I desire to share that I am one who is skeptical of the Western Medical practices as conducted now-a-days. My skepticism comes from personal experience as well as research into Big Pharma’s practices. I acknowledge the usefulness of Western Med in many ways, but stay away from them for the most part because of past experiences.

The alternative therapies we use are not really alternative, but are called that because they are not Western Med “approved”. So, if something works for me and mine, I should not use it because the houses that educate Doctors have not said it is good or best? I use what works and what works with least harm. Yes, Western Med is good for some purposes, but not all of it is hunky-dory.

JMHO.

1. Tori – thanks for the comment. I would be interested to know what makes you skeptical? I think it is fine if you are comfortable with something working for you, but you should be clear what data either support or don’t support the approach you are taking. Many of the alternative approaches claim to treat and cure everything with little data but a few anecdotal claims from people…

2. bbell – I agree Modern Medicine is a blessing. Perhaps I know many Mormons skeptical of modern medicine given I am related to a bunch and there seem to be a lot of them in Utah associated with the MLMs…

Perhaps I know many Mormons skeptical of modern medicine given I am related to a bunch and there seem to be a lot of them in Utah associated with the MLMs…
*barf* Yes there sure are.

The large number of Mormons addicted to prescriptions of various types may be evidence that Mormons are less inclined to be skeptical of modern medicine. Or perhaps the success and growth of Health Sciences and Services in Utah is evidence.

I think Mormons are not a cohort that is in any way a majority skeptical of the Health Care industry, but rather, as you say SOME Mormons are. Why it bothers you that Mormons are skeptical, and that it may not bother you that people in general are skeptical is interesting.

I agree that there are large numbers of Mormons, especially in the Utah area, that are skeptical of traditional medicine, but I attribute that more to their fussy conservative political beliefs than to their Mormonism. You could argue about how much those political beliefs are influenced by Mormonism, but still, it’s not religion that directly causes an attitude of disdain for doctors and hospitals, it’s conservative politics and culture.

The statistics quoted in the OP are interesting but probably won’t do a whole lot to dispell any of these attitudes. Advances in treating those rare diseases since 1962 are mostly due to the fact that we knew almost nothing about them in 1962. There’s still plenty of room for improvement in cancer treatment.

7/8. nasamomdele/BrianJ “I think Mormons are not a cohort that is in any way a majority skeptical of the Health Care industry, but rather, as you say SOME Mormons are. Why it bothers you that Mormons are skeptical, and that it may not bother you that people in general are skeptical is interesting.” I would guess that Mormons are somewhat similar to the rest of the world regarding modern medicine skepticism, although as MCQ mentions it could be part of the conservatism in general in Utah that drives it. The reasons I am bothered by it from a Mormon perspective and mention it are several fold: 1- since this is a Mormon type blog, I focused on Mormons (rest of the world skepticism bothers me too), 2- Mormons tend to hold up the discoveries in science as gifts from God but yet there is a skepticism by some in modern medicine while at the same time 3- there is a willingness by some Mormons to experiment with crazy potions doled out by MLMs and others…

9. MCQ – agreed that there is room for improvement in treating cancer, but the improvements that have occurred are pretty amazing.

Devyn, I agree that there’s an interesting contradiction at work with some Mormons where they seem very leery of traditional medicine but supplements and/or alternative therapies are embraced without reservation. I don’t understand it, but I find it fascinating.

Is there a proven link between political orientation and medical skepticism? What does the actual research show?

When you poll any question a minority will respond with crazy theories from both left or right. So a large minority on the left thinks that 911 was a inside job and a large minority on the right thinks that Obabma was born outside the country.

