CAGE MATCH! Holistic medicine vs. allopathic medicine, Round 1, just kidding, it's not really a fight.

So, a few people have talked to me about Barbara Ehrenreich's new book BRIGHT SIDED, and compared it to what I am advocating.

First of all, I love Barbara Ehrenreich. I loved NICKEL AND DIMED, and anyone who has watched my facebook page has seen that I listed her landmark article "Welcome To Cancerland" only a few weeks ago. 

BRIGHT SIDED portends to be about how Americans are all relentlessly positive thinkers, and how this is a sort of blindness, a refusal to see reality. Into this, she dumps alternative medicine. I.E. people take a lot of unproven crap because they all have fairies on the brain and are hoping to cheat death while running away from their doctors prognoses, hands over their ears, singing loudly.

This kind of thinking is sloppy, not to mention very indoctrinated. After all allopathic medicine's history is shallow - 100 years. And in the 100 years it has existed, it has done two things we highly value in this country: innovate and make shit-tons of money. And it has saved lives. And it has created new illnesses. And it has lots and lots of statistics. Why? Because allopathic medicine is scientific medicine. It does not believe particularly in the case of a single patient - it believes in the statistical majority.

But one thing that very few people understand about Western Medicine is simply this: it uses science, but is not one. There is no overarching ideology or philosophy about how the body works. Just empirical evidence of certain therapies that have produced certain results in the majority of the patients in a certain study.

Holistic medicine treats a whole person. And a whole person is more than the sum of their physical parts, which makes them two things: statistically insignificant (who cares what works for you?) and a combination of body, mind and spirit, which will always be complicated and individual and nearly impossible to quantify. 

The choice between the two is completely individual, and a combination is probably best. The most important thing is to be educated and to own your own health. More on that in CAGE MATCH!! Part two...