....did you hear Rand Paul today talking about how he made sure his children got their vacs over time, instead of the intense schedule that is pushed....how many vacs is there by the time a baby is 36 months old? HHmmmmm....I'm just asking questions.... Is Rand Paul a doctor???...I don't tell engineers how to build bridges, I just cross them, I don't tell pilots how to fly planes, I just ride in them, I don't tell doctors how to practice medicine, I just trust that the medical profession has advanced beyond blood letting and amulets.
I just trust that the medical profession has advanced beyond blood letting and amulets.
Not much beyond. Just research and find everything you can where the medical industry's own publications say something to the effect that "they do not know the mechanism" by which things happen. If you start with a high-level condition or diagnosis - any one - and start drilling down into the details, invariably that's what you find.
It is also very common for the mechanisms by which medicines work to not be understood, even though the industry designs and produces them and regulators approve them. Not knowing a precise mechanism is not a barrier to market entry.
Notably, this includes anesthetics, which have been in use and researched for 150 years.
Theories of general anaesthetic action
(from the link):
General anaesthetics have been widely used in surgery since 1842 when Crawford Long for the first time administered diethyl ether to a patient and performed a painless operation. It has always been believed that general anaesthetics exert their effects (analgesia, amnesia, immobility) by modulating the activity of membrane proteins in the neuronal membrane. However, the exact location and mechanism of this action are still largely unknown although much research has been done in this area. There are a number of outdated and modern theories that attempt to explain anaesthetic action.
For the most part, damaged organs are not repaired, but simply cut out of the patient. There is promise with stem cell research, but that is steadfastly slow-walked by big healthcare working with regulators to keep it from being covered by insurance. A classic case is joint replacements. Stem cell therapy has had great success in this area, but it remains basically an expensive cash-only alternative, thus protecting operations like the knee replacement, of which about 300,000 are performed in a single year in the US. The dollar amount of those operations, of course, is well into the billions, and, since "no price is too high" where covered health insurance claims are concerned, the manufacture of the artificial joints is extremely profitable. Stryker Corporation, in fact, is right here in NJ, and I have an uncle that works for a very small company right here in NJ that machines titanium parts in that industry - it is a very profitable business. Being a very hard, tough metal, titanium is difficult to machine, and of course, the final part must be precisely dimensioned and have a consistent, quality finish (texture), since it is destined to go inside a person's body. Thus the work is very profitable, given that the primary manufacturers (the customers) can easily charge high prices for their end products.
This is not to say that profit is a bad thing, but that industry consolidation and health insurance rate increases, as well as the normal regulatory wall combine to stymy competition and aruably raise costs quite a bit more than would be necessary in an ideal business and regulatory environment. Not many people would want to disturb the status quo on such a profitable industry.