11. living in zion – good question – Likely many are working on it, but it certainly is not an easy thing to tease out…

12. MCQ – as do I… On a personal level, I have had many a discussion with family members about how the magic crystal/magnet/etc. is likely not going to cure their arthritis and that there is no cure for it, but you can treat it…

13. ESO – “If thinking that much of medicine is guess work and that therapies and procedures are often selected to maximize the doctors’ convenience rather than the patient’s wishes and health, then count me as a skeptic.” You need a new doctor if you feel this is the case – there are obviously poor physicians, but there are also good ones…

“My major beef with doctors and scientists generally is the discrepancy between the actual facts and the claims. Doctors and scientists want everyone to believe them, to think that they know everything, and that everything they claim is provable. A cursory knowledge of history shows that scientists have been wrong many many times. They are still being wrong.” I think that much of this discrepancy is actually promulgated by the media and not by the scientists. I don’t know many scientists who believe their claims are irrefutable.

MLM – multi-level marketing…

14. bbell – good question – I am guessing you have folks on both extremes who are skeptics.

15. bbell – anti-vaccine crowd drives me nuts – I am planning on posting on that in the future…

I find it more than a little silly that so much discussion seems to be conducted via anecdote and sweeping generalization these days :-).

Is the practice of some church members to rely on priesthood blessings but not medicine analogous to Mormons rejecting government assistance but relying on church welfare?

At the very least, it’s flying in the face of recent counsel from Elder Oaks.

I’m both grateful for medicine and realistic about its limitations. For concrete problems, it can often be simply amazing. For example, our daughter got strep on Christmas and w/in just a few hours of taking her first dose of antibiotics, she was pretty close to being back to herself.

On the other hand, dealing with vague chronic illness like mine is not something I have found traditional medicine to be very helpful with, and I’ve had to push back several times on the “let’s just hide the symptoms with drugs” approach and sort through what makes the most sense given my situation.

I think of my cousin’s child whose internal organs were about as messed up as they could be, and with some surgeries, she is living and doing very well — all the more so after a recent heart surgery. I also have numerous people in my sphere who are living thanks to cancer treatments and surgeries and such.

And even with the limitations of medicine in ‘fixing’ my problems, I’ve been grateful for all the advances in testing and such so as to be able to rule out any serious, life-threatening illness.

I think I’m pretty much with ESO on this one. As grateful as I am for many medical advances, I’m skeptical about a lot of medical practices and approaches. I actually don’t think medicine is much of a science. The statistics doctors use to prove their arguments are terrible. I’m not going to bother re-writing this post (plus, it has a cute picture of my daughter) but in brief it shows distributions of motile and non-motile sperm in men who are either fertile or not fertile and, in spite of the similarity of the distributions, claims you can distinguish infertile males based on the percentage of non-motile sperm. It’s bad statistics trying to claim you can categorize someone based on measurements that overlap so much. While there are plenty of places where medicine has made great strides, there are a lot of medical problems where you might as well go to a witch doctor as see a medical doctor.

Oh yeah, and the hubris doesn’t reassure me either.

I will preface this comment by saying that I am a doctor.

Yes, the cost of medicine is going up. Yes, it is breaking the bank. It is easy to point at the “greedy” medical field for this. It makes great “copy” for articles and sensationalism. But is the medical field itself entirely to blame?

In my practice, I treat knees. I often tell people that an MRI is not needed because it’s not going to change what we do. They want it anyway, because they “have good insurance”.

I also replace knees. The need for knee replacements in this country is going up 750% (!!!) over the next decade. Is this because people like me are pushing it. Absolutely not. It’s because we’re fat (collectively). The cost of obesity in this country is over $150 BILLION annually in increased costs for joint replacement, arthritis, back pain, diabetes, high blood pressure, strokes, heart attacks, etc. Just to put that in perspective, the proposed cost of Obama’s plan was $1 trillion over 10 years, or $100 BILLION annually. We could pay for that just if we weren’t so obese.

One more comment about medical costs: I spend over $1000/week in case I am sued. This comes out to around $30-35 per new patient as an expense to me, just in case that patient decides to sue me at some point in their care. This also doesn’t include my costs for rent, employee salaries, equipment, health insurance, supplies, etc. For a Medicaid patient, I am paid around $40. So not only do I lose money on a Medicaid patient, the majority of that expense goes to protect me from lawyers.

17. Ardis E. Parshall – I don’t know of anyone who rejects modern medicine in favor of Priesthood blessings but they probably do exist. I am irritated like you on the Nutraceutical front. That is a funny story about your RN aunt. So did it heal you?

