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Unfortunately many people's experience says otherwise.
Doctors are often too happy to prescribe medication instead of a change in diet or exercise. Too often happy to use chemistry to fix problems that are societal or political. Too happy to prop up the capitalist pharmaceutical industry that treats patients as guinea pigs. That's why many have turned to alternative medicines. Trust has been eroded in professional medicine. Too many people have had bad experiences with professional medicine.
I personally would still trust a GP over a TikToker, but I am skeptical of everything they say and still read up on it afterwards. I'm well educated and can relatively confidently do that. Mostly understanding what I'm reading. Many aren't or don't know where to go to read, so can't be confident, so they rely on their social interactions instead.
This is an institutional problem that needs fixed at the Cabinet level, and yet nothing constructive will likely be done. Some bullshit like banning nutritional advise online perhaps, which won't fix anything.
No people do alternative medicines because tiktok tells them to.
A doctors job is not to be your dietician or personal trainer. You go there to get a pill that fixes your stuff. Everybody knows whether they need better food or more exercise. You don't need a doctor to tell you that. You can ask them during checkup if there are specific changes you need, but nobody actually does that. How many times do you hear fat people who don't want to go to the doctor because he's going to tell them they need to loose weight? It is happening, but people want the pill instead.
Alternative medicine is a big scam that does a lot of advertising. To the point where the US DHS pushes it now.
I think the combo of Covid and algorithms broke peoples brain.
Edit: A solution would be to change immunity laws for social media sites. If you have an algorithm that pushes certain content to certain people, you are the publisher of that and can be held liable. This would fix so many problems.
Indigenous peoples have been using plant medicine with good results for a long time. But sometimes we need heavy lifters like pharma, and like pharma, have contraindications. Slippery elm is great for sore throat, white willow and devil's claw are analgesics and antipyretics, clean spider web can close a wound, remove cactus needles, glass splinters, metformin comes from goat's rue.
But pharmaceuticals are profitable.
People can microdose a mushroom that grows in cow dung and experience depression relief for months, or take SSRI/SNRI from a corporate entity, twice daily.
Note I'm not saying someone inexperienced should just go mucking about, they should consult a knowledgeable practitioner and a licensed professional.
Nope, you can eat mushrooms for flavor. If you want medicine and there is an active ingredient in mushrooms, you isolate it and get a specific and regulated dosage.
I assume every alternative medicine doesn't work, until it gets proven. Then it's just medicine.
Big pharma has been villainized for too long. We have eradicated diseases, saved millions of lives with vaccines and can keep people alive through stuff that would have been a death sentence only a couple years ago.
Do all meds work for everyone? Of course not. But for a significant number of people e.g. SSRIs have been a great help.
For some reason everyone thinks they have insane profits. But the manufacturing is a fraction of the cost. The real cost is in the research which has a low success rate, so a working drug needs to fund the research for many failed ones. Contrary to popular belief there is actually heavy competition in the pharma industry.
Most of the popular talking points have been pushed by people selling you alternative medicine. (See Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, Dr Oz. etc.)
Sounds about yt.
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a doctor is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_doctor
In the modern era that has most often been practiced via chemistry's interaction with biology. Or as you put it, a pill. But prescribing pills is not their job, it's just a function of it. Their job is to ensure good health and often that is best done via other means than chemistry. Chemistry is just the first port of call for many doctors because that's one of the main things they're taught and it's a simple solution to a complex problem. But not always the best solution.
A doctors job is to be your dietician or personal trainer if that's the best course of action. Obviously, not literally, they'll give advice or refer you to others. But that's the idea.
Many people do need a doctor to tell them to eat better or exercise. Nutrition is complicated. Many don't know what contains carbs, proteins, or fat. Not to mention micronutrients. And then you've got to have the time, energy, knowledge, and finances to buy and prepare this healthier food. The time and energy to exercise after working 40h a week, commuting 5-10 hours a week, performing household chores, and potentially raising children.
