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I am a practicing allopathy physician. When one of my very young family members started worsening from pediatric U.C., I myself started looking for alternative answers and spent a good amount of money on it. I am myself frustrated that allopathy provides bandage treatments for U.C. and is not dwelling in to the root cause and prevention. It is very horrific to see a young child scared to go out of the house because of fear of bowel movements and soiling of pants. The medications beyond mesalamines are highly toxic and their long term safety questionable for young U.C. patients. The only other option is colectomy which is very hard for a child to come to terms with.

As a family member and an actively practicing allopathy physician, I feel betrayed by my own science as it is not able to offer any non toxic treatment options or root cause treatment for U.C. I went out and spent a lot of money on alternative medical treatments. I feel our allopathy sciences has been infiltrated by highly vested pharmaceutical companies who are relentlessly in pursuit of profit for their share holders with an abject disregard for human safety and an complete lack of empathy for human sufferings. Living with a member who has U.C has made me realize how helpless we are to alleviate sufferings inspite of all the advances in sciences. May be complementary medicine may have a thing or two to teach us as to look at the root cause of a disease and its root cause treatment rather than an industry driven multi-billion dollar solutions to our chronic illnesses, severely debilitating 
illnesses. 

I am also appalled by how much money can buy when it comes to research. I just heard that a cure for Fragile 'X" syndrome may be in sight. How come millions of people who suffer from U.C. cannot have such a cure ? It all boils down to money. IBD foundation is not able to compete with giant organizations like AHA, Prostate Cancer foudnations and so on. So we let millions of children with IBD suffer as there is no money to pull in for research on its safe treatments and it's prevention.

If confidence of an actively practicing allopathy physician is shaken from the allopathy sciences then how can we blame the lay man ?


From: Ronan Conroy <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2012 8:29 AM
Subject: Re: Teaching of complementary medicine to undergraduate medical students

One important aspect of complementary medicine is the amount of money that people spend on it, with generally no reimbursement either from the state or insurance. We take this as a starting point and ask the students to consider why people might spend sizeable amounts of their own money on complementary medicine. Among the themes that we discuss are the roles of the patient and professional in scientific medicine and in complementary medicine, the approach to diagnosis/case formulation, and the question of who defines the problem - the doctor (let me be the judge of that!) or the patient.

Medical students can learn a lot by looking at a highly profitable health system that runs parallel to scientific medicine, and should ask themselves what we should be doing in scientific medicine to address the shortcomings that send people off to seek complementary medicine.

r

On 2012 MFómh 18, at 22:43, Margaret MacDougall wrote:

> Dear list members
> 
> As a non-clinician, I would like to improve my understanding of current perspectives in different countries on the teaching of the principles and practise of complementary medicine to undergraduate medical students. Do perspectives vary across countries and are their instances where such teaching is taboo?

Ronán Conroy
[log in to unmask]
Associate Professor
Division of Population Health Sciences
Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland
Beaux Lane House
Dublin 2