/fringe/ - Fringe

Fringe I have been researching various pharmaceutical solutions non-stop for a wide variety of problems I have and also some random other conditions I know others have or that catch my interest during all my waking hours for the last hundred or so hours.

Literally article after article I go through it's the same shit over & over; every drug is not proven effective and apparently placebos work just as well. Study after study conducted fails to prove any of the drugs more effective than placebo.

The harsher drugs all come with terrible side-effects and basically poison you and have a bad track record of actually helping people.

The less harsh drugs that are more easily obtained are not really effective unless you believe in their efficacy.

What's more is that going deeper and deeper into researching these various problems I find a strong emphasis on stuff like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and various approaches to healing which target the MIND. It seems most professionals just give people drugs because they expect a drug to help them and it works well as a placebo but that to actually treat people they need to fix the way they think about things and the drugs should at best be a temporary adjustment thing.

It seems that modern medical science is way behind the legitimate power of shamanic practices in healing people. I have no idea why fedoras put so much faith into doctors when they have such a bad track record of actually helping people and most of modern medical science is toxic and based on some pretty bad science. People like to look at the quack cures being used in the past and how absurd they were but it's no different from what's being done today, the present system of healing is still faith based, it's just the faith fedoras have in doctors and pills that makes them better; and those who lack that faith don't get better usually.

>A number of investigators are agreed that the popular medical systems of tribal, peasant, and allied peoples are "effective." Most of the literature closely examining that effectiveness focuses on the ethnopharmacological dimensions of the healing systems and generally ignores psychosocial factors. Recent developments in psychophysiology may offer insights into these neglected areas. The specific idea to be examined here is that successful "general medical treatment," or "symbolic healing," by either the shaman or physician, is based in part on a psychosocial mobilization of the patient's biochemical response system. Moreover, it is argued that to account fully for these processes we must reconceptualize the character of the human organism; a unitary alternative to standard Western Cartesian dualism (mind vs. body) is proposed, based on a model derived from recent research in neuroendocrinology. This model can be the basis for a nonreductionist theory of medical effectiveness needed to account for a series of observations (derived from both anthropological and medical contexts) which seem to transcend the explanatory powers of the traditional reductionist biomedical model.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2741861