Talk:Allopathic

Title
Why is this page titled "Allopathic" and not "Allopathy"?--Кřěĵ (ṫåɬк) 02:40, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Possibly because the wikipedia article is named "Allopathic medicine"--Token Conservative (talk) 05:50, 16 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Then it should be "Allopathic MEDICINE". Just "Allopathic" doesn't really make sense.--Кřěĵ (ṫåɬк) 00:30, 17 July 2013 (UTC)

Quote
I have never heard anyone claim that “modern medicine” has all the answers. Quite on the contrary, it is blindingly obvious that it hasn’t. The only really big advances since the 1930s have been bacterial infections and in vaccines. Also in prosthetic surgery. Most of the rest has been marginal small improvements, and palliative rather than curative. Progress in some fields has been close to zero: low back pain, the common cold and almost anything to do with the CNS. And for many neurological conditions, the diagnosis is very crude indeed, as a result of the fact that we haven#t that foggiest idea about what causes them.

Of course none of this means that herbalists and other quacks have done any better. A few billion of US taxpayers’ dollars has been spent on testing all sorts of folk medicine. So far they haven’t come up with a single one that works.--Кřěĵ (ṫåɬк) 16:55, 5 January 2018 (UTC)

Who uses the word allopathic?
Contrary to the article, anecdotally, I know a surprising number of MDs, medical students, nurses, and public health scientists who will describe what they do as allopathic medicine or health research within an allopathic framework. They use the term in the sense of the definition offered in footnote 1, which is the only definition they know, that they take at face value. The use of the term that way by the authors of the article cited in footnote 2, and accepted by JAMA editors in 2002, is one piece of evidence that my anecdotal experience may be generalized, though more evidence will be needed. Nearly all of my health science acquaintances who use allopathic sometimes to describe their work have been surprised when I tell them of term's origins as a homeopathy jargon.

More than just a jargon, it's also a fundamental cornerstone of homeopathy ideology, being the core antonym to homeopathy. Homeopathy claims to be true science that has discovered the science of all true cures, that like cures like. All other methods claiming to cure are false and unscientific in the ideology, because all are based on an "other cures like" method of one sort or another, although mostly they don't say that because they don't even see the issue. On that sense, homeopathy ideology is gnostic (based on secret knowledge shared only the insiders), apocalyptic (soon to be revealed to the world), and absolutely dualistic (like Manichean gnosticism and many other historical gnostic sects), and essentially religious.

The assumption in the article that all "alternative" medicine schools would or should seem themselves as similar just because they oppose or in some cases criticize without completely opposing empirical scientific medicine is a fallacy. An analogy: in early modern European religious wars, Protestants would unite against Roman Catholics and Roman Catholicism, and the Catholic Church opposed all forms of Protestant heresy (as they saw it), but that didn't prevent bloody wars among Protestants -- cf. the English Revolution and Civil War organized around Church of England vs. Calvinist Reformed of several flavors for a number of years, associated with other political views. Homeopaths not only saw the implication for other alternative healing approaches, but intended it.

Based on these observations, I think the current article contains significant empirical inaccuracies. In a few hours I will return to make a pretty broad edit. This comment is by way of motivating it. CCLowe (talk) 23:01, 26 October 2018 (UTC)