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…The Real History of Medicine

Show Title: History Repeating: Empirically Minded Doctors Increasing Despite Political and Economic Disadvantages

Mainstream Doctors Join Anti-Aging Bandwagon (MSNBC.com): Highlights the “often bitter tension” between conventional medicine (rationalist minded doctors) and the empiricist minded doctors (’anti-aging’ physicians - the largest aggregate of empirically minded contemporary ‘integrative medicine’ doctors today).

Analogy: ‘Anti-aging medicine is to FDA-approval-based medicine now as homeopathy was to allopathic medicine in the 1800s. The same vested interests don’t want to see natural, integrative medicine flourish today.

Prime therapy of concern to modern day drug companies and rationalists : Bio-identical hormones.

Hierarchy of Scientific Study Types from ‘Empiricism to Rationalism’: Case studies, animal experiments, expert opinions, descriptive reports, epidimiology studies, expert concensus, cohort or case-control analyses, non-randomized and randomized controlled trials.

Greatest Obstacle to Mainstreaming Integrative Medicine: Financial Limitations. Big Pharma has more money for: 1) marketing on mainstream media, 2) FDA/AMA/medical board schmoozing, and 3) congressional lobbying. In 2007 the pharmaceutical industry was Washington’s largest lobbying force, according to report by Center for Public Integrity. What was Pharma’s ‘ROI’? They squashed recent Congressional efforts to restrict drug media advertising.

Is ‘Anti-Aging’ Medicine ‘Just About Physicians Trying to Boost Their Income’? That’s what one ‘ivory tower’ doctor said in the MSNBC.com story. Boosting income is part of it, but more important is the steadily growing public demand for therapeutic approaches that promote health.

Are the Rationalist Drug-Oriented Doctors More Mechanically Minded/The Empiricist Integrative Medicine Doctors More Bio-Energetically Minded? One thing the MSNBC story got right was that “most conventional doctors are mechanics. They fix things.” Those are the rationalist physicians of today. Most empirically-minded doctors tend to be healers of the psyche, the nervous system, the endocrine system and the all-important immunological system ( Psychoneuroimmunology, PNI as it’s called). And which therapeutic approaches probably hold greatest promise for the future of our health, healing, prevention and ‘anti-aging’? Bioenergetic approaches.

Good Medicine Word of the Week: Anti-Aging Medicine - the realm of modern-day empiricists. But a better name is Integrative Medicine.

Next Week’s Show: 4th installment of History of Healing – History of Killing. We’ll explore how Big Pharma is in cahoots with the FDA, violating our constitutional rights.

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