71–80 of 198 posts
Modern medicine is great when you get in a car crash, and it's horrific if you have type 2 diabetes. Doctors get very little training in diet and lifestyle, because those are low-status and left to non-MD specialists, and many of them dogmatically cling to 1960s-era science.
Let me extend the query, is "modern medicine" overrated. Modern technology + western like urban lifestyle changed how we live.. and how much medicine we think we need. Walking in the woods is probably as effective as the average anti depressant. Good physical activity too. But we sell that modern life is great and that ailments are normal and that thanks to the medical field we have all these solutions.. that we prob…
Regular exercise, good diet and quality sleep prevent/solve most health problems. If exercise were in pill form, it'd be the most valuable pill.
These are the top 10 causes of death.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
How many of those could be prevented by good diet, quality sleep and exercise?
Modern medicine is great when you get in a car crash, and it's horrific if you have type 2 diabetes. Doctors get very little training in diet and lifestyle, because those are low-status and left to non-MD specialists, and many of them dogmatically cling to 1960s-era science.
Today we know that: limit eating, calorie restriction, little sugar consumption, can reverse type 2 diabetes and greatly reduce body inflammation, which is thought to give rise to all our modern diseases.
Agreed, but then to some degree could this same argument not be made about vaccines?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The level of legitimacy and respect that doctors and hospitals currently have is far too high, and hinges on branding and the exclusivity of becoming a doctor. Once all of this data becomes available, it will be obvious how worthless and expensive most medical treatments really are." I'm the spouse/partner of a recently-trained doctor, and I'm a programmer and startup founder with 2 decades of experience. With all r…
> I'm the spouse/partner of a recently-trained doctor, and I'm a programmer and startup founder with 2 decades of experience. With all respect, you have no friggen clue what you're talking about. Then you should know very well that the entire MD education pipeline optimizes for rote memorization and regurgitation of facts (from undergrad pre-med all the way through post-residency fellowships). Any patient with even t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I've long believed that once startups and tech companies get their hands on medical data Honestly I think the last people that are going to improve anything in medicine are startups and tech companies. Quite the contrary. I know that quite a few people in evidence-based medicine are worried that Tech people who want to "disrupt" things come with their own poor scientific standards to undermine the minimum standards…
We've started with ubiome/23andme providing customers data previously not available. Another area is improving existing processes. We see techniques where photos are being read more accurately and quickly compared to manual processes. Medicine now resolves around tests. Those can be improved and automated. We will see tools that will empower personal medicine and shift the power balance away from the family clinics.
https://www.livescience.com/63997-dna-ancestry-test-results-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"The level of legitimacy and respect that doctors and hospitals currently have is far too high, and hinges on branding and the exclusivity of becoming a doctor. Once all of this data becomes available, it will be obvious how worthless and expensive most medical treatments really are." I'm the spouse/partner of a recently-trained doctor, and I'm a programmer and startup founder with 2 decades of experience. With all r…
> I'm the spouse/partner of a recently-trained doctor, and I'm a programmer and startup founder with 2 decades of experience. With all respect, you have no friggen clue what you're talking about. Then you should know very well that the entire MD education pipeline optimizes for rote memorization and regurgitation of facts (from undergrad pre-med all the way through post-residency fellowships). Any patient with even t…
It makes total sense if you think about it: medicine is an infinitely complex field, and at the end of the day even though doctors have (in the past) undertaken significant training, they are still human beings, subject to the same limitations and errors as the rest of us.
New discoveries and nuanced understandings are made in medicine constantly, the idea that it is safe to assume that any individual doctor is going to know and understand all discoveries seems to me like extremely wishful thinking.
> Medical errors are the third-leading cause of death after heart disease and cancer.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/22/medical-errors-third-leading...
I agree with Stegenga:
> There is no place I would rather be after a serious accident than in an intensive care unit. For a headache, aspirin; for many infections, antibiotics; for some diabetics, insulin—there are a handful of truly amazing medical intervention, many discovered between seventy and ninety years ago. However, by most measures of medical consumption—number of patients, number of dollars, number of prescriptions—the most commonly employed interventions, especially those introduced in recent decades, provide compelling warrant for medical nihilism.
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I was just reading about "The China Study", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Study
> The China Study is a book by T. Colin Campbell and his son, Thomas M. Campbell II. It was first published in the United States in January 2005 and had sold over one million copies as of October 2013, making it one of America's best-selling books about nutrition.[1][2][3]
> The China Study examines the link between the consumption of animal products (including dairy) and chronic illnesses such as coronary heart disease, diabetes, breast cancer, prostate cancer, and bowel cancer.[4] The authors conclude that people who eat a predominantly whole-food, plant-based diet—avoiding animal products as a main source of nutrition, including beef, pork, poultry, fish, eggs, cheese, and milk, and reducing their intake of processed foods and refined carbohydrates—will escape, reduce, or reverse the development of numerous diseases.
Now I'm a pretty "fringe" kind of guy, and there's some stuff in there that even I have trouble with (animal protein is highly carcinogenic? Eh what?) But the basic idea of nutrition affecting health, or more accurately being the foundation of health, seems sound to me, and my attempts to eat a "whole-food, plant-based diet" have been very positive. Although I did send my digestion for a loop by "cutting over" too fast once. It takes about three days for your guts (microbiome and own) to adjust to a big change in diet, FWIW.
In any event it's batshit insane that convention medicine treats nutrition as an afterthought.
(There's a wonderful confluence between eating a whole-food, plant-based diet and the ecological repair of our food systems.)
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Now let me push the boundaries. I burned the tip of my thumb the other day taking a pan out of the oven, 450°F. I was careless and didn't quite hold the potholder correctly, burn reflex overridden so I wouldn't drop the pan, it melted the fingerprint whorls. After I finished hopping up and down, pissed off at my own carelessness, I took a few moments to "beam" Reiki to my thumb, while concentrating on communicating with my healing and immune responses telling them to "get in there and clean things up". The pain went away and didn't come back. A very modest blister formed under the melted skin. The spot was tender, and it stung a bit if I let hot water touch it the first day, but after that there was no tenderness. Two days later the blister was gone. The skin is slightly rough, but it's not peeling, nor is it a scab. Day three I woke up and forgot that I had burned myself. The flesh apparently reconstituted itself. I'm not sure it will even leave a scar. The skin still hasn't peeled.
In sum, a minor second-degree burn, apply ten seconds of Reiki, result: no pain and accelerated healing.
"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet."
I've long believed that once startups and tech companies get their hands on medical data (patient outcomes, medication treatment outcomes, mal practice rates, surgery outcomes) that a reckoning will take place on the medical industry. The level of legitimacy and respect that doctors and hospitals currently have is far too high, and hinges on branding and the exclusivity of becoming a doctor. Once all of this data bec…
"The level of legitimacy and respect that doctors and hospitals currently have is far too high, and hinges on branding and the exclusivity of becoming a doctor. Once all of this data becomes available, it will be obvious how worthless and expensive most medical treatments really are." I'm the spouse/partner of a recently-trained doctor, and I'm a programmer and startup founder with 2 decades of experience. With all r…
Note that the author is a “science journalist” with a degree in journalism, not medicine or even STEM.