18. Tom D – huh?

19. queuno – not touching that one…

20. michelle – antibiotics are certainly a miracle. The ability to completely get rid of an infection is nothing short of amazing.

21. Anon – uh ok…

22. kristine N – I would dispute that scientists don’t use data. I looked at your post and the data and it looks like there is a separation between fertile vs infertile men – not all but clearly you can distinguish some infertile men. This is typical of scientific research with humans – you never get 100% of people that respond or act similarly which is why we have to apply statistics. Now layer in the complication of treating someone for whom you may know the disease they have based on the diagnostics that exist today and it is a bit of art – precisely why we need better science…

23. Jon – amen to that although I wouldn’t want a member of my stake presidency delivering my children :)

24. Mike S – thanks for the comment. Obesity is a major issue to be sure

Interesting post. The anti-science and “alternative” medicine crapola that is so prevalent in the US today is something I deal with on a daily basis, since I am also a medical doctor. I don’t really know that Mormons are more skeptical of medicine than non-LDS people. There certainly are a lot of people, including Mormon, who seem extremely gullible when it comes to alternative medicine. All anyone has to do is slap the label “natural” on something, and it sells.

I would like to nitpick on terminology a little bit. I don’t think of treatments as “alternative” versus “medical” or “natural” versus “pharmaceutical”. I think of them in terms of evidence and plausibility. Some treatments are evidence-based, some are not. Of those that are not, some are based on plausible mechanisms of action and are recommended based on the best available knowledge, some are not. For instance, recommendations about eating whole grains rather than refined and eating more fruits and vegetables to prevent heart disease and cancer are mostly not strictly based on the kind of evidence that is required to approve medicines for these uses; but they do have some epidemiological evidence and they make sense based on what we do know about the pathophysiology involved in these disease processes. Homeopathy, on the other hand, has no evidence supporting it and is not at all plausible given what we know about disease.

living in zion, childhood cancers have always been a rare thing and they still are. I don’t know of any evidence that the rate of childhood cancers has increased since 1962. Do you have a reference?

Anyone who thinks that alternative therapies are useful needs to read Snake Oil Science: The Truth about Complementary and Alternative Medicine. The fact is that over-and-over, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trials with low attrition rates demonstrate decisively that there are no alternative therapies that work better than a placebo.

What happens is this: almost every time a person gets sick they get better, and even those who suffer chronic symptoms endure them in cycles where the symptoms get better and worse. Since people seek treatment when symptoms are generally at their worst, it follows immediately that anything that people take at all will be followed by recovery.

In other words: I could feed you dog-poop, and your cold symptoms would subside. This is known as “reversion to the mean.”

It’s a mystery to me why people have this idea that Doctors have an incentive to prescribe pricey meds. What do they have to gain by pushing their patients towards meds that they cannot afford? The most commonly prescribed antibiotics are semisynthetic penicillins (e.g., ampicillin and amoxicillin), which also happen to be among the cheapest drugs of any kind that you can find anywhere. And insurance companies offer substantial financial incentives for the prescription of lower-cost generic drugs over brand-name drugs.

That said, there are legitimate reasons to distrust medical doctors. The current state of medical ethics among doctors is deplorable, where senior doctors routinely teach younger doctors to cover up and deny mistakes. Thankfully, there are institutions like Beth Israel Deaconness Hospital in Boston that have committed to the open disclosure of all mistakes, and I hope to see this practice spreads, because it will result in a lot more trust of doctors in general. (When you read headlines about the mistakes made at Beth Israel, it’s because Beth Israel actually publicly reports all such mistakes. The same mistakes are frequently concealed when they occur elsewhere.)

