Why do most alternative practitioners show such dogged determination not to change their view of the efficacy of their therapy, even if good evidence shows that it is a placebo? This is the question that I have been pondering for some time. I have seen many doctors change their mind about this or that treatment in the light of new evidence. In fact, I have not seen one who has not done so at some stage. Yet I have never seen an alternative therapist change his/her mind about his/her alternative therapy. Why is that?
You might say that the answers are obvious:
- because they have heavily invested in their therapy, both emotionally and financially;
- because their therapy has ‘stood the test of time’;
- because they believe what they were taught;
- because they are deluded, not very bright, etc.;
- because they need to earn a living.
All of these reasons may apply. But do they really tell the whole story? While contemplating about this question, I thought of something that had previously not been entirely clear to me: they simply KNOW that the evidence MUST be wrong.
Let me try to explain.
Consider an acupuncturist (I could have chosen almost any other type of alternative practitioner) who has many years of experience. He has grown to be a well-respected expert in the world of acupuncture. He sits on various committees and has advised important institutions. He knows the literature and has treated thousands of patients.
This experience has taught him one thing for sure: his patients do benefit from his treatment. He has seen it happening too many times; it cannot be a coincidence. Acupuncture works, no question about it.
And this is also what the studies tell him. Even the most sceptical scientist cannot deny the fact that patients do get better after acupuncture. So, what is the problem?
The problem is that sceptics say that this is due to a placebo effect, and many studies seem to confirm this to be true. Yet, our acupuncturist completely dismisses the placebo explanation.
Why?
- Because he has heavily invested in their therapy? Perhaps.
- Because acupuncture has ‘stood the test of time’? Perhaps.
- Because he believes what he has been taught? Perhaps.
- Because he is deluded, not very bright, etc.? Perhaps.
- Because he needs to earn a living? Perhaps.
But there is something else.
He has only ever treated his patients with acupuncture. He has therefore no experience of real medicine, or other therapeutic options. He has no perspective. Therefore, he does not know that patients often get better, even if they receive an ineffective treatment, even if they receive no treatment, and even if they receive a harmful treatment. Every improvement he notes in his patients, he relates to his acupuncture. Our acupuncturist never had the opportunity to learn to doubt cause and effect in his clinical routine. He never had to question the benefits of acupuncture. He never had to select from a pool of therapies the optimal one, because he only ever used acupuncture.
It is this lack of experience that never led him to think critically about acupuncture. He is in a similar situation as physicians were 200 years ago; they only (mainly) had blood-letting, and because some patients improved with it, they had no reason to doubt it. He only ever saw his successes (not that all his patients improved, but those who did not, did not return). He simply KNOWS that acupuncture works, because his own, very limited experience never forced him to consider anything else. And because he KNOWS, the evidence that does not agree with his knowledge MUST be wrong.
I am of course exaggerating and simplifying in order to make a point. And please don’t get me wrong.
I am not saying that doctors cannot be stubborn. And I am not saying that all alternative practitioners have such limited experience and are unable to change their mind in the light of new evidence. However, I am trying to say that many alternative practitioners have a limited perspective and therefore find it impossible to be critical about their own practice.
If I am right, there would be an easy (and entirely alternative) cure to remedy this situation. We should sent our acupuncturist to a homeopath (or any other alternative practitioner whose practice he assumes to be entirely bogus) and ask him to watch what kind of therapeutic success the homeopath is generating. The acupuncturist would soon see that it is very similar to his own. He would then have the choice to agree that highly diluted homeopathic remedies are effective in curing illness, or that the homeopath relies on the same phenomenon as his own practice: placebo.
Sadly, this is not going to happen, is it?
50 Responses to Why are alternative practitioners so stubborn?
Leave a Reply to Edzard Cancel reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
STREEEEEETCH, YAAAAAAWWWWWN. Another wind up.
nobody forces you to read my blog, but when you comment, try to be a little more intelligent.
This post goes to the heart of something I’ve always wanted to be able to do. Have an alternative practitioner (of any stripe) just spend a couple of days with real (hospital) doctors in real hospitals and see for themselves the enormous difference between truly sick people and those whom they themselves treat.
