Hi MeSci, Hi All,
I went to a pain specialist doctor several years ago, inquiring about using opioids for pain relief. She was reluctant to prescribe that, but readily offered me a prescription of vioxx. I looked at her rather incredulously, and asked her if she was aware of how many people were having strokes and heart attacks from vioxx. She said she wasn’t. I then mentioned that I had run into many references on the internet without even doing specific research on the topic, and was reading that literally thousands of reports were dying from taking it.
She sort of looked at me like I was a bit of a kook for “believing the internet”, or whatever else she may have been thinking. It took the FDA another 2-3 years to acknowledge there was a problem and finally ban this product. In the mean time, many more people died (tens of thousands) or suffered horrible injury. — My point being: What is a reasonable definition of authoritative and impartial? You quote the FDA, but I myself don’t consider them to be at all credible. I, and I suspect many other people, believe they often play the role of being a mouthpiece and tool of the pharmaceutical industry.
As sad as it may seem to many who discount testimonials that proliferate on the internet, I myself put as much or more credence in them than some respected institutions and various medical publications, which I’ve found again and again to be extraordinarily biased. I recently ran across an account of a man who was very disabled from chronic Lyme, and used various alternative therapies to fully recover. Just a couple of his therapies and the percentage he felt was responsible for his recovery included: MMS (10-15%), BioPhoton (30-40%), and there were more. Are either of these therapies EVER going to be given some stamp of approval by authoritative and impartial institutions? To me, the answer is obviously no.
Some people prefer to have some kind of official stamp of approval for a product or therapy to make them legitimate, and I really have no problem with that at all. Other people, such as myself, listen carefully to what others have to say, and what their experiences have been. I then look at their credibility, assess the risk/reward ratio, and decide for myself what I want to subject my body to. This makes more sense to me than blindly taking the advice of doctors and institutions who have much less interest in my health than I do. I personally believe navigating our health care system, and putting too much reliance on conventional medicine parameters is one of the most dangerous things we do in our lives.
For me, in the end it’s all really pretty simple. We look for the best information possible, and then in a sense, become our own authorities on the risk/reward ratio of what we’re looking at doing. Some people orient toward conventional medicine with all its strengths and weaknesses. I am more oriented toward alternative therapies with all of its inherent strengths and weaknesses. So in the end health care decisions, like all other major choices in our lives including religious or spiritual, is a personal decision, and we choose what makes the most sense to us. Sort of what life is all about, wouldn’t you say?