Another issue surrounding scientists in general is that they are reluctant to admit that they are wrong, unless they can fully justify their incorrectness. Put bluntly: They enjoy being the sorts of people who know lots of things that other people don’t know, and this leads them to be unable to admit to having faulty knowledge. This is ironic, since science is premised on the notion that the systematic attempt to discover erroneous beliefs will illuminate the boundaries of truth. We saw this reluctance to admit to faulty knowledge quite powerfully on your Global Warming thread, where numerous scientists pretended to be experts on such topics as modal realism, number theory, the law of diminishing returns, models of performance used in investments, the definition of paradox, and the nature of causation. They had no training at all in these areas, and their forays into them were embarrassingly unskilled and sophomoric. Nevertheless, they utterly and completely refused to admit that their doctrinaire (and wildly inaccurate) pronouncements in these areas were not absolutely and utterly correct. Such behavior fundamentally undermines the authority of science, because people who are so blindingly unaware of the fallibility of their own beliefs cannot generally be trusted to explain important truths to society. Moreover, when scientists behave like morons, people take a less favorable view of science.

When you look at problems with the audience rather than with the scientist or medical doctor, you see that there is enough blame to go around: There are a great many studies concerning a topic known as “acculturation of science,” which seeks to discover the degree to which specific groups completely or incompletely understand science or deal with science. Such studies measure acculturation of science among different ethnicities by measuring how receptive and how skilled an ethnic group is at grasping the import of science and at performing science. For example, 93% of studies that come out of China confirm the experimental hypothesis no matter what that hypothesis is. I’ve spoken with DNA researchers attempting to trace biological histories using DNA, and they openly discuss the aversion that some ethnic groups tend to have toward DNA tests. (One has to be quite careful when bringing this up — a particularly ignorant professor of English at a California college accused me using ethnic slurs when I brought this up in an online context, an indication of faulty acculturation of science among her own cohort).

I don’t think that Mormons are much less skilled at understanding and performing science than other groups. Scientists (like you, Devin) are likely to seek out relationships with people who are highly skilled at science when they’re not at church, and were it not for their attendance at church, they might never run across a broader cross-section of the population who are not as skilled at assessing and performing science. Thus, your non-church cohort represents a biased sample to judge other groups by. Does that make sense?

D,

I think one of the main allures of alternative medicine can be summed up by the fact that most people as they age are afflicted with chronic conditions like arthritis, tendonitis, back pain, joint pain, foot pain etc. These types of conditions can’t be cured. All of my basketball buddies plus 35 have at least one chronic issue. The symptoms can be somewhat treated but chronic conditions ebb and flow. In frustration some people turn to alternatives seeking relief after they realize they are stuck with the chronic issue and the local MD can’t cure it.

bbell – not sure if the D is me, but I would agree that some do turn to alternative therapies when nothing else seems to work. Unfortunately, these are often no better than the potential medical therapies in most cases…

Devyn–I didn’t say scientists don’t use data–that would be silly to claim, since I am a scientist. What I was saying is that medicine isn’t science, or at least, a lot of medical studies aren’t terribly rigorous. That’s not even to say they aren’t useful, just a lot of medical studies aren’t very conclusive, or don’t prove their points well.

The article I point to is one example–they claim the data they present support the use of sperm motility counts for distinguishing fertile from sub-fertile and infertile men. While there are differences in the distributions, meaning you can distinguish between the populations, categorizing any individual is problematic–it’s a bit like claiming since men and women have different average heights you can tell the gender of an individual based solely on height.

I admit, my life is most certainly better because of modern medicine–I didn’t have to worry about any childhood illness other than chicken pox, antibiotics helped treat several serious infections as a kid, and there are probably any number of other ways modern medicine benefits me that I’m not even aware of. However, whenever I interact with doctors I get the feeling that, as much as they want to help me, there are actions they routinely take simply to avoid a lawsuit, or procedures and medications they prescribe not because they’re truly necessary but because they feel they are expected to do something.

Kristine, when talking with fellow engineers about doctors, a frequent observation is the physicians’ dependence on memorized patterns and seeming weakness at analysis. The lawsuit avoidance idea could have a lot to do with that; when you stick by the standard book, no one can hold you personally responsible if the book isn’t quite right regarding the case at hand.

Personally I see modern medicine as blessing from God. Similar to how I see modern agriculture. Essentially far less early death and no starvation

Amen.