A couple of days spent with a general practitioner won’t cut it: the bulk of people presenting to GPs have self-limiting conditions, and those who don’t are swiftly referred to hospital specialists. The concept is to confront practitioners of pseudo-medicine with diseases that require deep medical knowledge for management.
Of course, we have previously had comments from many fans of SCAM saying “of course, orthodox medicine has its place for some diseases”. I have often responded to this type of comment by asking, politely, to be informed for which conditions the line should be drawn to define the diseases that SCAM can’t handle, but have never had a satisfactory reply.
The suggestion of sending the practitioner of one branch of SCAM to spend time with the practitioner of another is brilliant! However, one side effect may well be to increase the number of general naturopaths.
“This post goes to the heart of something I’ve always wanted to be able to do. Have an alternative practitioner (of any stripe) just spend a couple of days with real (hospital) doctors in real hospitals and see for themselves the enormous difference between truly sick people and those whom they themselves treat.”
I have seen this several times; most alt med practitioners are initially impressed to the point of being speechless. After a couple of weeks, they tend to say: CONVENTIONAL MEDICINE IS VERY GOOD FOR ACUTE CONDITIONS, WHILE WE ARE BETTER AT CHRONIC DISEASES.
Be careful about comparators.
“He has only ever treated his patients with acupuncture. He has therefore no experience of real medicine, or other therapeutic options. He has no perspective.”
There are many registered medical practitioners who practise acupuncture, homeopathy, refer patients for Reiki, chiropractic etc. and do have experience of patients ‘getting better’ in their eyes. Not plausible evidence – or those treatments would be in the corpus of ‘medicine’.
I am bemused as anyone else as to why such doctors are so deluded – unless they are deliberate and knowing quacks and frauds.
Perhaps Dunning -Kreuger can help consider the phenomenon.
But then many doctors believe many strange things for no rational reason (or it would not be a belief).
Just like the rest of us!
I don’t demy that qualified doctors can suffer from lack of perspective too; anyone who read my memoir knows that I have seen plenty of this with my own eyes.
Richard Rawlins wrote: “many doctors believe many strange things for no rational reason”
According to Quackwatch, some reasons for MDs’ interest in quackery appear to be boredom, low professional esteem, paranormal tendencies, paranoid mental state, reality shock, beliefs encroachment, the profit motive, the prophet motive, psychopathic tendencies, and the conversion phenomenon:
https://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/quackpro.html
Interestingly, Peter Fisher, a trained medical doctor, and homeopath to The Queen, admits to “plain ambition”:
https://edzardernst.com/2015/11/is-the-queens-homeopath-telling-the-truth/#comment-71492
The ambition of charlatans, quacks, frauds who are also Royal sycophants is termed ‘knight starvation’.
And the tax payer is paying for it!
https://edzardernst.com/2013/06/the-knighthood-starvation-syndrome-little-hope-for-the-desperate-and-vulnerable-victims/
There are lots of fully qualified medical doctors who practise quackery. They do see what works. One local GP here gives acupuncture and another does homeopathy. I don’t know how they cope with the cognitive dissonance.
It reminds me of Mein Kampf, in which Hitler said `All that matters is the will. If the facts disagree with the will, the facts are wrong’.
I don’t know how they cope with the cognitive dissonance.
If my understanding of cognitive dissonance is correct, once the practitioner has fallen into the rabbit hole, it’s really hard to fish him or her out since they have presumably managed to completely rationalize their behaviour and can be pretty impervious to new evidence to the point of actively avoid any negative evidence. There no longer is any discrepancy to resolve.
See Tavris, C.; Aronson, E. (2007). Mistakes were made (but not by me): Why we justify foolish beliefs, bad decisions, and hurtful acts. Orlando, FL: Harcourt. ISBN 978-0-15-101098-1.
