I was pretty sickly as a child, and my parents lost count of the number of times we visited doctors, or the number of doctors we visited. Trouble was, we never really found a good doctor. Either they were the kind that would just not believe in telling you what was wrong – you just had to take them at their word and do what they asked you to do, or they were the kind that would prescribe the same antihistamine/antibiotic/flavour of the day for whatever complaint you brought to them. Another problem was that my folks were much in love with alternative therapies, and would willingly swallow any myth that either glorified alternative therapies or demonized modern medicine. Around the time I was entering my teens, I was diagnosed with asthma. We visited a GP who first brought my wheezing under control with a huge shot of Deriphyllin, and gave me a stack of pills for a week. Many well meaning friends then piled us with warnings against the big scam that the Doctor would try to perpetrate on us – The Inhaler. This was a piece of magic that gave asthmatics near instant relief, but it was extremely addictive, like a drug. Once hooked, you carried it with you till your death. Both my mother and I fell for this, and on our next visit to the Doctor, I flatly refused to use an inhaler. The GP didn’t bother to try and convince me – I guess he must have seen enough crackpots by then to be even bothered to try. We next visited a homeopath. Leaving aside the fact that he was a homeopath, he had this way of putting his patients at ease and instilling in them the hope that they were in capable hands, and that they would get cured. You felt better as you left his clinic. Needless to say, my asthma didn’t really get better. To the homeo’s credit, he always recommended that I visit a proper doctor if my wheezing was getting to be painful, and come back to him once things had settled down. I don’t know if he knew what he was doing, or if he really believed in homeopathy. I suffered with my asthma for about the next decade. The time came when I finally saw the light and the scales fell from my eyes. I’m glad to say that my asthma is now under control, as in I touch an inhaler maybe once in six months, and I can happily run 3KM at 10KM/Hr without sounding like a steam train’s whistle. (Okay, this was three weeks ago – I’ve since caught up with being out of shape.) I’m seriously considering tossing my inhaler into a garbage bin, but for the fact that I’m allergic to pollen and some other things.
What’s my grouse against alternative therapies, you ask? They have no side effects, you say? Check this out. Whatever’s written there holds good for any alternative therapy.
I have no idea what makes people fall for woo therapy. From my childhood experience, though, I can think of these reasons:
i) You visit a bad doctor and get bitten. You visit another doctor and unfortunately this one turns out to be bad too. Twice (or more) bitten, you develop a deep mistrust of the system, and begin to think that there’s something to all these alternative therapies after all. You fail to recognize that the problem is not with the system, but lies with its practitioners.
ii) Someone in the family, or someone you know very well is a practitioner of an alternative therapy.
iii)You come from a religious family, where logic and reason are suspended in the presence of anything “divine”. Ayurveda has “divine” origins, and hence is far superior to any man-made system of medicine designed to fleece people of money. Side note – I don’t think Ayurveda is totally bad – it probably started out the right way, but became irrelevant the moment its practitioners started treating their texts as dogma. Who knows, if someone had kept the spirit of enquiry alive, Ayurveda just might have resulted in some good
chemistry, physiology and who knows what else. But that’s just wishful thinking anyway.
There are probably more reasons – but I’m too lazy to indulge in serious thinking now, so I’ll just leave this post the way it is and work on it later. If you are interested, you can find enough reading material online – like this page, for one. So if folks have already done the thinking and the writing, why am I doing it all over again? I guess I like to think, and write – tongue in cheek ;)
Thus end my incoherent ramblings for the day. If past experience is anything to go by, I’ve just poked a sacred cow with a sharp needle. As time goes by, people with bees in their bonnets will read this post and comment with righteous indignation. I think I should be able to respond clearly and logically. Not that it will make a difference – in matters of faith, reason takes a backseat.
