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By Gary Null, PhD and Jeremy Stillman
Each day, millions of Americans visit a physician. Whether they go to the office of a primary care physician, consult with a specialist or seek medical assistance at an outpatient clinic or hospital emergency room, in all cases, there is an underlying assumption that the quality of care they are given must be the best in the world because we spend nearly twice as much as any other country in the world on individual healthcare. Also, we are led to believe by our physicians and nurses, the media and the many federal agencies that oversee the medical-industrial complex, including the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Cancer Institute (NCI) that everything offered to patients is based upon scientifically proven therapies for safety and efficacy or science-based medicine.
At the same time, we are told that any approaches to health involving non-science-based medicine is to be rejected; these include homeopathy, ayurvedic medicine, acupuncture, acupressure, massage, aromatherapy, magnet therapy, chiropractic medicine and supplementation with vitamins. We are told that such modalities have no foundation in science and that they have an almost cult-like following. Our health authorities make it clear that patients pursuing these alternative therapies have never made any improvements, in any circumstances, simply because they aren’t dealing with science-based medicine. The medical establishment tells us that anyone who sees improvement in their health using a non-science-based therapy was either misdiagnosed in the first place or improved only because they were treated by some form of science-based medicine that they must have received before. Hence, all practitioners of alternative medicine must be at best delusional, and at worse, out-and-out frauds and quacks who should be disgraced and imprisoned.
This has been the existing medical paradigm for nearly a century. Confronted with this situation, we ask a few basic questions: Is science-based medicine safe and effective? If so, where is the proof? And if it is not safe and effective, where is the proof? We also ask are alternative therapies are safe and effective? If they are, where is the proof? If they are not, where is the proof? These are reasonable questions to ask.
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