I took the liberty of making some global edits to your post. Not wishing to plaguarise, I claim fair use of the original. I have added a few comments in parentheses []:
Why are conventional practitioners so stubborn?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Published Thursday 05 July 2018
Why do most conventional practitioners show such dogged determination not to change their view of the efficacy of their practice, even if good evidence shows that it is unreliable and dangerous? This is the question that I have been pondering for some time. I have seen many doctors change their mind about this or that treatment in the light of new evidence. In fact, I have not seen one who has not done so at some stage. Yet I have never seen a [skeptical] conventional doctor change his/her mind about his/her conventional practice. Why is that?
You might say that the answers are obvious:
• because they have heavily invested in their practice, both emotionally and financially;
• because their practice has ‘stood the test of time’;
• because they believe what they were taught;
• because they are deluded, not very bright, etc.;
• because they need to earn a living.
[• and because they are misinformed, bribed and threatened]
All of these reasons may apply. But do they really tell the whole story? While contemplating about this question, I thought of something that had previously not been entirely clear to me: they simply KNOW that the evidence MUST be wrong.
Let me try to explain.
Consider an conventional practitioner (I could have chosen almost any type of conventional practitioner) who has many years of experience. He has grown to be a well-respected expert in the world of conventional medicine. He sits on various committees and has advised important institutions. He may even be a professor. He knows the literature and has treated thousands of patients.
This experience has taught him one thing for sure: his patients do benefit from his treatment. He has seen it happening too many times; it cannot be a coincidence. conventional medicine works, no question about it.
And this is also what the studies tell him. Even the most sceptical scientist cannot deny the fact that patients do get better after conventional medicine. So, what is the problem? [Unsolved problems, the toll of adverse effects, FDS FAERS etc]
The problem is that [real] sceptics say that this is due to unreliable and dangerous medicine, and many studies seem to confirm this to be true. Yet, our conventional practitioner completely dismisses the [placebo explanation] evidence.
Why?
• Because he has heavily invested in their practice? Perhaps.
• Because conventional medicine has ‘stood the test of time’? Perhaps.
• Because he believes what he has been taught? Perhaps.
• Because he is deluded, not very bright, etc.? Perhaps.
• Because he needs to earn a living? Perhaps.
But there is something else. [Apart from bribes and compulsion?]
He has only ever treated his patients with conventional medicine. He has therefore no experience of real medicine, or other therapeutic options. He has no perspective. Therefore, he does not know that patients often get better, even if they receive an ineffective treatment, even if they receive no treatment, and even if they receive a harmful treatment. Every improvement he notes in his patients, he relates to his conventional medicine. Our conventional practitioner never had the opportunity to learn to doubt cause and effect in his clinical routine. He never had to question the benefits of conventional medicine. He never had to select from a pool of therapies the optimal one, because he only ever used conventional medicine.
It is this lack of experience that never led him to think critically about conventional medicine. He is in a similar situation as physicians were 200 years ago; they only (mainly) had blood-letting, and because some patients improved with it, they had no reason to doubt it. [They had false authoriy to depend upon] He only ever saw his successes (not that all his patients improved, but those who did not, did not return). He simply KNOWS that conventional medicine works, because his own, very limited experience never forced him to consider anything else. And because he KNOWS, the evidence that does not agree with his knowledge MUST be wrong.
I am of course exaggerating and simplifying in order to make a point. And please don’t get me wrong.
I am not saying that doctors cannot be stubborn. And I am not saying that all conventional practitioners have such limited experience and are unable to change their mind in the light of new evidence. However, I am trying to say that many conventional practitioners have a limited perspective and therefore find it impossible to be critical about their own practice.
If I am right, there would be an easy (and entirely conventional) cure to remedy this situation. We should sent our conventional practitioner to an [experienced] homeopath (or any other practitioner whose practice he assumes to be entirely bogus) and ask him to watch what kind of therapeutic success the homeopath is generating. The conventional practitioner would soon see that it is very similar to his own [except for the cures of conditions the patient was told are incurable]. He would then have the choice to agree that highly diluted homeopathic remedies are effective in curing illness, or that the homeopath relies on the same phenomenon as his own practice: p̶l̶a̶c̶e̶b̶o̶ producing results.
Sadly, this is not going to happen, is it?
