Wednesday August 13, 2008 at 18:33
1 note“To dismiss alternative medicine too quickly is to miss a central question: What is the role of health care? Is the enterprise aimed only at preventing and treating illness, or should it also try to make us feel better? Treating an illness Western-style can mean chopping off a leg, giving chemotherapy, hooking someone up to dialysis. All of this is done to score the touchdown of American medicine: extension of survival by a week, a month, a year, anything. No doctor wants a patient to suffer, but in the Western view the long-term goal of survival comes first. The focus of many Eastern approaches, on the other hand, is on feeling better now rather than lasting longer. And this is something altogether different.”
— Kent Sepkowitz in Slate
