"When many cures are offered for a disease, it means the disease is not curable" -Anton Chekhov
''Once you tell people there's a cure for something, the more likely they are to pressure doctors to prescribe it.'' -Robert Ehrlich, drug advertising executive.
"Opinions are like sphincters, everyone has one." - Chris Rangel
Post Modern Medicine: I'm a little behind on this ( to put it mildly), but last week's MedScape Roundtable on evidence based medicine as science or fascism was inspired to some extent by this unbelievable article. I had no idea that postmodernism was worming its way into medicine. Truth is power. Power corrupts. Corruption is bad. Truth is bad. It would be funny if it were in a satire, but, alas, it's real. posted by Sydney on
1/21/2007 12:26:00 AM
2 comments
2 Comments:
This guy has serious self-esteem issues. Somewhere, in the distant past, some medical doctor belittled him, maybe he had a paper rejected, and he has taken on the entire scientific medical establishment as a result.
Take his title on his website- Dr. Whatshisname, RN
That is just weird. Dr. is a social title. Academicians use their name, followed by their degrees (usually the highest one only, unless the others are in unrelated fields i.e., were not precursors to the highest one). It's like he's still trying to say "See, I'm as good as you!"
Postmodern deconstructionists are like little kids playing make-believe. They can pretend there is no one "right" way of looking at things (in this case, logic), but at the end of the day, they know it's good old modern Western thought that put the computer on their desk, the food on the table, the car in the garage, and the drugs in the medicine cabinet. If you really want to push the description, they're hypocrites. (Not the little kids of course, they just haven't grown up yet, the post-modernists never will).
I do think that evidence based on very rigid statistics sometimes does miss some treatments that are just "under the radar" in terms of effectiveness- yet in this day and age, can we afford anything less? I also think it leads to overly high doses of medications because a drug has to obtain a desired effect to be-well- effective. But that's just tinkering around the edges. The theory is sound.
If one wants post-modern medicine, why not look at pre-modern medicine? The Flexner Report would make nice bedtime reading for those who think evidence-based medicine is fascist.