~~~~~~~~~~~
[I have somewhere a furious letter from a ‘phlebotomist’/blood-letter (I think this was in the 1700s) to some journal, asserting that homœopathy Could Not Possibly Work – how could it? – since it does not let out the bad blood. Plus ça change ]
A pleasure, as always.
Brilliant.
Honestly how clients feel can speak for itself. Clients of natural healing practitioners get better and that is all they care about. If you call it a placebo effect, to which there is a plethora of evidence that shows otherwise (in infinite studies far too exhausting to even take up here) than so be it with the placebo effect….or positive suggestions. Healing is healing and results speak for themselves.
And by the by there are so many natural healing practitioners who boast medical practitioners, doctors, for natural care. In my practice in the 80’s ( I went other directions) I had so many medical docs come for bodywork. They got results and that is all they cared about. They would not come otherwise. Flexiril was the med of choice for back spasms and aches. They could have run to their medicine cabinet if they wanted.
“Honestly how clients feel can speak for itself.”
does that mean we need no clinical research ever? Or only that type that confirms what you think?
“in infinite studies far too exhausting to even take up here”
just give us a few of the best, please.
what type of body work are you referring to?
@Dawn
Thanks! Your comment brings to the fore the only fact that matters. Well educated practicing clinicians know the potential drawbacks of organ system damaging pharmaceuticals and choose more natural means.
So Sandra the only fact that matters is subjective experience? Tell me, do you know what risk:benefit assessment is? When you get your heart attack what treatment will you want?
Anyway, nice to encounter you again – at least you can’t block me here.
Well said Dawn. They get better just as I did when I had the Bowen Technique. To be honest I don’t care how it worked. It worked 3 times. Back in the day when I was practicing Martial Arts I had several problems with hips and back. In those days I went to Osteopaths but I had brilliant results. I was training for a Karate competition and my elbow was damaged during training. I was in agony with it. I went to an osteopath and he he sorted it. As for the Doctors and nurses of the NHS? I have nothing but full resect and admiration for them. When I had an accident on my motor bike I shattered my left patella and dislocated my right ankle plus concussion. I was in a bad way but they were wonderful. Anyway I am going to tone down my posts from now on. I will observe and jump in if I feel the need to. I believe in CAM and will not change my stance on that. Peace and love.
Barry, your last sentence says it all. Scientists are prepared to be proved wrong, otherwise there would be no progress.
Let us hope Barry will not be harmed by its faith in fantasy 😉
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-44724700
Well, I am not prepared to let myself be shot. That is just plain stupid. That’s faith for you. People have faith in God which to my mind is just as silly.
“Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time!
BUT HE LOVES YOU. You want to talk about bullshit stories.”
George Carlin.
I think that this is where Mark Crislip’s wisdom deserves mentioning once again:
http://www.azquotes.com/author/68445-Mark_Crislip
(and his other quotes are quite good too)
People seek alternative treatments primarily because they have EXHAUSTED conventional medical treatments and consistently find that such treatment does more HARM than BENEFIT. It is interesting that you don’t ask yourself: Why do so many people have such awful experiences with conventional medical treatment…and why don’t doctors LEARN and ADAPT? But no. You’d rather bash something and someone else rather than have ANY introspective analysis.
As for those people who seek homeopathic treatment, they do so because of the RESULTS they get, not just in their own families but in the various animals that they have in their home…plus the significant additional benefit of the inherent safety in its application…
That said, you’ve never been very good at introspection and self-critical analysis. I’m not expecting you to change that.
In a way, Dana is right, but not in the way he thinks. In lots of cases, conditions are self-limiting and will get better by themselves, but doctors feel pressure to intervene and try to help. As Dana says, certain of these interventions can be harmful. The patient, frustrated, visits a homeopath who does nothing with the help of some inert sugar pills and, if the patient is lucky and the condition is self-limiting, the patient recovers. Recognising such conditions (i.e. the common cold, obviously a straightforward example) and conditioning patients to understand that they won’t walk out with a prescription is something medicine is trying to do. Recognising that their remedies are sugar pills with inert magic shaky water on them is something homeopaths are not.
