only pointing out what I think is a consequence of medicine. How does one make a trade-off? Is this good for me or good for everyone?

I may be out to lunch here, but it's something I think about, being a selfish person I'm glad I am alive and my friends are alive and my kids are alive and I'm glad I can take antibiotics when I get lyme disease.

I'm glad you weren't brutally murdered by ticks. [/demitrimartin]

I am glad there are antibiotics. Are they over prescribed? YES! Do some have side effects that can cause death? YES are the patients told? I don't think so who would take something if a DR said BTW this might make you well or it might cause you to have :

diarrhea that is watery or bloody;

headache with chest pain and severe dizziness, fainting, fast or pounding heartbeats;

cardiac arrest

Death
nausea, upper stomach pain, itching, loss of appetite, dark urine, clay-colored stools, jaundice (yellowing of the skin or eyes); or

severe skin reaction -- fever, sore throat, swelling in your face or tongue, burning in your eyes, skin pain, followed by a red or purple skin rash that spreads (especially in the face or upper body) and causes blistering and peeling.



mild diarrhea, vomiting, constipation;

stomach pain or upset;

dizziness, tired feeling, mild headache;

nervous feeling, sleep problems (insomnia);

vaginal itching or discharge;

mild rash or itching;

ringing in your ears, problems with hearing; or

decreased sense of taste or smell.



I would rather take something that may make you well but will not kill you or cause life altering defects. I would rather practice prevention and not need any drugs. Allot of medical conditions are self inflicted.

That is an extraordinarily dangerous assumption with which to approach any remedies, 'natural' or otherwise.

I've never had a UTI, but my individual experience is not meaningful.
Some people will take cranberry and feel better.
Some people will take cranberry and not feel better.
Some of the first group may have gotten better anyway without the treatment.
Some of the second group may have avoided feeling even worse by taking the treatment.
The only way to measure the actual effectiveness of the treatment is a double-blind study.
The NIH indicates that after first symptoms, it's probably too late for cranberry to help.
Not always the case, but mostly true. "No effects" implies "no side effects". If placebo effect is sufficient to cure what ails you (as it often is), then you've got a good chance with most alternative medicine. The problem is that you can't tell ahead of time which ailments can be placebo'ed away, and there is no method within alternative medicine to separate the treatments that are placebo from those which have real effects.

There are quacks in modern medicine, and there are quacks in alternative medicine. The fundamental difference that separates modern medicine out is that it actually has a goal, and a process, of eliminating its quacks. Its an often slow and imperfect process, and a process that will never be complete, but there are innumerable practices and practitioners that have been medically discredited.

Which alternative medicines have been "alternatively discredited"? Sometimes it appears that in alternative medicine, failing to succeed in a scientific study of a treatment is second only in prestige to refusing to conduct one.

Modern medicine = treat the symptoms

Alternative= cure the ailment

Nirvana's right in that we're a nation of junkies, looking for instant relief for every itch, real or imagined. Gladly provided by Big Pharma, a pill to treat, but they hope not cure, that itch, and gladly profiting from the placebo effect.
Doctors try to pick the right pill because patients demand the miracles promised on the TV every 30 seconds.

But that's only part of "Modern Medicine", and quickly forgotten when you hit a pole at 60mph, catch you shirt sleeve in the combine, or your arm goes numb and you can't breath.

Living healthier always makes sense, and nature provides a lot of help with little itches, although aspirin is a lot more convenient than chewing that Willow branch. After all, look how well it worked for the Indians.

And quacks...dear me. I have had way too much fucking experience of quackery.

(This isn't directed at anyone. I just needed to rant mindlessly.)

I am a healthy skeptic of modern medicine. If I didn't respect the institution and the practitioners (to say nothing of the negative externalities they operate with -- e.g., poor analytical statistics instruction, drug advertising and weak FDA), I wouldn't consider it at all.

That said, I treat everything my doctor tells me as a professional opinion, nothing more and nothing less. Doctors are people and thus have bad days on top of operating with incomplete information.

I know first hand how hard it can be to analyze software. You can always get visibility into any part of the system, given enough time--but even then you have to be careful to not confound the results (this happens all the time and it's hard to discern). Biological systems are much more complicated and do not yield to all of the analytical techniques I use everyday, no matter how much time and care you take.

Doctors are valuable in that they can diagnose your body as quickly and accurately as I can diagnose your code problems. Your local holistic "practitioner" is often just making shit up or relying on shit other people made up.

"It works for me" is anecdote, not data. Most novice programmers make this mistake and get a face full of pie when they use the excuse on customers, bosses or experienced developers. Even if you know hundreds of people who have made the same observation, you can't generalize without valid experiments. Sure, if it isn't going to hurt you, you can try it but you can't have any confidence that it will work. That's what experiments give you: x% confidence that your diagnosis is true and the solution will work in a given set of circumstances.

As an example, I manage my psychiatric illnesses on my own most of the time. However, when things get really bad and my usual coping mechanisms are failing, I see a professional and get therapy and meds to get over the rough spots. The professionals think what I do is super dangerous and that I should be on high doses of medication at all times. Medication that makes life not worth living; no sex, no enjoying food, no enthusiasm, no exercise sounds like a great way to live, right? For most of the population, however, the professional is right and their cocktails work.

tl; dr: ZOMG! Don't confuse individuals with statistics. Medicine is not an exact science. It is based on a lot of things, including professional experience and judgement (which may not easily be explicated).

And if that last one was a genuine description of the broad sway of alternative medicine I'd be a lot less cynical about it.

