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Allopathic Medicine

In just 50 Years, since World War II, medical research continued to emphasize the physical body and development of drugs to influence physical function. Better understanding of electrolyte balances, protein structure, and more recently gene functioning has changed the practice of medicine in the U.S. By the mid 1960s three of the most commonly prescribed classes of drugs (antibiotics, tranquilizers, and birth control/hormone drugs) were all post-war discoveries. The fourth most common drug class (analgesics), mostly aspirin, was the only medication discovered pre-war that is still in regular use today.
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For all this “science” leading to drug discoveries, very little is actually understood about how the body responds to most medications. For example, aspirin has been in use for 60 years for pain, swelling, fever, and allergies—yet, how aspirin does any of this is still unknown. Our faith in curative medicine is really not warranted given the limited understanding we have of the human body. We are now learning that many seemingly miraculous drugs have detrimental side effects after long-term use, and we may do more harm than good by emphasizing attempts at “cure” rather than engaging in less glamorous preventive approaches. This driving the move towards “evidence-based medicine” today, where we are finally looking at outcomes in relation to treatment costs.

In contrast, much is understood about how the mind is affected when it believes in the potential for cure. In many cases of illness, a placebo is just as effective as a drug for “curing” illness, with no risk of side effects.
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Medicine oriented towards a “cure” is called the allopathic school. The ancient approach, still used in many non-western societies, stressing achieving “well-being” is referred to as the naturalistic school. The allopathic method has benefited from the above-described remarkable scientific success that brought medicine from distain (remember those barber poles wrapped in bloody bandages) to a highly respected, and profit making, profession in just a few decades. It also benefits from our world view that disease is evil and “strikes” us down, or that we “catch” germs; thus, a medical approach that emphasizes an attack on disease is inherently attractive to us. We even talk about our “arsenal” of drugs used to combat scourges such as polio, for which one is protected with a “shot.”

Allopathic medicine views germs and viruses as the basic cause of disease. We forget the role of the mind, and our social environment as both cause and source of treatment in disease–and pain management. We do this at our peril. The approach has been so overused that we now have increasing drug-resistant strains of bacteria.

Its interesting that recent studies suggest the rise in asthma is related to our obsessive need for cleanliness in raising a child. Or that “transplants” of fecal material may need to be reintroduced to an overly sanitized bowel thanks to antibiotics. We forget the millions of years we survived living with bacteria, rather than avoiding it. Furthermore, there is something wrong (with using only an allopathic approach) when we have by far the most expensive health care system in the world, but the WHO rates us at 33rd in life expectancy out of 193 countries in 2014, and 28th in infant mortality! We have the best disease care system in the world (also the most expensive), but we also have one of the worst “health” care, or prevention, systems of any country in the world.

Read on for a description of Biological Medicine in the next section.