Homeopathy is simply an expensive and elaborate way of doing nothing at all, or, as the old saying goes, “Keeping the patient entertained while nature takes its course.”
When real doctors do nothing and let nature take its course, there is no show, no entertainment, and that is why people are often dissatisfied with doctors take a conservative approach: they have the feeling that nothing is done to help them – even though ‘doing nothing’ is often the best (and most natural!) way to help them.
Unfortunately, both patients and homeopaths subsequently fool themselves and each other that any improvement or recovery was caused by the ‘treatment’.
Perhaps conventional doctors could try some kind of shamanistic dance and chanting rather than drugs, explaining it is an expression of best wishes before sending the patient away?
Conventional medicine is a victim of its own success. It is because conventional medicine can rebuild a face or a hand or replace a kidney or a heart that patients with ‘ordinary’ ailments LBP, Eczema have trouble understanding why they cant help these sort of ‘simpler’ conditions. However its not that they can’t help – its more that they know conventional treatment is no better than natural progression, could actually do some harm and that nature is a lot cheaper.
SCAM does the opposite- it pretends it can cure the LBP and the eczema and then the arrogance steps in and practitioners believe they can prevent cancers.
I have a suggestion – NHS should make patients ( heart attack , stroke broken leg etc. ) fill in a questionnaire- if they are proponents or practitioners of CAM then they should be denied NHS treatment. You can’t badmouth conventional medicine and still expect to take advantage of it.
quite radical – but it would shorten the queues significantly
Of course the clients are happy.
In my experience patients are generally very pleased with their choice of doctor and treatment, however bad it is. In the early days of HIFU (high-intensity focused ultrasound as a treatment for prostate cancer – largely discredited now but very much in demand when first introduced as a result of an effective advertising campaign) I met a gentleman at a party who had had this treatment. He had to run off in a hurry several times over the course of our conversation as the treatment had rendered him almost incontinent of urine (it also very commonly causes impotence). He told me that it had not yet (!) been successful in curing his cancer, and that he was returning to see his specialist for another session. I was astounded that he should be so effusive in his praise for a treatment that had been ineffective and had harmed him, particularly when there were proven and safe alternatives, and that he was going back for more. At the time there had been no trials of efficacy or even safety, and yet a number of urologists were offering it as an alternative to prostatectomy or radiotherapy (or monitoring in the case of low-risk tumours). Patients were delighted to have what they regarded as cutting-edge treatment, although oncologists (who are more conservative and love clinical trials) regarded it as untested.
I also remember (when I was a very junior doctor) seeing a German gentleman who was visiting London and had been taken to the nearest Accident and Emergency department after collapsing with chest pain. He was confirmed to have had a small myocardial infarction (this is the medical term for damage to the heart muscle due to an interrupted blood supply in one of the coronary arteries, what most people know as a heart attack), but his coronary arteries proved to be normal. It turned out that he had seen a doctor in Germany for dizzy spells, and had been diagnosed as having low blood pressure. Further questioning revealed that his blood pressure had never actually been low when measured, but his doctor had assured him that his blood pressure must be generally too low on the basis of his symptoms (I gather this is quite a common diagnosis in Germany, though not one recognised at all in the UK). He was prescribed ergotamine, which is a powerful vasoconstrictor. The ergotamine had caused spasm in his coronary arteries leading to a temporary insufficiency of blood and consequent damage to his heart. Happily it hadn’t killed him (though it could have done) and we were able to discharge him home a few days later. He couldn’t wait to return to Germany to see a proper doctor, and was very suspicious of the cardiology department of an NHS teaching hospital. His doctor in Germany had failed to investigate his dizzy spells properly (or indeed at all), had made a strange diagnosis on the basis of very little evidence to substantiate it, and had prescribed a powerful and dangerous drug which had led to serious harm. In the UK he would have been open to investigation by the General Medical Council and indeed to a criminal charge of grievous bodily harm, but to his patient he was the only doctor worth seeing.
My personal experience of being on the receiving end of health care, following my father’s treatment for cancer, and subsequently my own, is to feel an enormous and almost irrational sense of gratitude and respect for the doctors who had treated us, even though I know that they have done nothing more than the standard treatment which I would have offered to my own patients.
