Worried sick: a prescription for health in an overtreated America by Nortin M. Hadler

Author:Nortin M. Hadler [Hadler, Nortin M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ISBN-13: 9780807831878, # Publisher: University of North Carolina # Number Of Pages: 392 # Publication Date: 2008-06-02
ISBN: 9780807831878
Publisher: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, c2008.
Published: 2011-01-09T05:00:00+00:00

tioned as the primary-care practitioners of the day (and seek to do so yet again).

All sorts of potions were purveyed. The nineteenth century may have witnessed Pasteur and Joseph Lister birthing modern scientific medicine, but the birth was more of theory than practice. For the mainstream practitioners of my guild, the nineteenth century was the century of “heroic medicine.” Therapeutic zeal seemed to recognize no iatrogenic boundaries. Bleeding, purging, fever therapies — along with administering heavy metals and toxic botanical potions and unctions — were the order of the day. “Heroic medicine” was a term that grew out of the carnage on the battlefields and in the military hospitals of the Civil War. Not surprisingly, society welcomed old alternatives and invented new ones. Homeopaths claimed recovery rates in the cholera epidemic of 1849 that outstripped the track record of mainstream ministrations. This was a century before epidemiology started to contend with confounders and bias in such observations, so there must be uncertainty about such claims. Perhaps the sicker patients chose mainstream physicians, or perhaps the mainstream ministrations ushered more to their deaths. Regardless, it was sensible to seek alternatives if you or someone dear to you was il . The nineteenth-century menu of alternatives was extensive. There were schools of hydrotherapists and botanical therapists. North America’s answer to Graham’s dietary-plus approach to wel -

ness was thriving in Michigan, where Dr. John Harvey Kellogg offered hydro-therapy, colonic irrigation, purging, abdominal surgery, and clitoral stimulation along with his therapeutic corn flakes. In response to “heroic medicine”

and all the quackery, the nineteenth century birthed a religious backlash that included Christian Science and the Pentecostal movement. Metaphysics was a match for heroic medicine. By the way, Mary Baker Eddy founded Christian Science, arguing that worry could make one sick and faith could heal. Please believe me that in choosing the title of this book, I mean no obeisance to this bit of history.

Homeopathy and other therapeutic movements that challenge the tenets of mainstream medicine from within or without are termed “sectarian” by the mainstream membership. “Sectarian medicine” is a chauvinistic, if not pejorative, term. In use today, it is not meant to imply that all sectarian practitioners are cultists or even true believers. It is meant to designate the systems of health care that compete with each other and with mainstream medicine. All are capable of taking off their gloves to protect their turf. However, today they all seek licensure as certification of the specialized nature of their knowledge and skills and thereby codify a competitive advantage in that regard. They are perhaps more akin to guilds of old than to present-day unions. All compete for 198  |  “alternative” ther apies are not “complementary”

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