It’s a mystery to me why people have this idea that Doctors have an incentive to prescribe pricey meds. err, I’ve dealt with a number of pharmaceutical sales representatives. They spend a lot of time and money to make that so. Or consider the response to the mouse studies that ultrasounds might be implicated in autism and that it was worth additional study.

The cost of obesity in this country is over $150 BILLION annually in increased profits. I very much found Taubes very persuasive. As far as I can tell, the push from fat to carbohydrates has driven huge decreases in health and transfers of wealth to the health care sector.

Anyway, an interesting topic.

Medical science is amazing. But it’s not in the business of keeping us healthy. It’s in the business of curing us when we get sick. Because of that, I’m skeptical of it’s value. We don’t have a health care crisis, we have a health crisis. The standard western diet high in meat and refined carbs is the culprit, encouraged by bad public policy and huge financial interests. If we were to really live the word of wisdom as it’s written, we’d be much healthier and mostly just need doctors for the treatment of injuries.

The science and technology amaze me. The way we apply our knowledge and treat patients is pathetic.

I go with both types of medicine. Some types of illnesses are helped more by alternative medicines. Acupuncture, chiropractic, even hypnosis are helpful. My illness has required a combination of treatments.

I’m ambivalent about your statistics, though. Cancer is a terrible illness (living in Zion has a point about the increase) but boy, the torture that chemo and radiation inflicts on people blows my mind. It would be a terrible choice to make.

Especially for your child. It must be so awful to watch your child suffer from the effects of chemo. I think somewhere down the road something will be discovered that reveals that treatment for the torture that it is. I know, I know, if the alternative is burying your child, it’s the better choice. But “better” is sure as hell a relative word in this circumstance.

I don’t know anybody personally who had cancer, tried alternative medicine, and survived.

I love my doctor, and my drugs. I also love the alternative practitioners I’ve had help me.

I think about Star Trek a lot and “Bones’” dismay at treatment he saw when time traveling. I think we’re still very much in the dark ages medicine-wise.

Devyn S Wrote – “however, their willingness to try crazy therapies still shocks me”

It doesn’t shock me at all. Remember, you’re talking about a group of people who believe all sorts of crazy things, like God and Jesus appearing to a 14 year old boy, gold plates translated into scriptures, miraculous healings by a heavenly power.

We are a people who believe in things for which there is no physical evidence. Some people extend that belief to all sorts of strange things.

If we were to really live the word of wisdom as it’s written, we’d be much healthier and mostly just need doctors for the treatment of injuries.

We’d also be drinking a lot more beer . . .

living in zion, your paranoia is astonishing. Sure, chemo and radiation can be awful, but there are a lot of different therapies involved in those treatments and I have seen both my mother and my wife go through chemo with mostly good results. Yes it was difficult, but much better than the alternative.

The idea that you would lose custody of your child if you decide to forego chemo or radiation treatments for them is just silly. There was one case here in Utah where that became an issue because the family fled to Idaho (not anyplace you need a passport, these are state laws we’re talking about) rather than undergo cancer treatments for their son. The subsequent litigation was won by the family, not the state. There is nowhere I know of where you are in danger of losing custody of your kids if you make even slightly reasonable decisions about their health care. The law does protect parental rights, it only gives the state the right to step in where the state can prove that the parents decisions are threatening the life of the child.

Wow, missed you too, DKL.

My wife was vaccinated, it was more recently that my MIL has started to go off the deep end. (since getting divorced and starting working for a healer)

__________

I don’t know about red wine, I would tend to believe that if a doctor is prescribing it, it wouldn’t be any different than any other prescription, and probably much less harmful than most medications. I’d do it without question, but thats me.

I was mostly just responding to the “really live the word of wisdom as it’s written” part.

For some reason I just can’t read: “[. . . ] and barley for all useful animals, and for mild drinks, as also other grain” without thinking that there a) weren’t any mild drinks made from barley known to 19th century east coasters other than beer and therefore b)a literal reading of DC 89 states that God wants Mormons to drink beer.