I have also noticed that people in general seem to regard any choices they have made in any situation as being the only ones worth considering, and that they will try to persuade their friends to make the same choices, whether it be in the purchase of a car, where to go on holiday, what restaurant to eat at (and what to order there) or even what route to take when driving somewhere.
Indeed, unless they feel that they have been badly let down by their service provider (usually as a result of someone having made a promise that they are unable to deliver, having been rude, or having failed to give a plausible explanation of why things have gone badly), most people will be very vocal in their praise of whatever it might be, particularly where their health is involved.
So… “How clients feel can speak for itself.” Hmm…
Julian
Regarding HIFU, it’s being reported today that trials have shown it to be highly effective. https://www.hippocraticpost.com/ageing/hifu-is-effective-against-prostate-cancer-with-fewer-side-effects/
Lenny,
Thank-you for directing me to that link. I don’t think the summary in the blog summarises the trial very accurately, but here is another link, this time to the original paper where the study was reported (sorry, I don’t know how to paste it as a hyperlink):
https://www.europeanurology.com/article/S0302-2838(18)30431-7/fulltext
I don’t think that this forum is really the appropriate place to debate prostate cancer treatments, but I would like to add a few comments of my own to set the record straight since I am afraid you are completely wrong in saying that this report shows HIFU to be highly effective as the original paper is actually inconclusive on this.
First of all, what the paper is discussing is focal HIFU, whereas what I was talking about in my previous post was the much more widely used whole-gland HIFU. The difference is that focal HIFU only treats the part of the prostate where the cancer is thought to be, and as such would be expected to be much less toxic, which is indeed what the study found.
Secondly, with the exception of unusually aggressive cases, prostate cancer follows a very slow natural history, and the five-year follow-up in the trial is far too short to give any assessment of whether this treatment can control prostate cancer effectively in the long term, which the authors freely admit in their discussion.
Thirdly, it is an observational study of a cohort of patients treated over a roughly ten-year period, with no control group, so it is never going to provide any definitive comparison with other treatments such as radiotherapy, brachytherapy or prostatectomy.
A little bit of background:
When HIFU was first invented it was a treatment in search of a disease, and the manufacturers of the equipment launched an effective PR campaign in the national press of a number of countries, at the same time training a limited number of urologists to use it. There was a lot of uninformed interest in this “cutting-edge” treatment, and unless you looked very hard, all there was to find on the Internet was essentially propaganda. Many men were treated, a few fortunes were made, some practitioners were disgraced, and there was very little information available about what happened to the poor patients, good or bad, though over the years some of them trickled into oncology clinics with recurrent prostate cancer and my colleagues and I were faced with the problem of how to treat them (the patterns of recurrence were unfamiliar and we didn’t even know whether radiotherapy post-HIFU was safe). In the age of evidence-based medicine I was astounded that this could happen, but it did.
However, from the start there were more cautious urologists who were interested in HIFU but felt that it was wrong to offer an untested treatment without at the very least gathering data on what kinds of patients were treated, what were the characteristics of their prostate cancers, what toxicities they experienced and what happened to their cancers. Among the authors of this paper I recognise the names of many of my colleagues who took this approach and I applaud them for it. After a while it became apparent that whole-prostate HIFU was not all it was originally cracked up to be, but its proper role in the management of prostate cancer was still undefined. One approach was that the not insubstantial toxicity of HIFU might be mitigated by treating only the part of the prostate where the cancer had been found, and so focal HIFU was born. We now know (following the experience of 625 patients, as detailed in this paper) that focal HIFU is safe. We have no idea whether it is effective. Indeed, the authors of the paper estimate that a randomised controlled trial to establish this would require 2000 – 8000 patients and 10 – 15 years of follow-up, and I agree with them that this will probably never happen.
My own background is that I am a clinical oncologist (what in the US would be called a radiation oncologist and medical oncologist combined), until recently specialising in the treatment of urological tumours in conjunction with a multidisciplinary team based at a UK cancer centre. Sadly I had to retire recently when I was diagnosed with an advanced malignancy myself.
