Science, Medicine and Babble
Started in response to the H1N1 threads
ah the good ole days before medicine, when no one ever got sick, either physically or mentally - damn those evil greed scientists
"Throughout the centuries, countless breakthroughs in medicine have been achieved. From the early days of alchemy to today's merge of medicine and technology, it would be an understatement to say that medicine has come a long, long way. Thanks to the hard work of scientists and researchers, we now have the x-ray, aspirin, antibiotic, artificial heart, cloning, and laser eye surgery to name a few. And with a new breed of science lovers taking up the challenge to push further, it's safe to say that a lot more medical breakthroughs are yet to happen."
http://latestmedicalbreakthroughs.com/
I'm really glad that a publicly funded researcher in the US discovered/proved that stem cells from monkeys could be isolated in a lab a number of years ago. Big things have happened since and promising new areas of medical research identified. Public power is people power.
Not sure exactly where you are going with this but I have an idea given the nature of your strawperson.
What you should know is that what you call "medicine" is more accurately a very new movement that comes from a very small population in the history of the world. This New Medicine is based in the European Enlightenment and is based in Eurocentrism (please just read one of the 1000 books available on what this means instead of just blindly reacting to it).
Before all those white men from Europe that they taught you in school are responsible for the "birth of science" (or whatever other Epcot Centre term your teachers used) knew their ass from their elbow, their were established systems of knowledge based on observations of phenomenon in the natural world and part of that was medical knowledge. Most of this knowledge in what is now Europe was maintained through a complex system we now call "oral tradition". The thing about oral tradition is that their aren't no books or Google - people (human beings mostly) are the books. And in Europe a lot of the medical knowledge was kept by women. So when men murdered millions of women as witches they were not only killing people they were destroying the knowledge that those people held - like burning books. It didn't stop there, everywhere these book burners went they encountered oral traditions and killed (or tried to kill) the people and the knowledge (except for the little bits of knowledge that they stole and the people that the stole as slaves).
So imagine. You are in a wonderful library of books with such a breadth and history of knowledge that would make Google look like Readers Digest. Then you burn it mostly to the ground and throw what doesn't burn in the garbage. Then you set up a set of rules that you call "scientific method" and you start the extremely hubristic task of learning everything there is to know.
So, what were you saying about breakthroughs and all that?
Medical misinformation can kill:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=194
Nice work, Jenny McCarthy et al!
SaganIsKing, maybe you could do a bit of reading of some Babble threads in the Humanities and Sciences forum, and maybe a bit of other reading on science and hegemony too, so we don't have to re-argue the same tiresome points here just because you're new (supposedly) and just because you've finished your first Carl Sagan book.
Nobody here is anti-science, despite what posters like Trevor M Kidd try to proclaim. Some of us here are simply examining the hold science as a culture has on society, a hold that many leftists here seem to be happy to affirm almost unconditionally.
Thank you LeT and jas, you've said better than I could, what I feel.
How is spreading scurrilous misinformation by spamming health-related threads with links to every kook site on the web consistent with progressive values?
Nobody here is anti-science.
It's just that some people don't think science has anything to tell us about medicine and health.
And like Le T, above, they yearn for the good old middle ages when real medicine flourished, before all those white European males went and messed it up with their anatomy, their microscopes, and their anaesthetics, antibiotics, disinfectants, and surgery.
Wonder if the anti-science people on babble have considered the basic contradiction of their presence on the internet.
Who do you think is anti-science, Sineed?
Beat me to it, G. Pie.
In case I am one of the accused, please note that I am very much pro-science. My beef is that psychiatry is not a science.
For the record I'm pro truth. And the truth is sometimes still out there and can't be bought and paid for by corporate schills.
A better question is: How can mocking or deriding almost any mention of alternative, natural or historical approaches to health care be considered progressive? A: It isn't and can't be. It's blind adherence to an amateur and incomplete understanding of science.
science is not against or vs. nature - human beings (even the caucasion ones) are a part of nature - humans created scientific study - therefore science is a part of nature
Don't forget the childbed fever that women contracted and died from when delivery by doctor, rather than mid-wife, became the practice and that when the connection was made by a doctor he was persecuted for it. Now personally I think the mid-wives understood this but given history they never would have been credited with it and many of them had been burned by then.
I am not opposed to science or some of the work that is being done but I am very aware that we are all being medicalized through a diet that is nutionally deficient and damaging and through medications which do not cure us but simply suppress the symptoms until they arise in further damage for which there are futher medications. I believe the average spent for each Canadian is somewhere just less than $900.00 per year. That is around $30,000,000,000.00. How much of that is paid by taxpayers for our "health care system"?
Why are you telling me this? Where have I said anywhere anything about science versus nature?
[edited for grammar]
Golly, I didn't know that, Saganisking.
Like I said, you should do some reading here before spouting off about other babblers here, OK? This forum is a good place to start since it's obviously an interest of yours.
Sorry G Pie - I'm getting the names mixed up
I'm not an expert on Psychiatry and I understand that it is not a solid science but that doesn't mean that modern science hasn't help many people with mental illnesses
No problem. I was just genuinely perplexed.
Some people feel helped, that's true. Others of us have been harmed.
But leaving aside the varying results, psychiatry does not constitute a science, solid or otherwise. It's more akin to a religion.
I love inquisitions. Apparently so did Galileo Galilee, Leonard daVinchy and a bunch more.
Condescend much?
It does not lie in your mouth to lecture others on the need to "do some reading". I've done plenty of reading on babble and I know that what saganisking says makes a hell of a lot more sense than what some babblers have to say about science and medicine.
I just wanted to repeat that because it's exactly what I was thinking that I couldn't put into words.
Why the insistence on group speak? Penicillin was an accidental discovery of a natural cure - where would we be if no-one had decided to pursue that one?
Actually medecine is not a science in and of itself. It's biological engineering. It uses whatever it can from biology but it's focus is on fixing things as opposed to understanding them. The problem with psychology is that the psychological sciences are so primitive that the it simply does not throw enough light on the problems to be useful.
So if psychology is still in the dark ages, and medical science still can't stop us from getting the common cold or pfff! Cancer, then does this mean Steve Harper should raise military spending in Canada to levels comparable to the US on a per capita basis over the next five to ten years?
The "no-one" who decided to pursue that one happened to be a scientist. If not for scientists, we'd all be eating mouldy bread to fight infections the way they did in the middle ages.
I love it when you call him Steve, Fidel.
Yep, theyre all the same Steve running the show in Ottawa for the last 30 years as far as I can tell. We used to have a national science officer until the most recent Steve.
"The "no-one" who decided to pursue that one happened to be a scientist. If not for scientists, we'd all be eating mouldy bread to fight infections the way they did in the middle ages." (Spector)
Yes, but it was a natural cure none the less. And if I remember right, he had trouble convincing anyone that is would work.
What's a "natural" cure?
One that grows spontaneously on vegetables left uneaten in dank places, apparently.