|
|
|
HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
 Posted - 07/30/2006 : 16:56:59 [Permalink]
|
quote:
Originally posted by Ricky
They were his foes, sure, but was there really two classes, "Real medicine" and "Other"? I didn't think so, but I don't know all that much about the history of medicine. Maybe someone who does can chime in?
Yes! We need a medical historian to step up to the plate.
And in the most practical sense, I'd argue that real medicine vs. all other types is truely the most important categorization.
|
“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
| Edited by - HalfMooner on 07/30/2006 16:59:48 |
 |
|
|
Ghost_Skeptic
SFN Regular
Canada
510 Posts |
Posted - 08/01/2006 : 00:39:20 [Permalink]
|
quote:
Originally posted by HalfMooner
quote:
Originally posted by Ricky
They were his foes, sure, but was there really two classes, "Real medicine" and "Other"? I didn't think so, but I don't know all that much about the history of medicine. Maybe someone who does can chime in?
Yes! We need a medical historian to step up to the plate.
And in the most practical sense, I'd argue that real medicine vs. all other types is truely the most important categorization.
In the absence of a medical historian, I will step up. At the time homeopathy started, "mainstream medicine" consisted of whatever treatment the doctor thought might work - scientific it wasn't. This often consisted of toxic substances like mercury or intoxicants like alchohol and opiates. William Osler, the "Father of Modern Medicine" said quote:
One of the first duties of the physician is to educate the masses not to take medicine
and pointed out that most of the cures then being used were completely futile.
During most of the 19th century you would be better off being treated by a homeopath because they would merely amuse you while your immune system fought the disease while a "allopathic" conventional doctor would actively try to poison you or bleed you to death. Failing that they would infect with whatever their last surgical patient or autopsy case had. No wonder homeopathy became popular. During a cholera epidemic in the early 19th century in London, patients treated at a homeopathic hospital had a much better survival rate than those treated at conventional hospitals. (I don't have the exact figures - I think I found this in Ben Goldacre's Gaurdian Bad Science Column or some other skeptic site.)
This explains the antipathy of the early homeopaths to "allopathic" medicine and the popularity of homeopathy. However, "allopathic" medicine has moved on to become better than doing nothing and homeopathy hasn't. |
"You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink. / You can send a kid to college but you can't make him think." - B.B. King
History is made by stupid people - The Arrogant Worms
"The greater the ignorance the greater the dogmatism." - William Osler
"Religion is the natural home of the psychopath" - Pat Condell
"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter" - Thomas Jefferson |
|
|
|
HalfMooner
Dingaling
Philippines
15831 Posts |
Posted - 08/01/2006 : 05:13:43 [Permalink]
|
Thanks, G_S. I'm not a medical historian, either, but I have a few quibbles that come from memory:
Both opium and mercury could be effective, even lifesaving, medicines in their time, though both were often misused. Opium helped control diarrhea, and could relieve acute pain. Mercury, if used in just he right dosage, could actually sometimes cure syphilis. Tincture of willow bark had an effect like aspirin in lowering fevers. Quinine was an effective antimalarial drug. Physicians, before antibiotics were available, would sometimes intentionally inoculate syphilitics with malaria, in order to create a fever to counter syphilis, controlling the severity of the malarial fever with quinine.
There were, however, hardly any other useful medicines. But that's just the drug side. Some surgeries were useful, as in the removal of morbid limbs. Broken bones were set, often with great skill. Skilled "real" physicians and surgeons could sometimes save lives and limbs, though doubtless many killed their patients with nostrums such as bleeding, or misdosing with mercury.
In constrast, the Homeopaths, as you mentioned, had no effective treatments at all.
|
“Biology is just physics that has begun to smell bad.” —HalfMooner
Here's a link to Moonscape News, and one to its Archive. |
| Edited by - HalfMooner on 08/01/2006 05:14:16 |
|
|
 |
|
|
|
Topic Locked
