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Credulity and Cures
- Foundations of Evidenced Based Medicine & Medical Law:
- Warnings: assertion of authority, believe what we want to believe
- Responsibility: to protect from dangerous; denial of disease, and panacea of unskilled or ignorant
- Credulity: past experiences should make us a balanced optimist/skeptic.
- "Ignorance prepares ground for new belief", its value asserted by authority (new: endocrines, hormones)...it is "hard to get bearings in these uncharted seas"
- Examples of therapeutic measures based on assertion: clitoridectomy, ovariotomy, rhinologist's turbinate removal, spine magnets, electricity, stretching of spine, urethral sounds for the cure of locomotor ataxia, trephining,crotalin (pr in rattle snakes-hemolytic, neurotoxic), prisms, cutting eye muscles.....our past should lead us to be very skeptical
- And you think compliance is bad now...can you imagine trying to get a consent??
Copyright 2002 by the University of Florida