"doctor" means teacher

[miriam_e]

I just looked online for some information for a friend who had a brain scan in an attempt to find an explanation for her terrible headaches. Apparently she has a lesion in her right basal ganglia. Now that area is a fairly large and complex part of the brain so it could have many possible effects. I was trying to learn more about it and found a site called Medcyclopedia. It had some tiny thumbnail images that looked like they might be of use, but unfortunately I would have to register in order to view the full-size images. I always find this compulsory narrowing of audience annoying, but annoyance turned to disgust when I found that in order to register I had to "prove" I was a professional by clicking the aortic lumen in the image presented, only to find that the page was so incompetently designed that it didn't work on any web browser other than Microsoft's awful and dangerous InternetExplorer, which fewer and fewer people use these days.

What is with medical groups that they are so loathe to disseminate information to the public at large? Don't they know that the word "doctor" originally meant "teacher"? Everywhere around the world there is a shortage of medical doctors. And the doctors themselves generally would like to be able to spend more time with their patients and less time on trivial things. They also bemoan the rise of nutty strains of "alternative" medicine, such as chiropracty or homeopathy, but they seem utterly opposed to disseminating the very knowledge which would drive back such superstitious beliefs.

Sometimes I think the medical profession is its own worst enemy.

Comments

Re: about chiropracty

[miriam-e.livejournal.com]

Hmm, you can't see any benefit in it?

Not in chiropracty... after all the research on the topic I've read, and also from my personal experience. I used to do a lot of gymnastics when I was younger (somersaults, working out on bars, and so on) and I had the falls that you'd expect anybody to have while doing that. Unfortunately one or more of my falls injured my back and caused me a lot of pain for many years afterward. I went to a lot of doctors, chiropractors, and osteopaths. Eventually, after years of this I realised that the net result was a big zero. The chiropractors and osteopaths would always say they could fix it, but never did. Later I found out why. The manipulations do sound and feel dramatic, but other than risking doing terrible secondary damage, they have no actual effect.

In the end, the gentle exercise of walking long distances fixed my back.

Decades later I was in my car at an intersection, waiting for the lights to change, and another car smashed into the rear of my car, giving me whiplash. Over the following days my right arm began to ache more and more and then I began to lose use of it. I'm right-handed and my right arm was weakening and becoming paralysed. All my friends told me I should see a chiropractor, but having had some experience of what a waste of money they are I went to a doctor. He immediately sent me to a neurosurgeon who through a few very simple, logical tests was able to show me exactly where the damage was, and what had happened. When I told him my friends had wanted me to go to a chiropractor he was horrified. He showed me how twisting the vertebrae at that point would have very likely severed the nerve to my arm and the paralysis would have been permanent and irrepairable. His solution was to widen the hole the nerve came out, giving it more room. The injury had caused the nerve to swell, and that swelling was strangling the nerve. In time it would have died if nothing was done. Interesting side note here. If I had taken aspirin in the early stages the injury would have healed without danger. Aspirin takes swellings down. Swellings are normally a good thing that aids healing, but in this case my body was hurting itself.

Anyway I now have my arm back, with only a tiny numb part on the edge of one of my fingers to remind me.

On the point of one's back "going out", I've asked numerous chiropractors what they mean by that, and they generally give vague references to a disc or bone moving out of alignment. However, if you look at how the backbone is constructed, what they speak of is physically impossible. Buy a spine from a butcher one day, or if someone is going to cook a chicken, have a look at its uncooked spine. The way the connective tissue holds it together, misalignment would seem to be impossible.

[oops... have to break the post... I'm blabbering too much.]