Monday, December 04, 2006

Oh ye of little faith

...myself included, of course.

Medical science. Is there such a thing? Sometimes it feels more like medical best-guess. Or medical ok-we've-tried-this-and-it-didn't-work-so-let's-try-this-and-see-what-happens.

Case 1 - my foot has been bothering me for some time. Floorball (sähly in Finnish) was the thing that did my ankle in. Doctors called it a fracture, a pull, an infection, just about everything, and gave me medicine for just about everything too.

Took a couple of years before a physio looked at it, saw that a bone was slightly out of joint and a muscle was way too tight, keeping the bone in that position. He promptly gave me physiotherapy and a set of excersises. Voila - no more pain.

Case 2 - which is the case that leads to this small muttering - our son, last weeked at the hospital, with asthma. More medication, this and that, give medicine with inhaler, not with oxygen - nono, hang on, give with oxygen and not inhaler - nono, wait, inhaler, take away that oxygen mask. Let's try him on this medicine! Yeah! Come back in a month, and we'll see how he feels.

Now, I know this is the way things are done. And that there are next to no other way of doing it - trial and error. But I just wish there was some way for me to start trusting the medical sciences again. As things now stand, with lots of other cases I won't mention here, I find myself having a bit of a hard time finding that trust.

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