#50 MCQ -

Did a quick search and found this article. //www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/saving-sick-children-from-state-science/

If I sound paranoid about cancer treatment for children, it comes from personal experience. In 1999 my older brother had a terminal brain tumor. The docs did surgery and radiation, not to cure the cancer but to slow down the aggressive growth. The side effects of the radiation were devastating. We decided to end radiation. The doc disagreed and wanted to take us to court to force treatment on the basis my brother couldn’t make the decision for himself (he was developmentally delayed) and that family members were too emotionally involved. My brother was 33 years old. The only thing that saved us from a court fight was that we had just enrolled in Hospice and the Hospice lawyer reminded the hospital lawyer that a patient in hospice has a right to end treatment.
It was wrong, crazy and yeah, I’m paranoid as hell about cancer treatments. I wouldn’t wish our family experiences on anyone.
P.S. You are not a nice person today. Might want to consider doing some deep breathing for relaxation.

My MIL is always giving my wife “herbs.” Yuck. She thinks she can determine the gender of our unborn children by looking into my wife’s eyes, thinks she can tell what health problems we have by looking into our eyes, etc. etc. She spends money they don’t have on pretty much useless alternative medicines.

I’m kind of surprised no one’s mentioned Senator Hatch’s involvement with alternative medicine. That’s one of the reasons the industry is so big in Utah–as long as they’re big in Utah, Hatch will continue to defend them. Unfortunately, he’s done a great job defending them in the past.

It wasn’t this way in the beginning, but medicine has been preempted by Big Pharma and other business interests. We spend the most of any nation and are far down the list in healthiness.

Examples of medical practices often done for business reasons rather than patient benefit include the use of stents in coronary arteries where serious angina is not present, the practice of automatic prostate surgery for high PSA readings, and the spreading use of statin drugs beyond serious cardiac patients.

What is missing is preventative focus in medicine. Ever have a dentist give an earnest lecture on how to avoid dental cavities? Not likely. Or any doctor give a strong endorsement to reforming your diet? Ditto.

The best chance for Mormons is to live the Word of Wisdom’s prescriptions (a diet rich in fruits, vegetables and herbs, a little meat, and whole grains). There is a new web site dedicated to living the Word of Wisdom. wordofwisdomliving.com Check it out.

Skip

Devyn S.

Are you a rep for a drug company? Check it out, the data is readily available. A fair summary is in the Aug. 12 2007, N.Y. Times article, “World’s Best Medical Care?” Americans spend the most on health care–including drugs that are often vitally needed–but per WHO rank 37th in the world for effectiveness of health care. The problem isn’t about inventing new drugs, rather that our focus is palliative instead of preventative. The era of miracle drugs that cured infections is over; most drugs developed now treat symptoms. I spent my career as a biomedical engineer, I know a little about how products are developed. Best to you. Skip

My wide exposure to mainline Mormons suggests that Mormons in general are skeptical of Science, including medical science. And those skeptics tend to favor “miracle treatments” from totally unsupported sources. Goes together with denying evolution, global warming, and such and generally being critical of intellectuals.

Anyone who can support an opinion with dry facts is a ridiculous egghead, while if you can support your opinion with flamboyant rhetoric that ignores all evidence that it doesn’t find convenient you’re a touted as a brave champion of the truth.

Make of it what you will. (Several top-notch biologists have told me their good standing in Church is often called to question, when they defend that basic principles of evolution are well supported by all the evidence.)

P.S. I have always lived outside of the Utah Mormon beltway, which I think was the beginning audience of this post. The world in Utah is probably different than the rest of the planet.
Oh wait – we did do 18 months at BYU in married student housing (the rabbit hutches, I recall it was called) if that means anything. We tried hard not to learn anything about Church culture while serving the minimum time in Mecca required to achieve the Celestial Kingdom in the next life.

65. Velska – While there are skeptics in Mormonism around evolution, global warming, etc, I think that it is a minority of the population now (at least I hope). Evolution has been taught at BYU for many years and I believe that the post-JFS/BRM rhetoric against evolution is pretty much a bygone with maybe some hardcore conservatives still believing. Perhaps you live in Utah where you might see more of that which is a bit depressing.