Dr Richard Horton Advocates Natural Medicine.
From The Lancet, 2012.
Food for thought.
Food for thought.
"Before there were doctors,
human beings relied on Nature alone to re-establish normality to the body.
Ridding oneself of a cold or recovering from a minor injury, for example. But
as science has advanced, so we doctors have argued that patients should
increasingly put their trust in us as the practical emissaries of medical
science. The place of Nature in human health and hygiene has become
correspondingly diminished. Since the time of
Hippocrates, doctors have sought to put Nature in its rightful place:
subjugated to power of medicine. That ambition has meant asking patients to
distrust their own sense, to jettison their own judgment, and “to appeal to the
man capable of knowing for him what he is himself unaware of—that is, to the
doctor”. With this argument, medicine achieves its position of dominance: “There
is no hygiene without a doctor.” Perhaps this conclusion partly explains why
doctors are often so reluctant to engage with aspects of health (social and
political determinants of health, for example) if they themselves are not put
at the centre of the solution. Science has been a vital source of strength for
medical advance. But it has also led the doctor to a position of extraordinary
dependence and, strangely, vulnerability."
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