Ranting to /dev/null

Medical disciplines

I've been getting a really positive response to the last post of a medical nature that I wrote, and as I was responding to a comment left by Mesh, I realized that I had enough for another one. This is about the various major schools of medicine and alternative medicine.

Once again, this is just me talking. The information provided herein is accurate as far as I know, and interpreted by me for my own uses. I am not a doctor, and have no formal medical training. Caveat emptor.

The following are some of the major branches of Western medicine. I'm not going to get into Eastern or tribal medicine, as the former is a whole different ball of wax and the latter is not really all that relevant. Essentially, what we've got here is the main trunk of scientific medicine that traces its lineage all the way back to ancient times and up through such minds as Hippocrates, Aristotle, etc., and that tradition's various bastard children: homeopathy, chiropractic, and osteopathy.

"Allopathic" refers to scientific medicine as proscribed by the AMA, etc. When you meet an MD, they're a practitioner of allopathic medicine. A better term would be "Hippocratic", as what is in view is the current manifestation of Western scientific medicine dating all the way back to the Greeks. This is the standard to which everything else is an "alternative". The thesis of Hippocratic medicine is that the body is, more or less, a chemical machine, and that disease is the result of chemical abberations caused by some combination of diet, genetics, infection, and environment, among other things. [Actually, the term "allopathic" was coined by the founder of homeopathy as a perjorative, but the term has stuck and has largely lost its negative connotations.]

"Homeopathic" is a specific branch of alternative medicine which deals with the administration of extremely dilute solutions of various minerals, vitamins, and herbs, solutions so dilute that the solute is undetectable. The thesis of homeopathic medicine is that all substances have various spiritual/metaphysical properties, and that symptoms are the result of imbalances in these substances. The theory goes that water retains a "memory" of things once dissolved in it after they are removed, and that this "memory" can be used to correct imbalances of various sorts in the body. Unsurprisingly, there is no evidence to indicate that this does anything at all, and the original founder of the discipline - an 18th-19th century German - was something of a mystic.

"Chiropractic" refers to another branch of alternative medicine which focuses on manipulative therapy, especially of the spinal column. This was founded by an American magnetic healer around the turn of the last century. The essential thesis is that all disease is caused by irregularities in the nervous system, which in turn cause imbalances in the body's natural intelligence/energy. These irregularities are called subluxations, and are normally treated by manipulating the spine. Like homeopathy, there is no good evidence to suggest that chiropractic does anything that a decent backrub can't.

"Osteopathy" was originally very similar to chiropractic, and was also founded in the American Midwest in the late 19th century. It is another manipulative therapy field, and originally stated that all disease was the result of misalignments in skeletal structure which produce interruptions/aberrations in blood flow. Osteopathic practice has moved far from its roots, however, and today osteopathic medicine is essentially "Hippocrates lite", as osteopaths prescribe drugs and perform surgeries in ways generally indistinguishable from normal doctors. In fact, osteopaths are licensed physicians in all fifty states and the percentage of osteopaths that perform the manipulative therapy upon which osteopathy is based has been steadily shrinking.

So there's that. I'm sure I've missed something. I'm sure someone will point it out to me. I'm tired. I'd say I'm going to go to bed, but circumstances have conspired to make that pretty unlikely.