It's unpopular to voice anti-science sounding sentiments about medicine but it's worth noting that there is often a disconnect between known and practiced medicine.
Optimal outcomes at the aggregate don't always translate to optimal outcomes for the individual.
This can mean that strategies like effective triage and prioritization lets people fall through the cracks of conventional medical treatment. This is especially true for both public healthcare and separately chronic issues which are often too hard to treat vs acute medicine.
Then in private medicine it can be a bit of a crapshoot of practitioners who are incentivised to upsell or recommend preferred treatments.
I think this has soured people's opinions of conventional medicine.
My own personal anecdote to offer on the subject is a friend who suffered from severe eczema and over their life and was just put on progressively higher doses of steroids until that stopped working. The last advice from the doctor was "we give up - our next recommendation is chemotherapy to shock your body. Maybe you would like to consider alternative medicine first"
They went to try traditional Chinese medicine and for the first time in their life got control of their eczema.
Given alternative medicine is a dirty word here what I'd say is missing these days is the family doctor who has excellent holistic patient history and is willing to provide a mixture of therapy and lifestyle guidance eg exercise or nutrition intervention.
Some people might claim a GP should do this but the reality is that GPs often aren't allowed to provide this kind of care due to capacity constraints or top down strategic planning.
Ironically you see the gap being bridged from the other direction with therapists increasing their scope - eg someone close to me went to an osteopath for neck issues to get diagnosed (correctly!) that the root cause was sleep apnoea
Optimal outcomes at the aggregate don't always translate to optimal outcomes for the individual.
This can mean that strategies like effective triage and prioritization lets people fall through the cracks of conventional medical treatment. This is especially true for both public healthcare and separately chronic issues which are often too hard to treat vs acute medicine.
Then in private medicine it can be a bit of a crapshoot of practitioners who are incentivised to upsell or recommend preferred treatments.
I think this has soured people's opinions of conventional medicine.
My own personal anecdote to offer on the subject is a friend who suffered from severe eczema and over their life and was just put on progressively higher doses of steroids until that stopped working. The last advice from the doctor was "we give up - our next recommendation is chemotherapy to shock your body. Maybe you would like to consider alternative medicine first"
They went to try traditional Chinese medicine and for the first time in their life got control of their eczema.
Given alternative medicine is a dirty word here what I'd say is missing these days is the family doctor who has excellent holistic patient history and is willing to provide a mixture of therapy and lifestyle guidance eg exercise or nutrition intervention.
Some people might claim a GP should do this but the reality is that GPs often aren't allowed to provide this kind of care due to capacity constraints or top down strategic planning.
Ironically you see the gap being bridged from the other direction with therapists increasing their scope - eg someone close to me went to an osteopath for neck issues to get diagnosed (correctly!) that the root cause was sleep apnoea