This seems to me a somewhat related topic, though. Many of us learned our first doubts about science from years of experience with arrogant doctors who spoke so authoritatively, so categorically, so smugly -- and then turned out to be Wrong.

Many women especially have become just a touch nervous of those who speak categorically, mainly because of their experiences with (often paternalistic male) doctors.

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What is conflict theory?

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Conflict theory posits that individuals in society are engaged in numerous struggles (in numerous spheres) for scarce resources - money and power primarily - and will act accordingly to ensure their access to these. Kind of a sociological way of describing Musical Chairs.

Individual variation makes it an art.

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Doctors are an example of a profession which seeks to retain its monopoly, and thus its status, power and wealth. They are the overseers of their own profession, they decide who gets admitted to the profession and who doesn't, they decide what constitutes health and the treatment of ill health, and ultimately they retain the freedom to at all times act in their own best interests, even if these aren't shared by patients or society, and even if their actions wouldn't qualify as scientific.

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Originally posted by DrConway:
Medicine, today, is really still quite primitive. The invasiveness of many procedures and the requirement of the use of a doctor's judgement call on a medical diagnosis (which introduces a subjective element into medicine, since one doctor might conclude something different than another on the same medical test) means that we haven't progressed as far as we like to think from the days when "doctors" would actually cut sick peoples' blood vessels and bleed them, thinking that the "ill humours" would leave the body.

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Originally posted by BleedingHeart:

Most of the above is the definition of any profession.

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Originally posted by Courage:
You seem to equate 'subjective judgement' with primitivity. Really?

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It's primitive in a relative sense, in that there are still many things not clearly or well understood; for example, only recently has the notion of societal health been countenanced as important in understanding how medical recoveries or lack of such can take place.

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Originally posted by DrConway:

It's primitive in a relative sense, in that there are still many things not clearly or well understood; for example, only recently has the notion of societal health been countenanced as important in understanding how medical recoveries or lack of such can take place.

For another example, oftentimes whether or not a cancer patient goes into remission has nothing to do with how advanced the chemo drugs are or how good the laser beam is that zaps the tumor; it can boil down to something as simple as the patient's own attitude towards treatment, and somehow the mind-body connection has a direct impact on the advancement or retardation of progress in treating a disease.

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Interesting, all, but that doesn't really answer my question.

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If it's any consolation to you, as a profession doctors are having this privelege clawed back at a rapid rate. Deskilling and codification of the profession, HMO's and group practice and Nurse Practitioners are all pecking away at what was once the exclusive domain of doctors.

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No, medicine is not a science. It's the product of a whole bunch of sciences that fit together more or less uneasily. Each season, one science is ascendant or one theory is fashionable or one new machine or miracle-drug comes on the market. Next season, another science will make a breakthrough, the old theory will be debunked, the machine will discover its limitations, the drug will show its nasty side-effects. Things change; emphasis shifts.

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Originally posted by nonesuch:

I don't think so. I think the doctors are still calling all the shots, deciding who is allowed to perform what tasks under their [doctors'] supervision; they're still getting the big bucks, and they're free to take a subsidized education to wherever the bucks are even bigger.

No, medicine is not a science. It's the product of a whole bunch of sciences that fit together more or less uneasily. Each season, one science is ascendant or one theory is fashionable or one new machine or miracle-drug comes on the market. Next season, another science will make a breakthrough, the old theory will be debunked, the machine will discover its limitations, the drug will show its nasty side-effects. Things change; emphasis shifts.

The best doctors pay attention to the patient, remember all the patients and all the different kinds of pain they've seen, and try to use whatever knowledge, tools and chemicals are available to help each patient individually. That's the art of medicine.

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It's primitive in a relative sense, in that there are still many things not clearly or well understood; for example, only recently has the notion of societal health been countenanced as important in understanding how medical recoveries or lack of such can take place.

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Originally posted by nonesuch:

Only recently has modern scientific European-based medicine discovered what the witch-doctors of Africa and the Americas have known for thousands of years: that humans don't exist in a social vacuum. They've also been recently discovering herbal remedies that wise women have used for thousands of years. With any luck, they'll soon discover the connection between body and spirit.
Primitive is not a dirty word. People have been self-aware for some time.

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It's true, though we have to watch not to become too 'primitivist' in our own right - i.e. knee-jerking to praise 'the old ways' before taking stock of all ways, old and new. Science is really just formalised common sense - and all I'm suggesting is a scientific approach.

That said, one of my favorite examples of this was while watching Dr. Dean Adell on CTV one night, I was shocked and awed to find out that a massive study had concluded that certain green vegetables contained a substance which was beneficial in staving off heart disease, and also degenerative effects of aging. The moral - eat your greens.

I could've saved them a few million dollars and just had them call my mom, or my grandma, or her mother, or...well you get the picture.

Sometimes, our 'scientists' are a little too quick to dismiss the cumulative knowledge of human being that has been gathered over millions of years of very scientific trial and error....

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Hey! Blood-letting was based on cutting-edge scientific theory, not old wives' tales

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Be that as it may, I'm sold on Broad Leaf Plantain for insect bites and more. Although, anything that works as well as this does makes me wonder about side effects.

Our healers of yore, it must be remembered, practiced science-- although less formally than our current approach-- to come up with the cures and treatments they used.

They experimented, observed, concluded.

It may not have been the old double blind trial, but it was a form of science none the less.

In societies where the margin between life and death was much narrower, observation skills, experimentation and making the logical conclusions paid off in survival.

The psuedo science and irrationality we see today is a by product of easy living.

[ 26 September 2003: Message edited by: Tommy_Paine ]

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Lets not forget either that lots of herbal remedies and such are ineffective, or have injurious side effects, just like the pharmaceuticals, and that the herbal remedy industry is every bit, or more sleazy than the pharmaceutical industry.

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Excellent point

http://www.quackwatch.org/