Practice of medicine is pretty similar to Buddhism.
No, I am not going to bored everyone with that same lame but true story equating Dukkha, suffering to illness and the Eight Noble Path as medication and Lord Buddha, the great enlightened teacher to a doctor.
Basically, Buddhism is pretty much divided into several traditions – Vajrana, Theravada and Mahayana. But a true Buddhist, will practice following the gist of the teaching, disregarding the tradition. As all the traditions are simply the shades of the true practice.
Similarly, I do not find rejecting traditional medicine or ‘complementary’ medicine as something benevolent in the practice of medicine.
If we seek the most established joint for a cup of coffee, some other branded stuff, I think traditional medicine existed beyond the time.
If we hunger for some good food, a good cuppa, we wanted to buy something good, some branded stuff or wish to attain something guaranteed of quality, we'll go for the established joint, the established shop or kopitiam.
It is the big reason why establishment is very important in most of the advertising logo or name. Just look around, how people used ‘Est’ or ‘Since’.
Fighting against establishment, the new or upcoming ones will not survive the market slaughter by the well-established ones.
In the spirit of ‘Can’t fight them, join them’, you’ll see lots of Adedas, Nikke, Louie Vuitton or Fuma in the market, trying to steal the cheese that was meant for the established ones.
IMHO, traditional medicine came a long way, before conventional medicine came along. In actual fact, traditional medicine is the father of conventional medicine.
Most of our medications were either derivatives or substrate of some leaf, some roots, some flower or some tree bark.
Who are we kidding by rejecting traditional medicine?
Traditional medicine is much more established than western medicine.
However, traditional medicine are losing ground, mainly it doesn’t work fast enough, and it doesn’t work always (you think western medicine always work? Think again), its functions can’t be explained scientifically and more because of all those phonies out there, especially in Malaysia were using self-claimed, self professed ‘established’ traditional skills to kill time and kill their patients, instead of heal.
Traditional medicine should be practiced with the foundation of conventional medicine. That is a hallmark of a safe traditional medicine practitioner, as in how it is practiced in
The traditional practitioner cannot just keep their certificate high while having a baseline low knowledge on the general medication. It will only kill not heal.
Just imagine, someone
who prescribe steroidal herbs for someone already immunosuppressed,
who prescribe circulation enhancing herbs for someone bound for major operations
who prescribe any thing believing it will make the placenta praevia travel up to the fundus.
Therefore, in
Mind you. Even the recognized house officers from recognized medical school are having bloody difficult times in sorting out Daflon from Dafilon, omentum from subcutaneous fat and arteries from veins. Main reason why unnecessary amputation have to be done.
Brings me to another expose I heard from my friend, a bubbly chap who clearly laid out the how our dear country is producing more and more killers in the form of (yet again) half-baked nurses. Worst still, in the process, digging a big hole in the government’s pocket.
Vowing to put upgrade and supply enough nurses to Malaysian healthcare, the government are pouring, yes, pouring as in flooding money in a bid to produce lots and lots and lots of nurses.
Therefore PTPTN decided to increase their loan from RM8K to more than RM40K, or more or less.
This made majority of private colleges looking at it as good business opportunity.
Business school, offer Nursing.
IT school, offer Nursing.
Architecture school, offer Nursing.
Racing school, offer Nursing.
The best part is coaxing those fresh high school grads, who have too much money with their parents, and too little brain cells working, by telling them how highly paid nurses are in those Arabian countries, hiding the fact that they need to rot first for few years in Malaysian settings before they got enough experience to be hired somewhere else. Sometimes, they need more than experience, they need luck and also cables. To have good cables, one will need to sacrifice more.
But by the time, they enrolled themselves into the program, the private colleges already sees each of them as a gold mine, happily tapping into them every semester for gold. No money, get government loan. By the time they graduated, they are being fooled with all those serious and prestigious ceremony, and they go all frenzy and snobby till the day they realize it is time to slog it out to pay back the government.
Many don’t even pay the government loan without any repercussion, especially those being sent to European countries. Not that they are too poor to pay, they just couldn’t bother to pay. More of like, if you start paying, people will actually look down at you, laugh at you or alienate you. To them defaulting loan payment is like peer pressure kind of thing. Maybe I am just pulling your leg. Maybe I am not.
Anyway, going back to the main point.
Do not reject traditional medicine, just because all the time, you’d encounter the fake and phony.
Do reject the fake, phony and ‘certified’ medicine, no matter they are traditional or conventional medicine.
Primum non nocere.
