> And it disappoints me greatly that the medical community shuns this phenomenon
The medical community is a joke as a whole. They even brush off side effects because they have never heard about them before. They are as unscientific as you can go.
Nowhere in hard science world do people act like that.
> The medical community is a joke as a whole. They even brush off side effects because they have never heard about them before. They are as unscientific as you can go.
I've had lackluster medical care before, but this is an extreme position. A lot of health professionals are dealing with life and death decisions on an hourly basis. I can understand how under those circumstances you'd be biased towards conservative and practical methods. Do what you know works; you don't want someone to lose their life, or have some horrible complication, because you think it'd be cool to try something different.
The complaint isn't about any particular treatment but rather about a lack of basic respect for patients. I once had a doctor tell me I was lying because studies show that only 10% of patients had that side effect. There are systems that are supposed to help find previously unnoticed side effects but I wonder how many doctors are actually using them when some have such strong reactions to known and not even that uncommon side effects. Of course, patients can also incorectly attribute something to a medication and doctors need to take that into account as well but repeated challenge gives a better idea. Some particularly strong effects, like that prompted the doctor's comment in my case, are rather obvious when they being shortly after starting the medication and stop shortly after the medication stops. Patients need to be ready to decline treatment if doctors aren't listening or there can be major, even deadly, results.
I have respect for doctors and their skills, but I don’t associate the guys actually running around in a hospital with hard science. They are factory workers, like programmers that produce widgets on a tight deadline. They have a metric ton of shit to handle under enormous stress.
I agree with the idea that medical doctors are not scientists, not even engineers. Yet I think it's impossible to do medicine as if it was a science: Most person is different from the next because their life events, and biology and medicine are incredibly hard.
For example we do not have models of human physiology, even if it looks something that could be computerized (there are efforts: dr Guyton's heritage, BioGears, etc).
Another thing is that we only had recently tooling to interrogate what's going on in our body: MRI and ultrasound. Yet no medical doctors (GP/family doctor) use them. At best they use blood analysis which gives an indirect knowledge. But if the doctor does not ask for the right analysis, whole health developments stay unknown until it's too late.
And many family doctors work with feeling more than with medical standardized practices: It's common that old family doctors say that they know what brings a patient as soon as they enter into their office. This is because of these "gut feelings" that we still have half of cancer cases that are discovered when they are metastasized (too late to be treated by oncologists).
Ok, I'll state the reverse opinion in the same stark way as you did: why should they? Their job is helping people who still want to live and can be helped. If someone is terminally ill and has made peace with the thought that they are going to die soon, there's nothing they can do for them anymore...
> Their job is helping people who still want to live and can be helped.
By this logic pain management is also unnecessary, because the patients won't (generally) die of pain.
It is necessary because understanding the process (1) may improve the quality of (remaining) lives of the patients, and (2) may actually help prolong lives, similar to the placebo effect.
We have made a system that has no room for seeking understanding. It needs to be fast, affordable, and without mistakes otherwise you’ll get sued, so everyone simply follows protocols.
The medical community is a joke as a whole. They even brush off side effects because they have never heard about them before. They are as unscientific as you can go.
Nowhere in hard science world do people act like that.