Furthermore, I know perfectly well that doctors are not infallible. My mother, for pete's sake, was under a doctor's care when she collapsed. Her weakness had been attributed to "anemia." Surprise, surprise! The "anemia" has disappeared now that the cancer is gone. In other words, I'm pretty sure my mother was misdiagnosed. Of course, my mother probably contributed to the problem by failing to mention to anyone that she was also having abdominal pain. The surgeon said she HAD to have been feeling pain for several months.

So the doctor screwed up. But what could an herbalist have done that was any better? Or a chiropractor? Or a yoga instructor?

I have no doubt that, in some cases, an herbalist, or a chiropractor, etc., can make you feel a bit better, and there's nothing wrong with that, as such. Maybe they can get your "chi" back in balance, until it gets unbalanced again, which is usually pretty soon. But they don't cure anything. And the kinds of problems they can solve are relatively trivial to begin with.

If you don't trust your doctor—and maybe you shouldn't—the solution is to find a better doctor.

Despite their many mistakes, there's nobody out there anywhere that can do what they do better. And I don't think there's any group of people anywhere that more deserve my trust.

The reason I mentioned my mother's cancer was to impress you all with the seriousness of the problems that doctors deal with, as opposed to the trivia that herbalists etc. base their claims of success on. "I was feeling a little depressed this morning, but that herbal tea perked me right up!" Well, maybe it did, but maybe coffee would have done just as well, and maybe going to bed earlier would have done even better.

Yes, doctors have little patience with minor complaints, and sometimes this offends people. Maybe doctors even sometimes deliberately offend some people, just to discourage them from taking up their time with trivia, when they'd rather be working on people who really need their help. If that's the case, I don't blame them.

In the ideal world, doctors and chiropractors etc. would operate in separate realms that didn't overlap. Then no one would say, "I prefer an acupuncturist over a doctor" just as they wouldn't say, "I prefer a carpenter over a plumber." But in the real world, a lot of people ARE confused about which one they should go to, and therefore they do make invalid comparisons.