Guest guest Posted April 2, 2000 Report Share Posted April 2, 2000 <<I was musing over Karen's point that we couldn't suggest that the confucian scholar doctors were more effective than the family tradition doctors. There is certainly no way to know the truth of this, but one thing is clear from the classical literature is that the scholar doctors frequently wrote of the rampant medical malpractice in imperial china. It was their perception that many unschooled herbalists were not using bian zheng diagnosis, but merely using formula for diseases instead of patterns.>> There are always incompetent doctors to denounce, but I've seen far too much theoretical medicine promulgated which doesn't pan out in the real world. Doctors who purge their weak patients to death are unlikely to get much repeat business and have trouble making a living, whereas those who are treating primarily their fathers will have less feedback or opprobrium if they screw up. The scholars wrote the history, not the family tradition doctors, and they probably never got to feel their 10,000 pulses or evaluate the treatments of those patients.. The Varro Tyler's of this world who practice constituent analysis on herbs decry the practices of competent clinical herbalists who appropriately use comfrey, aconite, etc. which may have a few toxic constituents but can be properly used to treat. Without clinical experience they exagerate certain risks and influence people away from useful medicines. I suggest that future readers delving into the written literature could decide that only the FDA/constituent scientists understood herbalism once all the patients actually helped by herbalism are dead. Which doesn't mean that either the constituent scientists or the scholar doctors were mostly wrong. In fact scholars like Li Shi Shen collected significant amounts of information from family tradition doctors and folk healers. But the proof of medicine is in its practice. Karen Vaughan CreationsGarden *************************************** Email advice is not a substitute for medical treatment. We walk in the footsteps of those who came before us, leaving paths for others to follow... ______________ YOU'RE PAYING TOO MUCH FOR THE INTERNET! Juno now offers FREE Internet Access! Try it today - there's no risk! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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