You know, it isn't accurate to say that the peoples of the East use Western medicine if they can afford to abandon their culture's traditional medicinal practices. They use both, and see them as complimentary healing modalities, not oppositional modalities the way we have been brainwashed into viewing them in the US. In Europe, where there was once a very strong and powerful tradition of herbal medicine practiced which is the root system to today's pharmaceutical industry, is more open to complimentary healing modalities than the US.

There still is a science dedicated to developing plant based medicines, and it is called pharmacognosy.

Sledge, you are right to point out that we owe a tremendous amount of thanks to the scientific (why did you capitalize that, BTW?) medical community. I wouldn't trade it for a million massages.

But what the scientific medical community has been too dismissive of, are sound medical practices which are less invasive and sometimes take a bit longer to work on a patient, which is the case with many complimentary therapies like acupuncture.

What that all too often overlooks is the relief a patient gets, and how dramatically those therapies work to relieve pain and improve the patient's quality of life. In the very fucked up US medical establishment, if it ain't a pill, a machine, or a surgical intervention, it ain't medicine.

That is just pure bullshit. Massage therapy would do so much more to relieve pain, with no negative side effects, than narcotics, for instance. But our insurance industry is beholden to our pharmaceutical industry, so insurance pays for addictive drugs with many negative side effects to relieve pain, rather than massage therapy twice a week, which has no negative side effects, and many positive ones.

So you tell me, what's wrong with that picture?