Do you know any Witnesses who are heavily into alternative medicine? I know a few. Two anti-doctor Witnesses I am very familiar with are my mother-in-law and my used-to-be best friend's aunt. By alternative medicine I mean holistic healing, herbal treatments, etc. These people don't go to regular doctors but go to self-proclaimed specialists (I call them shamans) who tell them what foods and plants to eat that will make them all better. Medicine is evil (they will tell you).
There is this shaman, supposedly, that has a magical machine. You can be hooked up (anal probe??) to this machine and it will tell you everything, EVERYTHING that is wrong with you, whether you are showing any obvious symptoms or not. It can tell you normal things like whether your blood pressure is too high, but it can also tell you if you have any other ailments that are not visible.
My wife half believes in them, mostly due to her mothers second-hand tales of miracles. Personally, I think it's all placebo effect. The people BELIEVE that the magical ointments are working and so therefore they do. Power of suggestion. Possibly there wasn't anything wrong to begin with. There was a woman who had pancreatic cancer. Her doctor told her she had six months to live. She started going to one of the witch doctors and she lived eighteen months beyond that. See, it works! We have no way to know that if she had NOT gone to the mystical shaman whether she would have survived anyway.
My mother believes even differently. She is more on a Tom Cruise level. She pretty much believes that even the shaman's are lame and that, especially with dealing with mental problems, you can overcome all of that stuff completely with just a little bit of therapy (never mind that she has a sister that has been institutionalized for the past fifteen years, therapy be damned).
I bring this up now because, as I have said in another topic, my son is having serious behavioral/mental issues and we have appointment for him to see a child specialist. My wife has loose lips and she is telling people that he is having these problems (before any professional has even attempted to diagnosed them). So now all of these different people are trying to get my wife to try all of these different things. Nobody tells me anything because I am sure they know I don't believe in mumbo jumbo. I know that modern medicine is not perfect and that pharmaceutical companies are screwing up the bodies and minds of alot of people, but at least I can verify that the doctors that prescribe these medications have at least been to school (yay for higher education!). These other people have certificates printed from dot matrix printers in the 1980s.
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