I heard an interview on CBC last week about a woman who had not vaccinated her kids being told point-blank by someone in her social circle that she was nuts and better get on it. My daughter, among other jobs, takes Children's Aid kids to school. A new kid that she was supervising was not let into school until her foster mom could track down her vaccination certificates from the birth mother. The Ontario gov't is cutting funds to Toronto health which provides "immunization management" among other things.

Ask your school if kids have to be vaccinated before they are let in. That would be good to know. And ask this woman directly if her kids are vaccinated. Measles is coming back and that's not good.

Well Wesley Snipes' acting ability was not affected by his choice to not pay taxes! ;-)

I have a real hard time with homeopathy. So does my wife. If you have the vaguest basis in science homeopathy is impossible to take at a basic level. BUT when my mother-in-law and my sister-in-law suddenly had serious issues with digestion and heartburn my wife advocated they talk to a homeopath before having their gallbladders removed.

My mother-in-law did not. She has no gallbladder now and is mostly doing fine. My sister-in-law did. She still has her gallbladder and can't even remember a time when she had digestive issues. Both of them are better. Both of them saw doctors who advocated gallbladder removal. One of them did and the other saw someone who gave them special magic sugar pills carefully crafted just for them.

I lost 40lbs in 2010 through diet, exercise, stress reduction and... a custom-compounded homeopathic dose. Fuckin' pisses me off.

Hi kb, sorry for the slow response. I appreciate your comparison between the medical vs. the psychic experience and there is likely some truth to it regarding my sister. I just want to mention that money is not part of the equation in Canada. The psychic is "a friend" and we never see a bill in Canada for doctor visits or hospital trips. She does pay for acupuncture and Chinese medicine and quite a bit.

I posted that conversation because: my sister. I will encourage her in the direction you suggest.

My wife got a degree in midwifery and naturopathic medicine because she gets to spend 90 minutes with patients.

I knew a psychiatrist who saw fifteen patients an hour.

For eight hours a day.

There's a great line in the movie Kandahar where the schlub American who ends up being the "doctor" for a Taliban-controlled village points out that the medical knowledge of the average college-educated Western citizen is greater than the average healer in Waziristan. Thing is, most people in the developed world can figure out what's wrong with them when it's the level of "oh shit I need to go to the doctor" stuff we deal with. When they can't, ANY medical practitioner is gonna have a tough time figuring it out in fifteen minutes. And fifteen minutes is what you get.

Into this gulf does alternative medicine jump.

Yes - not always bad. Often good. My wife is on the couch next to me right now rustling up bili lights for a baby that delivered early. She's run like 8 labs today alone. I watched her write a scrip for antibiotics before lunch. But up here she's plugged into the system, and she got into it because she wanted to help people not write ICD9 codes. Down in Cali she couldn't have done 2/3rds of those things and Cali is hella more integrated than most of the US.

Western medicine is crisis-oriented. If you have a gunshot wound there's nowhere you'd rather be than the US. But if you've got something lifestyle-oriented the US doesn't really know what to do with you other than prescribe drugs. Figuring out anything else takes time, and time can't be billed to insurance.

In an ideal world, the alt-medicine folx are doctors. But that upsets a lot of people.

I think also, there is a fear forming of modern medicine due to all the recalls people see on TV, the scary list of potential side effects, the seemingly predatory nature of pharmaceutical companies, the bullshit that is our insurance system, etc. Alternative medicine could seem so appealing because it doesn't have any of that social stigma around it (just a different stigma). Additionally, it might also seem less potent which in the minds of people might equate to less risky.

Thanks, I get that.

It's complicated, because of the placebo effect.

It's complicated for what spoons said.

Science is hard to understand. Magic is easy to understand. I wish it were the other way around.