I think I used to put more faith in conventional medicine than I do now. On the other hand, I realize that a lot of the alternative types of medicine require a lot of reading to wade through the pseudo-science/money-making crap. I have many people close to me who are in the medical profession, which has allowed me to see that what they have is simply a more educated guess than the rest of the public and a little bit more information. Like all other disciplines, information used to be unavailable to the average person. Now, it is available to everyone. I'm not suggesting that anyone can practice medicine, but rather that the person suffering from an unexplained problem has considerably more motivation to ultimately get to the root of it.
After several years of becoming increasingly ill, gaining 40 pounds without explanation, losing my ability to sing, feeling sick all the time, developing acne, needing to be near a bathroom immediately after meals, being so cold that I would wake up in the middle of the night to shower, and visiting many different doctors and specialists that told me it was all in my head, that it was premature aging or wanted to treat only specific symptoms without even understanding the whole picture, my friend (who had nearly lost her husband and two kids to the disease) diagnosed me with celiac disease and after getting testing done, the diagnosis was confirmed. Although many things have improved since then and I strictly follow a gluten free diet and supplement the vitamins that celiacs tend to be deficient in, my health is still not back to normal three years later. Even after I went off gluten, my legs were contracting and expanding with fluid by about three inches per day (and that was an improvement!). I was eating carefully, had cut out other possible allergens, and all the medical establishment was offering was dieuretics which are not a safe long term fix and ultimately make the problem worse. I found a reliable doctor who had been trained as a medical doctor, but who also practiced has homeopathic medicine for 35 years. He was able to help me get my legs back to normal and also get some of the minerals that my body needed at the time back into my system. I don't think it was a 100% fix, and I also visited another naturopathic doctor, who could not help me, but it was something and I have continued to go to him, as well as to my regular doctor. I have friends suffering from serious autoimmune conditions who have gotten their lives back after working with a reliable naturopath.
Conventional medicine doesn't, at this point, have good treatments for auto-immune conditions, even though they are increasingly common. I know of three people close to me who at last found the diagnoses to very serious health conditions that were rare through internet research (Cushing's was one of them) when the health system was shrugging their problems off. The diagnosis was later confirmed by the medical system and treated accordingly. Had they not taken their health into their own hands, in the cases in question, at least two out of the three would be dead. Here, we have public health care and our province has very long waits to even be seen by a specialist. Even if that happens, if there is no cure that is evident immediately, no one ultimately feels responsible for getting to the bottom of it. You have to really advocate for your own health, and those who are not very assertive or persistent fall between the cracks. I think that conventional medicine is sometimes more inclined to look primarily at symptoms, rather than root causes, which I think can sometimes cause a lot of additional problems. At the same time, I think there are good physicians and health care workers in both conventional and alternative medicines, as well as really shoddy ones.
I will give you another example. For close to a year, my hands will suddenly turn grey later in the day, like I rubbed them in pencil lead. Immediately I become internally really cold, my veins become a greenish colour and I am exhausted and can't even stay sitting up. After many hours of sleep, my hands return to a normal colour and I warm up. I also get what appears to be sinus headaches that knock me out for a couple days at a time as well. This is interfering with my real life and makes it very hard to plan anything. The doctor I have is very helpful and has sent me for blood tests, has taken time to investigate my symptoms, and even sent me to an internist, but she really is not sure what's going on. The internist has concluded that I must be lonely and therefore depressed because I am not dating right now (despite explaining that I have more emotional support and companionship than I ever have in my adult life and I'm fine right now with not dating), as none of the tests explain the tiredness. She has no explanation for how grey hands manifest are symptomatic of depression, but is insistent that I should be on anti-depressants. Even my doctor laughed at the diagnosis. Both doctors are sure that it is not sleep apnea, even though a number of people in my family who are not overweight suffer from that. I certainly don't want sleep apnea and if testing has ruled it out as a path to go down, and testing has also ruled out thyroid and various other common causes of extreme fatigue, I need to look for other options to solve a very real problem. Out of desperation, I am willing to consider looking into other possibilities such as leaky gut, vitamin deficiencies, heavy metal poisoning, etc even though I am properly skeptical.
Certainly something is wonky and I'd like to get to the bottom of it. If someone can offer a viable explanation and if it doesn't cost thousands of dollars or is dangerous to test that explanation, why wouldn't I try it? I am skeptical about all those cleanses and detox kits and stuff about parasites and so on. However, I don't think it can hurt anyone to drink green juice, eat veggies, and try to avoid sugar. If fermented foods make some difference for gut bacteria, and gut bacteria could improve my health (which is supported by even conventional medicine), I think it doesn't hurt to give it a whirl. There certainly are a lot of chemicals in the environment that we weren't dealing with some years ago, which is contributing to all kinds of health conditions. Reducing the chemical load that you are voluntarily making your body handle, doesn't seem to pseudo-sciency to me. Obviously something was a catalyst for celiac disease starting in me. I don't know if it was the crazy amounts of Chinese sourced tuna that I ate nearly every day for several years when I lived in the north, or whether it was that I was more sensitive than other family members to the pesticides used to treat wheat, or whether it was being exposed to pesticide spraying which is very prevalent around here (and has been documented to induce cancer and birth defects in a number of people within our circle of people) or if it was something completely different, but it has made me think differently about my health than I once did and not to take it for granted.