Comments on: Indigenous Medicine– From Illegal to Integral

By: brookew

brookew — Thu, 07 Nov 2019 17:34:50 +0000

In reply to William Palmer MD. Apologies for my late response! But yes, I too believe that studying all types of medicine is necessary (as long as it is done with the approval of the community the healthcare methods are coming from).

By: William Palmer MD

William Palmer MD — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 04:38:39 +0000

Thanks for your reply, Brooke. We are really all chemistry, don’t you think? Even placebos are doing chemistry of some sort in the neurons or synapses.? or they may be re-configuring neural pathways to hit the amygdala or something. I just don’t want to veer too much from genes and proteomes and metabolomes. I’m sure some of this traditional health care works well and is fundamentally science-based, but we have to study and dissect it to the chemical level too, just as we are doing with allopathic care. No discipline should escape having its chemistry examined and explained. Even thoughts and beliefs in God and spirits, if they work, are going to ultimately have a chemical root….because that is what we are. We can believe in the soul—I do—but if it is affecting illness and disease then it has to be working through chemistry.

By: brookew

brookew — Tue, 01 Oct 2019 17:35:56 +0000

In reply to William Palmer MD.

Hi Dr. Palmer– thank you for your comment on our blog post!

In response to some of your questions, I personally do not consider traditional medicine as a synonym to ancient medicine or as being quaint.

Many traditional medicines have been utilized by their communities for thousands of years longer than allopathic or other western-based medicines. In many communities, it takes years to practice their medicine— years of learning and training, making it more than something run out of Disneyland. And, what they are doing is not a ‘myth’ or ‘fairytale’. Many use their own version of the scientific method that we call upon today and use their own methods of deduction and testing in order to understand the world around them.

Also, I think it is a misconception to believe that traditional medicine has not progressed throughout time and adapted to modernity and daily life today. There have been thousands of Indigenous scholars who have extensively researched and found ways to see how their knowledge systems, which have been passed down for generations, can help people today and in the future.

Therefore, I think western-based medicine must be open to the possibility that it combined with a patient’s traditional medicine could be more beneficial that one standing alone. No practice of medicine is perfect. I hope that we can find the strengths among them and address the health outcomes of communities here in the US and around the globe!

By: William Palmer MD

William Palmer MD — Sun, 29 Sep 2019 18:05:56 +0000

I enjoyed this post but we have to extrapolate a little: Do you believe that any ancient and revered medical practice or custom should be OK in the US? How about the use of their associated drugs? Do we need to study all this stuff as exhaustively as we do our allopathic treatments? Or do we give them a break and let quaint little traditions continue? … like we are running little curiosity shoppes in Disneyland? Do you believe any treatment, if truly believed and trusted by the patient, is as good as an effective placebo? Couldn’t we eliminate all kinds of testing and trials if we simply got our patients to believe all our treatments were going to work? Maybe we could hypnotize patients and do anything we wanted as long as they Believed?

I don’t know the answers here. But we do need to pay attention as we don’t want to detach science from medicine too much. Mankind deserves to gradually move ahead scientifically. We are worth this. And if practices get too retrograde or quaint we probably do need to pull them forward a bit into modernity. I don’t want to be anal about standardization either.