this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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Traditional medicine is just dangerous pseudoscience in the modern world and needs to be left behind and completely rejected
Dumb take. Mainstream medicine is still warped by the conditions of the society in which it is developed and practiced. In America, that means politicized/racist drug policy results in prohibition of actually useful drugs while creating a massive legally prescribed opiod addiction epidemic. That doesn't mean it's all bad, but there's certainly a lot of ways in which "alternative" medicine works better than mainstream medicine.
Thatβs more about the way medicine is handled rather than the medicine itself. If we look at a country like Burkina Faso where vaccines were adopted en mass when they were made available, those vaccinations did much more to reduce the pervasiveness of a huge number of disease quite quickly and much more effectively than traditional medicine in the country was every able to
Ok, and? That doesn't contradict my point. Mainstream medicine in America works a lot of the time, but is fundamentally corrupted by the society it exists in. There are a ton of cases where it doesn't help anyone or actively makes people's health worse, so even completely ineffective alternative treatments are better by comparison in those instances. Then you have alternative treatments like cannabis, MDMA, or psilocybin which are prohibited from mainstream medicine, but almost certainly work better for some patients than what can be offered by mainstream medicine. Granted, it seems likely that they will someday be considered mainstream medicine, but that is not currently the case.
I should add that if your definition of "mainstream medicine" is simply "everything that works", then you just have a useless definition. It does not capture the real treatment a patient may receive when they see a doctor in America.