A Medical Skeptic Am I

Voltaire said, "the art of medicine is to amuse the patient while nature cures the disease", and that was said hundreds of years ago. What has changed?

If you are in a car wreck and have bones poking out or some other acute trauma then medical doctors are a top choice, but for anything chronic...uh-uh, they haven't that much to offer as far as cures anyway.

And, an admission of the lack of power of medical "gods" to cure us, from Dr. D. M. Hegsted's and Dr. Beverly Winikof's statement presenting the "Dietary Goals for the US" in February, 1977:

There is a widespread and unfounded confidence in the ability of medical to cure or mitigate the effects of such diseases [heart disease, diabetes, etc] once they occur. Appropriate public education must emphasize the unfortunate but clear limitations of current medical practice in curing the common killing diseases. Once hypertension, diabetes, arteriosclerosis or heart disease are manifest, there is, in reality, very little that medical science can do to return a patient to normal physiological function. As awareness of this limitation increases, the importance of prevention will become all the more obvious.

...oh, and their low fat dietary guidelines were probably the root of our increasing obesity/diabetes problem, but that is the subject fro another post.

And some lighter weight stuff...a doctor joke..."the flu lasts 7 days with treatment, and one week without it".

The Spanish Minister of Health said of the H1N1 flu scare...it's "an epidemic of fear caused by a ghost illness being fought by exaggerated response".