Defunct Treatments

Almost every day former "standards of care" are disposed of because they are either useless or harmful. Let's review a few:

• Bedrest or surgery for back pain (there is now a "side-effect" called Failed Back Surgery Syndrome)
• Arthroscopic knee surgery (sham patients did better--all they got was a hole drilled in their knee)
• Hormone replacement therapy--reduced hotflashes (sometimes) caused invasive breast cancer (oops!)
• Leeches for everything
• COX-2 Inhibitors--(Celebrex and other arthritis drugs) You're 2.5-3.5 times more likely to have a heart "incident"--attack, stroke, etc.--while taking these. My joints feel better but unfortunately I'm dead!

These are just a couple off the top of my head. There are many more.

I'll be a prophet for a moment. Here are a few treatments that will soon make the mainstream as being unhelpful:

• Fluoride in toothpaste (it causes dulled mentation and is a seditive and is so toxic if your kid swallows a pea-sized dab of toothpaste you should call poison control)
• Coronary by-pass surgery (the death rates for those who have surgery and those who don't are almost identical five years down the road)
• Cholesterol-reducing drugs (we already know that reducing cholesterol causes impotence--no wonder everyone discontinues them, they feel like s**t and can't do what they want to)

Medications are created to manipulate the body's chemistry. Most of them are like driving a Monster Truck to work. It'll get you there, but it will be very inefficient and cause other problems (parking and traffic jams come to mind). That's how many medications work. They might even have the desired effect, but there will be undesired, unintended side-effects.

And remember, no doctor can predict how more than two drugs will interact. There are absolutely no studies that are this complicated. So, if you are taking more than two medications, you're a walking science project.

"The doctor of the future will give no medicine but interest his patient in the care of the human frame, in diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease."

--Thomas Edison

Read more about HRT for an example.

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