(no subject)
Have I become jaded and cynical before I've even begun?
I cringe whenever someone mentions herbalism, natural healing, toxins, alternative medicine, homeopathy, and the like.
I pull out my soapbox on this issue every so often and I want to avoid rehashing the old hat.
If I do really do this, I'm leaning more and more towards a traditional medical education first and foremost before anything else. I don't think that they have all the answers, and I think medicine is likely to continue undergoing changes within the next 10 years (in the way it's practiced, the physician/patient relationship, the definition of healing, and so on), yet throwing out the baby with the bathwater is absurd. Conventional medicine isn't going anywhere, nor should it.
* * * * *
For every "good point" that natural medicine might have, there's a therapy or idea born out of frustration or pain and based on pseudoscience, wishful thinking, or borderline religious thought.
I find myself feeling like I will get an education of an order of magnitude higher on the traditional path. Anything else feels like avoidance--abandoning the highs and lows and all that it means to practice medicine in order to chase flights of fancy or beliefs that may or may not hold any real truth or validity.
I've read accounts of the science education at naturopathic medical schools--how it is, at times, severely disappointing, especially given the American Association of Naturopathic Medicine's slogan including, "the scientific knowledge of the present."
I think about how I might feel if I go the other routes (naturopathic, chiropractic, and so on) when I'm unable to help someone--especially in an emergency situation--because I have no tools in my toolbox that account for that sort of thing. No injections, no pills, no incisions, just letters by my name that can't do anything in that situation.
I know that I can't do everything--medical care is a team effort--yet it seems absurd to me to completely reject a whole school of thought that, for all it's drawbacks, has greatly improved life as we know it. A school of thought that I feel I need to know very well before I ever attempt to go outside of it.
Given the scope of practice, inclusion of therapies I find highly questionable, vastly reduced licensing and possibilities for practice, ability to transfer into alternative schools but not vis-versa, and other such factors, I feel that I should avoid options such as these in the beginning. I won't risk $100k+ and my future merely for the sake of what I want to believe in. I could, and hopefully would, pursue other education (naturopathic, studies in Chinese medicine, and so forth) afterwords so that I can add their knowledge to my toolbox without letting it define the core of my thinking or abilities.
I think that it's due to biochemical medicine itself that we even have a natural medicine movement that is as big as it is right now--and I mean that in a good way. There's a pyramid of things, much like a medical version of Maslow's hierarchy, and at the bottom of it, supporting everything else, is modern medicine. We have time to worry about vitamins and wellness and herbs because things like polio, heart attacks, cancer and trauma are already being taken care of, and in many cases are better taken care of, by modern medicine.
This leaves natural medicine free to play around. I have no doubt that conventional medicine has a lot to learn from the others, but that's a long time coming, on both sides.
I feel that I would be best served by pursuing a traditional medical education before I do anything else. I wish the case was different--I wish I could feel better about attending a naturopathic or chiropractic college, because in some ways they feel more in line with where I want to be and I know that they have a lot to give back to conventional medicine. Yet I feel like I would be missing out on a very big part of something if I don't follow the traditional route and experience firsthand the pain, suffering, death and the full scope of what it is to practice medicine.
A dear friend of mine asked me if I thought that conventional medicine was the answer, and I said, "sometimes." Sometimes it is. If I'm in a car accident, you bet your ass that I'm going to want a surgeon to save my ass and put me back together again. If it's a choice between taking a medication or dying, suffering terrible pain, or having a vastly reduced quality of life, I will likely take the medication. Many ideals, including my own, collapse and fail under a test of pain.
I cringe whenever someone mentions herbalism, natural healing, toxins, alternative medicine, homeopathy, and the like.
I pull out my soapbox on this issue every so often and I want to avoid rehashing the old hat.
If I do really do this, I'm leaning more and more towards a traditional medical education first and foremost before anything else. I don't think that they have all the answers, and I think medicine is likely to continue undergoing changes within the next 10 years (in the way it's practiced, the physician/patient relationship, the definition of healing, and so on), yet throwing out the baby with the bathwater is absurd. Conventional medicine isn't going anywhere, nor should it.
* * * * *
For every "good point" that natural medicine might have, there's a therapy or idea born out of frustration or pain and based on pseudoscience, wishful thinking, or borderline religious thought.
I find myself feeling like I will get an education of an order of magnitude higher on the traditional path. Anything else feels like avoidance--abandoning the highs and lows and all that it means to practice medicine in order to chase flights of fancy or beliefs that may or may not hold any real truth or validity.
I've read accounts of the science education at naturopathic medical schools--how it is, at times, severely disappointing, especially given the American Association of Naturopathic Medicine's slogan including, "the scientific knowledge of the present."
I think about how I might feel if I go the other routes (naturopathic, chiropractic, and so on) when I'm unable to help someone--especially in an emergency situation--because I have no tools in my toolbox that account for that sort of thing. No injections, no pills, no incisions, just letters by my name that can't do anything in that situation.
I know that I can't do everything--medical care is a team effort--yet it seems absurd to me to completely reject a whole school of thought that, for all it's drawbacks, has greatly improved life as we know it. A school of thought that I feel I need to know very well before I ever attempt to go outside of it.
Given the scope of practice, inclusion of therapies I find highly questionable, vastly reduced licensing and possibilities for practice, ability to transfer into alternative schools but not vis-versa, and other such factors, I feel that I should avoid options such as these in the beginning. I won't risk $100k+ and my future merely for the sake of what I want to believe in. I could, and hopefully would, pursue other education (naturopathic, studies in Chinese medicine, and so forth) afterwords so that I can add their knowledge to my toolbox without letting it define the core of my thinking or abilities.
I think that it's due to biochemical medicine itself that we even have a natural medicine movement that is as big as it is right now--and I mean that in a good way. There's a pyramid of things, much like a medical version of Maslow's hierarchy, and at the bottom of it, supporting everything else, is modern medicine. We have time to worry about vitamins and wellness and herbs because things like polio, heart attacks, cancer and trauma are already being taken care of, and in many cases are better taken care of, by modern medicine.
This leaves natural medicine free to play around. I have no doubt that conventional medicine has a lot to learn from the others, but that's a long time coming, on both sides.
I feel that I would be best served by pursuing a traditional medical education before I do anything else. I wish the case was different--I wish I could feel better about attending a naturopathic or chiropractic college, because in some ways they feel more in line with where I want to be and I know that they have a lot to give back to conventional medicine. Yet I feel like I would be missing out on a very big part of something if I don't follow the traditional route and experience firsthand the pain, suffering, death and the full scope of what it is to practice medicine.
A dear friend of mine asked me if I thought that conventional medicine was the answer, and I said, "sometimes." Sometimes it is. If I'm in a car accident, you bet your ass that I'm going to want a surgeon to save my ass and put me back together again. If it's a choice between taking a medication or dying, suffering terrible pain, or having a vastly reduced quality of life, I will likely take the medication. Many ideals, including my own, collapse and fail under a test of pain.