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Larry Sarner's avatar

I was unaware of the WHO "definition", probably because I don't regard it (WHO) as having any authority—definitionally, etymologically or otherwise. I'm not surprised, though, to learn it goes on to say the term denotes what is "sometimes called Western medicine, biomedicine, evidence-based medicine, or modern medicine." Proponents of "other ways of knowing," had been desperately seeking some way of collectively distinguishing their beliefs & practices from that which accounts for the model practiced by successful medical practitioners. They finally found it, not for their collective selves (eclectics, Flexner called them), but for their competition. They realized the marketing disadvantage they would have in calling what real physicians do with the correct modifier: *scientific* medicine.

Myself, I don't believe any modifier is necessary, much less desirable. WHO notwithstanding, there is no "category of medical practice" other than scientific. There is only *medicine*. There is no other way of knowing what it really is than by science.

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Larry Sarner's avatar

The article's mention of allopathy as a label for the scientific practice of medicine is misguided. "Allopathy" is the label invented in the 19th Century by Samuel Hahnemann, creator of the homeopathy quackery, applying it to the practice of medicine contravening his own. It has nothing to do with today's medicine. Use of the label today is a false flag raised by practitioners of 'alternative medicine' or 'natural medicine', and is also a thinly disguised insult. Part of the irony of some true medical practitioners adopting the term is that by using it themselves, they are contradicting of the very point which Flexner explicitly made in his Report: that a scientific outlook in medical education & practice was antithetical to *both* homeopathy and allopathy.

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