The simple solution of pills has had many negative effects for people, so now they're looking elsewhere. If people were happy and satisfied with their medical experiences they wouldn't listen to influencers on TikTok, but they do. And it's not because TikTok has some magical hypnotic brainrot function, people are dissatisfied and looking for alternative solutions. TikTok says it has the answers, so they give it a try.
Tbf plant medicine is also chemistry.
No, we already have a shortage of doctors. They are not trained for that and don't have the time. Doctors should do the chemistry stuff.
I wouldn't have a problem with seeing dieticians and personal trainers as part of medical infrastructure, tho.
In the same way a general doctor will tell you to go see a heart specialist, they could tell you to go see a dietician. It might make sense to even have a session with them covered by health insurance.
But the training for those jobs is a lot easier and takes a lot less time. Doctors are trained for completely different things and are way more expensive.
Edit: Also Tiktok does have a magical brainrot function. And it's feeding you stuff you agree with or respond to.
We have a shortage of doctors partially because they're often fighting fires with short term solutions. Providing reactive medicine instead of preventative. Treating symptoms instead of underlying root causes.
I'll give an example; a common ailment for women is iron deficiency. A shit side effect of losing a lot of blood once a month. To cure this, many doctors will prescribe iron tablets. Not enough iron? Take iron tablets! Seems logical enough, yeah?
The problem with iron tablets is they fuck up your stomach. They're difficult to digest, you get painful jet black shits, and never quite feel right while taking them. They also have a shit absorption rate. Only a fraction of the iron in the tablet is actually absorbed by the body. And they take weeks to bring you back to sufficient iron levels.
If instead there was a concerted effort to educate women to include spinach, varied beans and legumes, tofu, figs, dates, broccoli, pistachios, etc. Which foods are rich in iron, into their daily diet, then the amount requiring prescription iron tablets reduces significantly because they're getting iron in their diet every day.
But many aren't taught these things. They're taught if you start feeling shit, come to the doctor, we'll take a blood test and prescribe you some tablets that will take weeks to help, and make you feel like shit the whole time you're taking them.
Repeat the process again in 6-12 months when your iron levels inevitably drop again because the root cause wasn't fixed.
This is what I described earlier as a "bad experience" with professional medicine. And is part of why there's a doctor shortage, because many aren't fixing root causes but immediate symptoms instead. Creating a larger demand than there is supply of doctors.
That just sounds like you get too much iron from the pill.
But no, this is still the job of a dietician not a doctor. A GP could give you your bloodwork and send you to a dietician with that. You don't need a medical degree to be a dietician. It's simply not the same job.
(Also spinach is not considered a good iron source because of the low bioavailability of the iron in it. The best sources are mostly animals. If you are vegan it's probably a good idea to supplement, just like Omega-3)
It's crazy how some people think medicine is just "take this pill" and nothing more. I had a severe blood test phobia, so bad that I even delayed getting cancer symptoms checked for a year because I was so scared of the needles.
When I eventually got it checked and my gp said I'd need a blood test, I went into a panic attack. He prescribed me three lorazepam. One for the morning of the test, one for just before the test and one "just in case".
I didn't take them because I know I have an addictive personality.
Another GP told me to self refer to the local talk therapy. After three sessions I went from crying at photos of blood tests to being able to get two practice tests done with my therapist and then the actual test. Without getting dizzy, almost fainting or throwing up like I did as a child.
Medicine is and should always be about what's best for the patient, not "here just take a pill." Is anyone really going to say that I should have gone down the lorazepam route? Also the amount of times I've had SSRIs pushed on me when I didn't need them. Once when I was 13 because I had autism related mutism. Instead of pushing my mum to get me assessed, I wasn't even told that I could be autistic (he'd told my mum to get me tested for aspergers but she didn't tell me till I was about 26), which is a big contributing factor to me being the basket case I am today.
This is not me deriding modern medicine, just pushing back against the argument that pills should always be the answer. Long term solutions are better than relying on quick fixes.