Aspirin is a natural substance, borne out of old herbalism. Because it has a measurable and repeatable effect. So it is both mainstream and natural. Know what they call alternative medicine that can be tested and proven to work? Medicine.


We'd better stop here, else Monster's thread about bastard doctors (sorry orth :p) will descend rapidly into a standup row over homeopathy.

Love your comments Xob. I am not against all modern medical treatment.

HM The only way to have double blind studies is to have them funded. That takes so much money that only a drug company could afford to have this done, or the government who would never bite the hand that feeds them. Drug companies funding drug research is most certainly a conflict of interest since commercial value outweighs any effective treatment value. What is a few thousand deaths compared to 20 million symptoms masked?

An orange may affect a cure for scurry but you may not say this because that would make it a drug subject to the scrutiny of FDA approval. :rolleyes:

You use to be able to buy Baby aspirin everywhere, cheap. Then they decided older folks should take it for circulation, changed the name to Low Dosage, and charge ten times as much. :haha:

Tramadol a wormer for sheep is about $2 for 30 pills but as a human cancer "treatment" its about $6 a pill WTF?


I liked your post PW because sometimes people have to think for themselves instead of mindlessly drinking the kool aid.

I call it too expensive for the average person. I am glad most alternative therapies are not called [described as] medicine/drug because then I would need a Dr to prescribe and it would be 100x the price.

Yabbut ask me first okay? Nothing worse than being put in a coconut when you're not expecting it! :D

*nods* fair point. Not something that applies so much over here. Healthshops with ranges of natural remedies and advice on what to use, along with various alternative therapists make a mint over here. When for most people, a visit to their doctor is free, and the maximum charge for prescription drugs is £7.50 per item. Anything that can be bought otc for less the doctor will generally advise you to do so rather than prescribe.

I know, probably more than most given my family's woeful experiences of medical neglect and outright incompetence, that doctors are not perfect. And I know from years of regular contact with the medical world that sometimes the cure is not worth it, and some medicines are about ongoing profit rather than curing illnesses.

But some of the dangers in the alternative medicine scene are real problem, not least the danger that someone who really, really should be getting proven medicine from a qualified doctor, might delay such in favour of alternative, homeopathic, or holistic healing options. The harm isn't always in the substance. The harm is often in the delay it brings.

And speaking as someone who spent way too many years on the treatment merry-go-round, I know that there are a lot of practitioners making great big piles of cash from the hopes of desperate people.

Here a Dr visit is $100 or more and around 1 and 1/2 times that for medicine.

[quote] The harm is often in the delay it brings [quote]

This comes down to personal choice and not everyone makes good decisions [insert Steve Jobs here] but modern medicine, the entire industry and social machinery of it is, at its root, a totalitarian system. By that, I mean that there is a central ideology that seeks to enforce its domination by methodically obstructing any ideas that run counter to it.

Self diagnosis can be a problem. My dad died pretty much as a result of his fervent disbelief in "traditional" medicine, taking way too many magic bullet supplements, and drinking far too much water. He was proud to say that he hadn't been to a doctor since the early 1970s.

He died of un-diagnosed congestive heart failure, convinced that he was coughing all the time and out of breath because he was allergic to something and needed to drink more water to "Flush out the toxins." rather than drowning in his own fluids.

Had he gone to a doctor he might still be alive today or at least lived long enough for his grandkids to remember him, might not. But his self diagnosis and treatment regimen was pretty much for shit.

I agree with perrywinckle, I take all doctors traditional and alternative with a grain of salt, and do a lot of research and ask a lot of questions. I'm not so passive as a patient.

No, alternative treatments are frequently aimed at symptoms, too. Homeopathy explicitly so. And vaccines and antibiotics treat the ailment.
I'd have sympathy for that viewpoint if any alternative medicines that failed double-blind studies that actually were performed despite the cost were subsequently dropped from the market. The closest I can think of is Zicam which was recalled after causing actual harm, but have any been recalled for uselessness?

That's one of the things that makes drug production expensive - if they fail then they don't get to sell it.

That's not something the alternative medicine producers have to deal with.
And what is a few thousand deaths due to lack of effective treatment compared to 20 million customers buying your alternative pills? Commercial value outweighs any effective testing value on the alternative side.

Vioxx?

Isn't that the problem? BTW I do not own alternatives they are not "mine" I prefer a mix of the available information. I will visit a physician. I also believe that people should be able to choose their own path. Even if Steve Jobs could have lived longer maybe he did not want to...Should medical care be forced on people? No, unless they are a danger to others...

agreed

A failure of the system doesn't make the lack of any system into a virtue.

Vioxx was removed from the market after fraud was discovered in its clinical trials, and after further studies found more risk.

Would it have been better if they had put it on the market without clinical trials? And never did any further studies to assess risk after the fact?
Yes; that's why you should err on the side of the treatments that are required to do the testing despite the cost. Occasional failures in testing are better than never testing and ignoring any testing that does occur.
I was unclear; the "your" in that sentence was intended to be from the perspective of the alternative medication provider.

Claiming there is a lack of any testing for vitamin and alternative treatments is false information.

While I understand this company provides vitamins and alternatives it also provides in depth double blind study results on many treatments and supplements. The problem in modern medicine is it's all or nothing else will work approach or the disregard for information that is not funneled though the medical/drug community.

Life Extension

LINK

This is not my health bible, it is but one tool I use to learn about viable alternatives. They do not sell snake oil. ;)

Vitamins which have passed double-blind studies are part of modern medicine. I've been prescribed vitamins by my doctor.

That site does sell at least one bit of snake oil. Homeopathy has been extensively tested and has failed.