Doctors are stuffy. Their education and experience lead them to be more confident in their methods and results than they should be, and patients not getting better is a challenge to everything that they believe in. It isn’t their fault, but like everyone else that fails at their goals, they think it is.
There is always room for improvement and this goes double for medicine’s approach to the chronically ill. They need to admit up front that they can’t cure us, yes. However, most people’s ideas about alternative medicine and treatment are ritualistic at best and actively harmful at worst.
My mother insisted I needed to ingest diatomaceous earth for my stomach problems. Her alternative medicine research had lead her to this conclusion. Her research method? Put the treatment in the patient’s hand and measure the strength in that arm. This is a common practice in alternative medicine and that’s just one example. I have dozens of examples of alternative medicine craziness that I’ve just never published stories about.
Nothing that alternative medicine has ever suggested to me, none of the home remedies I’ve ever tried have done more for me than my own dogged trial and error run through every medicine available over the counter. My willingness to try new prescriptions.
I’ll take stuffy doctors over pseudo-science any day. I just change doctors if I feel the one I’m seeing isn’t taking me seriously. For me, dentistry is just this side of quackery anyway. Temporomandibular joint disorder is a thing though. So I will give that diagnosis a wide latitude for the sake of those who find relief in treatment for it.
