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What part of the world is the best place to get sick in, say, the fifteenth century?
Based on what I've read of Galenic medicine looks like 99% of interventions they prescribe will make things worse. Traditional Chinese medicine I think has things like acupuncture that's really only good for certain pain relief. Not sure how much of their herbal remedies are efficacious. India I read also has a long history of traditional medicine but all I know of Ayurvedic practices are the weird ones like drinking urine. All of these systems might have cures that work but the ratio of good to harm are probably very low.
Would it be better to just live in a Shamanic society where you get the benefit of the placebo effect without the harmful 'medical' procedures?
Western medicine got almost nothing right until the Pasteur era.
Chinese medicine is folk and fairy tales, grossly overrated by exoticism. Ditto for nearly every other ancient or preliterate culture (Native American, etc.) Getting a few mild herbal remedies right does not mean much.
Until the rise of science, I'm not sure any culture had medicine I'd want to depend on. My recommendation is that you don't get sick before about 1875.
Some of the Chinese herbal remedies are astonishingly effective. The old Taoist acupuncture also was very helpful. Unfortunately, Mao purged the old practices, and came up with substitutes, which he labeled "Traditional Chinese Medicine" (TCM). It's that ersatz practice that's taught in most acupuncture schools in the US today. You can still find practitioners of the authentic methods; they're usually people from Taiwan or Hong Kong, or people who studied under people from there. Most patients are very impressed. To treat chronic illness, though, the approach is a slow one over time, to "balance" the imbalances in the patient's system. This requires weekly treatments, if not multiple treatments weekly, for years. This isn't practical in the modern world, where practitioners charge $50-$100/treatment. So there's no way for us to try it and see it works.
Tibetan medicine is very impressive. It's basically Ayurvedic, but incorporates aspects of ancient Western medicine, Chinese medicine, and other traditions. Recently, scholars in the Iranian part of the former Soviet Central Asian area, studied the ancient medical system in old manuscripts, and said those methods (from which the Tibetans borrowed) were surprisingly in conformance with "modern" scientific/medical understanding.
Swiss, German and Austrian medical specialists and labs have picked apart the Tibetan herbal formulas to figure out what makes them tick, and to see if there was any validity to them, and were pleasantly surprised. Some of the remedies are now available in pharmacies across those countries. Switzerland found one remedy so valuable, they started manufacturing it themselves. The remedy has the potential to make certain heart surgeries for cardiovascular illness obsolete. They sent the cancer-treatment herbal compounds to one of Israel's famous cancer research centers, and the word came back, that the remedy prevented metastasizing of cancer by sealing off the cardiovascular system, so that diseased cells couldn't enter it and travel elsewhere in the body, which is how metastasizing works.
It can be surprising how effective some "folk" remedies (or Indigenous science, you could call it) are. My experience with Chinese and Tibetan Medicine is, that while it's effective for certain complaints, it's not always able to address endocrine dysfunction effectively, like for example, thyroid disease. But the response from practitioners to that would probably be, that it takes years of regular treatments to balance the system in such a case. So....IDK.
SMy experience with Chinese and Tibetan Medicine is, that while it's effective for certain complaints, it's not always able to address endocrine dysfunction effectively, like for example, thyroid disease.
So, what are the ancient Tibetan words for 'endocrine system' and/or 'thyroid'? And the diagnostic process they used that led to using exactly the right mountain weed to cure subtle systemic illnesses?
Some validity, coupled with massive selection bias. Like any more or less random system, there will be some hits.
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Originally Posted by Therblig
Western medicine got almost nothing right until the Pasteur era.
Chinese medicine is folk and fairy tales, grossly overrated by exoticism. Ditto for nearly every other ancient or preliterate culture (Native American, etc.) Getting a few mild herbal remedies right does not mean much.
Until the rise of science, I'm not sure any culture had medicine I'd want to depend on. My recommendation is that you don't get sick before about 1875.
Edward Jenner discovered the vaccine and cured small pox, before the Pasteur era.
John Snow was a leader in the development of anaesthesia and medical hygiene. He is considered one of the founders of modern epidemiology, in part because of his work in tracing the source of a cholera outbreak and his work helped to stop cholera outbreaks which he discovered were due to water supply.
Joseph Lister, was a pioneer of antiseptic surgery.
Well, jingo patriotism aside, Cinese Cancer Institute, that uses traditional medicines made out of herbs and minerals, is known to successfully treat around 70% of stage four cancers and 100% of stage 1 and 2.
Chinese traditional doctor can diagnose over 600 diseases just by pulse.
I'd be rather careful, bluntly calling them shamans. Same goes for traditional Hindu medicine. You just need to know who to see. Surely, plenty of money grabbers there too. Greed is very contagious.
Edward Jenner discovered the vaccine and cured small pox, before the Pasteur era.
John Snow was a leader in the development of anaesthesia and medical hygiene. He is considered one of the founders of modern epidemiology, in part because of his work in tracing the source of a cholera outbreak and his work helped to stop cholera outbreaks which he discovered were due to water supply.
Joseph Lister, was a pioneer of antiseptic surgery.
Yes, there are forerunners; I picked Pasteur as the beginning what we know as modern medicine overall. Feel free to choose another point in that era.
We hear about things like willow bark == aspirin precursors == aspirin, and this and that aboriginal/ancient herb that turns out to have efficacious properties (sometimes even for the illness it's supposed to), and such... but I haven't seen any study, by US, German, Swiss or any other authorities, that found anything but selected 'hits' among traditional methods and pharmacopiae.
A person can guess the roll of a die about 25% of the time. It doesn't make them a psychic.
Over thousands of years and at least a dozen major cultures, natural remedies that actually work and don't kill the patient are bound to be discovered.
But to suggest that anything prior to (roughly) Jenner-to-Pasteur was anything but mystical fumbling in the dark, far more nonsense, harm and uselessness, especially Western medicine based on the complete nonsense of the ancients, is to mistake the hard science of random chance for woo-woo "lost art."
Well, jingo patriotism aside, Cinese Cancer Institute, that uses traditional medicines made out of herbs and minerals, is known to successfully treat around 70% of stage four cancers and 100% of stage 1 and 2.
Chinese traditional doctor can diagnose over 600 diseases just by pulse.
I'd be rather careful, bluntly calling them shamans. Same goes for traditional Hindu medicine. You just need to know who to see. Surely, plenty of money grabbers there too. Greed is very contagious.
I was not calling TCM practitioners shamans. I was just wondering if one might be better off to live in a tribal type society where there's no medical ideology and all sickness as considered supernatural. In such a world at least they won't try to do bogus procedures on you and you get the benefit of the placebo effect. Anyway I don't know enough to say if that's the case. For all I know some shamans might drill holes in your head because you have the stomach flu.
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