In the pages of the Guardian, Ms Ngaree Blow attempts to sell the merits of prehistoric healing:
Apparently, modern medical science, with its oppressive Western paradigms, is insufficiently deferential to “our ways of knowing, being and doing.” We must, says Ms Blow, “embrace all knowledge systems.”
“Our unique lens, which views health as holistic and all-encompassing, has often been ignored or worse, considered inferior, as evidenced by a lack of traditional practices in these services.”
Well, not everyone is happy trusting their recovery to healing songs and delusions of aboriginal sorcery, and there’s only so much you can achieve by pushing crushed witchetty grubs into a person’s ear. Likewise, the restorative properties of bush dung, as used in many of the practices invoked by Ms Blow – those “ways of knowing” – are somewhat unclear.
Well of course “Oooga, Booooga!” is the way to go. Just look at what a fine job the natives are doing with Ebola in Africa…
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BIG JUJU…
“Dr Tshabalala-Msimang has often told people with HIV to eat garlic,
lemons and beetroot, while casting doubt on anti-retroviral drugs.”
“Some 5.5m South Africans have HIV – second only to India – and
one person in nine is infected.”
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Ask Steve Jobs what he thinks of … alternative healing systems and paradigms …
give him a minute to respond from the grave. The grave … which is also just a modern Western construct
My favourite quote re all this: ” It wouldn’t be called alternative medicine if it actually worked” !!
And yet when the crushing retrosternal chest pain hits and they’re gasping for air they all show up in the ER happy for a revascularization procedure courtesy of an interventional cardiologist armed with fluoroscopy, angiogram dye and stents or a cardiac surgeon able to split their chest open and bypass the blockage. Nothing says, “reality” like a heart attack.
Wait a minute this type of medicine worked for that little boy out west. Oh, he died, murdered by his parents whom the judge just let them walk away.
We are hoping these parents who killed their kid get sent back for a third trial on appeal. The judge was a Nazi sounding type who belittled a Nigerian born government medical examiner.
Ah yes, the Australian Aborigines. Another pack of savages left over from the Stone Age who by rights should have been extinct for generations, and have survived at all only with aid from successive Australian governments, originally motivated by Christian charity and now by virtue signalling—for which the “Abos” are invariably perfectly ungrateful. All reasonable efforts to make them an asset to industrial civilization have failed.
The reasons for their poor health are so obvious they hardly need enumerating. They drink too much, smoke too much, and eat too much—all related to a congenital lack of impulse control.
If all this sounds familiar to Canadians, it should.
I was about to suggest that Ms Blow take her bullroarer to the nearest hilltop and ward off some evil spirits.
Until I read of another of her culture’s rich traditions: women are traditionally prohibited from using, touching, or even seeing a bullroarer. How ‘holistic and all-encompassing’ is that, eh?
Shhhhhhhhh. Let em die.
So in the new left wing green society:
– will we offer human sacrifices?
– will we tell our elderly to go outside and sleep in the snow?
– will we bring back small pox?
– etc.
And?
Hospitals jam packed full of sick people, even out into the halls, is the obvious proof that modern pharmakiea is the answer. Just as more than 50% of the people are either pre-diabetic, or diabetic, is proof modern dietary recommendations are the answer. It’s a wonder people lived long enough to reach this stage of modern wonder medicine.
At my former dentist’s clinic, there was Chinese-born dental assistant. One day, after I got my Ph. D., that dentist revealed to me that the assistant was a “doctor”, too…. of–wait for it!–acupuncture.
I think acupuncture is interesting, and it seems to be helpful for people in some areas. A wise person once said regarding medical treatment: “Nobody has all the answers.” I know people who have been helped by alternative medical treatments. Several of them turned to these only after they had hit a brick wall with conventional medicine. So I like to keep an open mind.
https://gorenggoreng.com.au/
A quote from Damian Thompsons excellent book ‘Counterknowledge’ which echoes Stewarts comment above:
“There are only two kinds of medicine: that which works and that which doesn’t”.
well, see, actually, this is whut the woman is driving at:
do the holistic stuff, discover that certain molds have antibacterial properties, certain snake venoms are fantastic for anaesthetic purposes in minute amounts, certain herbs in fact can aid in gastro-intestinal problems, then start up a business to develop on this friggin knowledge THE WAY IT ALL UNFOLDED OVER THE CENTURIES.
or maybe she wants us to go back to those long beak masks worn during the great plagues?
To be fair, gnawing on a tree bark to treat malaria has been found to be efficacious, if that bark is from a cinchona tree. That was the only known cure for malaria, before quinine was isolated and synthesized from that bark.
The herb ephedra, known in China as Ma Huang for millenia as a stimulant, is such an effective source of the stimulant ephedrine that it is banned by the Olympics when it finally got wise to it, after Chicom athletes have used it or years.
So not all tree barks and herbs are not just folk tale, the advantage of modern medicine is we can find out the active elements that make them work (sometimes), unfortunately usually thereby rendering them much more expensive as proprietary.
Ironically, the Chinese community in the U.S. has managed to keep down the cost of the hundreds of different vegetation used as herbal medicine (as described in detail in various thick volumes) because they are imported as food, not medicine, since western doctors do not believe they can actually have medicinal value. Now that may change.
Personally, I don’t use any herbal medicine because western doctors do not know them or their effects, and it may be more dangerous to mix treatments, if herbal medicine have any medicinal value at all.