@Khan,
If I am articulate enough to keep with you, I am perceptive enough to understand “reality”. Realities are just that… an individual’s respond-react mechanism based around the World he moves in (Kiyosaki had an excellent discussion in one of his books, forget where). I certainly don’t have any rose-tinted specs.

What I am trying to get across is some of the myths that cocoon us because of the very (relative) short term boom that we have been seeing in our lives….
Read this essay which expands on some of the “myths” in this post, written by a good acquaintance and a fellow scientist.

OK, regarding medicine itself, the birthplace of Western medicine, i.e., the West is itself in crossroads regarding how long this juggernaut will roll. Please read the latest Archdruid report. Some excerpts:

On the one hand, I’m alive today because of modern medicine. At the age of seven, I came down with a serious case of scarlet fever. That’s a disease that used to kill children quite regularly, and in a premodern setting, it almost certainly would have killed me. As it was, I spent two weeks flat on my back, and pulled through mostly because of horse doctor’s doses of penicillin, administered first with syringes that to my seven-year-old eyes looked better suited for young elephants, and thereafter in oral form, made palatable with an imitation banana flavoring I can still call instantly to mind.

then he lays out the flip side

My wife has lifelong birth defects in her legs and feet, because her mother’s obstetrician prescribed a drug that was contraindicated for pregnant women because it causes abnormalities in fetal limb development. My only child died at birth because my wife’s obstetrician did exactly the same thing, this time with a drug that was well known to cause fatal lung abnormalities. Several years later we found out by way of a media exposé that the latter doctor had done the same thing to quite a few other women, leaving a string of dead babies in his wake. The response of the medical board, once the media exposure forced them to do something, was quite standard; they administered a mild reprimand. If this reminds you of the Vatican’s handling of pedophile priests, well, let’s just say the comparison has occurred to me as well.

Going forward:

if I could find a competent, affordable general practitioner to give me annual checkups and help me deal with the ordinary health issues middle-aged men tend to encounter, I’d be happy to do so. The catch here is that little word “affordable.” Along with those birth defects, my wife has celiac disease, a couple of food allergies, and a family history with some chronic health problems in it; for that matter, my family history is by no means squeaky clean; we’re both self-employed, and so health insurance would cost us substantially more than our mortgage. That’s money we simply don’t have. Like a large and growing fraction of Americans, therefore, we’ve turned to alternative medicine for our health care.

The more dogmatic end of the mainstream medical industry tends to dismiss all alternative healing methods as ineffective by definition. That’s self-serving nonsense; the core alternative healing modalities, after all, are precisely the methods of health care that were known and practiced in the late 19th century, before today’s chemical and surgical medicine came on the scene, and they embody decades or centuries of careful study of health and illness. There are things that alternative health methods can’t treat as effectively as the current mainstream, of course, but the reverse is also true.

Still, behind the rhetoric of the medical industry lies a fact worth noting: alternative medical methods are almost all much less intensive than today’s chemical and surgical medicine. The best way to grasp the difference is to compare it to other differences between life in the late 19th century and life today—say, the difference between walking and driving a car. Like alternative medicine, walking is much slower, it requires more personal effort, and there are destinations that, realistically speaking, are out of its reach; on the other hand, it has fewer negative side effects, costs a lot less, and dramatically cuts your risk of ending up buttered across the grill of a semi because somebody else made a mistake.

Before you dismiss him as a nobody, please count the number of comments for any of his post (150-200+ comments for every post and still counting). In other words, he has more readers than our own Subra 😉 and he is also influential.

From the comments of that post in question, here’s a medical doctor:

As a Family Physician in a small town, I can readily see the de-industrialization, and de-“everything else” happening in America right now. Being “inside the loop” of Medicine, I can also see that upstream, the Medical Powers That Be are not aware and have no desire to become aware. I am actively integrating Alternative Medicine and true Preventative Medicine into my practice, but I see no danger of Modern Medicine doing like-wise…

I fear the only “solution” that will turn Modern Medicine around is the societal pain coming from these two very large objects (Modern Medicine going one way vs. Modern American Society going the other) grinding against each other. Some would call this a crash, but I’m afraid that word (crash) is deceptive to most.

As a economic system we are mostly propped up by FIIs (yes we are hovering in the 17,000+ number not because of local investment but because of those robber barons). Be very aware that the modern life we are taking for granted is courtesy of some very hard nosed crooks. I vividly remember the 1997 Asian paper tigers crisis (collapse?) for I was personally affected by it very badly. Hence my warnings about cutting back and becoming an independent generalist rather than some totally dependent-on-the-propped-system specialist. Truth might be bitter, but in the end it makes you better (i.e., sets you free)

Have a nice day.

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@Srinvas
Thanks for finding the middle ground between us.
@ Surio
Thanks for debating with me. I really learnt a lot. Thank you