I have not encountered The Hippocratic Post before, but the author of this particular blog does not seem to be very informed regarding prostate cancer, nor does he seem to know how to read a medical paper critically. His headline suggests that what he has understood from the paper is very different from what the authors were saying and is quite misleading.
Julian
Thank you so much for your detailed and considered reply. It is, as ever, a delight to read the measured thoughts of experts when considering health stories in the media relating to recent research. I’m trying to think of the last time a “breakthrough” in dentistry was sensibly reported and need to remember this in relation to other medical reporting. I read the story in The Times this morning but couldn’t get an paywall-free link to it, hence the Hippocratic Post story – the first hit Google returned, of course..
I wish you well with your ongoing treatment. And please keep posting here. Your wise words are always a pleasure to read.
Actually, many SCAMsters are quite eclectic in the range of nonsense that they administer. It’s also built into homeopathy to keep trying remedies until one seems to work.
Both of those factors virtually guarantee that the SCAMster will be on hand to take the credit for any upswing in the patient’s condition. For self-limiting conditions that’s sufficient to count as a ‘cure’. For chronic conditions that fluctuate they either keep stringing the patient along, or the poor victim drifts back to conventional medicine which is always there and under an obligation to pick up the pieces. The SCAMsters have no means of keeping a systematic tally of their patients ‘lost to follow-up’.
So if a doctor prescribes an antibiotic and it doesn’t work should he try again or give up? You can’t have it both ways. I had a chest infection that wasn’t responding to treatment. My doctor tried different antibiotics until he finally found one that worked. Don’t see the difference myself. You know and if the doctor finally get’s it right he will take the plaudits.
I’m not sure I would support your doctor’s approach. Getting a sputum sample lab tested after the first failure might have been wise – especially in view of the resistance problem. In either case, how do we know that anything worked? Could it be that the condition naturally resolved, so the last treatment given is assumed to have been effective? The difference between the cases of course is that we have excellent evidence, both lab and clinical, that antibiotics are effective. We do not have that evidence for homeopathy. Why didn’t you try that for the chest infection?
Because here in the UK as you should know the NHS is free at the point of use. A sputum test? hahaha that’s a laugh this is the NHS you’d have to be dying first. As I have said before on here I know nothing about the efficay of Homeopathy. I’m not going to take a chance on something I know nothing about for something as serious as a chest infection. As I said on here before. I believe in the NHS so for something like a chest infection I would prefer to see a doctor. When it comes to back problems I will see an Osteopath.
and why should anyone give a hoot about your irrational decisions?
I couldn’t care less what you think. My post wasn’t even directed at you.
oh… this hurts!
[you keep writing stuff that is incredible in the true sense of the word; did you know this is my blog? do you feel that I am allowed to comment on my blog? are you quite there?]
“and why should anyone give a hoot about your irrational decisions?”
Bite me and I’ll bite back. Irrational decisions? Such as?
except, you are not biting, you are BSing
Where are my irrational decisions?
BT seems to be here for the sole purpose of stroking his own insignifiant ego. Never said anything relevant.
And right on cue here comes the straw man. That’s a laugh. You talking about egos. I’d rather have an insignificent ego than be an insignificant person Byawn. Lets have it right shall we. It wasn’t me that started this round of mud slinging. There was nothing wrong with the post I put up. I was making a point. But hey ho carry on slagging me off. It’s what you do best after all. As for me if you want a slagging match carry on lol. I love it.
“There was nothing wrong with the post I put up. ”
A CLASSIC CASE OF SELF-CRITICAL ANALYSIS!
How am I Bull shitting?
continuously
Continuously? It won’t take long to point it out then will it? Point out the continuous posts where I was bull shitting. When it comes to bull shitting you are one of the best at it. No qualifications but CONTINUOUSLY treating people for 20 years in a modality you didn’t think was working or even believed in lol. It’s up there on the net in your own words when asked if you
were qualified in any of the therapies you studied for. You said “I didn’t finish any courses”
Oh, you got me there Barry!!!
Yes, I know.