Hourglass, for a doctor, I think experience is a very important thing, thats why I go asking senior doctors about condition i get in my life and not entirely relate to the thing I study in books. But sometimes it gets extremes like to favor some drugs upon others, which I guess it should be correlated to scientific studies.

And about the alternative medicine, I believe it has an effect, psychological one, thats why I think studying its psychological effect and applying it to patient is a must contemporary with prescribed medicine.

Dear Dr Farah, As you know, some drugs indicated for certain diseases dont work on some patients even though they work on others, these differences in response might be gender-related or ethnic or placebo effect or some other factors or just not known yet. And if a mode of therapy worked on 90% of patients, this drug would be recommended to treat that disease even though it leaves 10% with no response.

My point is, personal experience can be biased, and god knows how many years or how many cases of a certain disease we need to treat in order to consider ourselves as doctors with expertise..... Thats why under controlled conditions the therapies can be tested with minimal bias.


I think that Evidence-Based medicine is relevant here simply because the mechanism of these modes of Alternative and Complementary Medicine are not known, and so, we can judge their efficacy by their outcomes whether in clinical trials or by systematic review of the publications about this subject.

I know that you disagree, but i urge you to consider evidence based medicine

cheers!

Dr.Samer

on the contrary, As a doctor i do believe in evidence based medicine but please don't forget that, EBM is originally formed based on different ways of collecting and analyzing data (meta analysis, case control, cohort studies,case reports, and experts opinions)
and it is clear that an individual's opinion is not as thorough as meta analysis studies (which puts the results of multiple studies together) but still to be considered .

Dr.Muhaned

if you mean favoring one drug over the other just becuase you noticed it is effective on your patients (expert opinion) while the best external evidence (meta analysis study for example )shows the opposite then I'm afraid you should follow the meta analysis results cause based on "the grading of evidence system" which assign 1++ for metanalysis (being the highest score) and assigns 4 for expert opinion (being the lowest).



the above demonsrate if we are talking as professional physicians . but when i talked about my experience of alternative medicine and migraine i was talking as patient more than as a physician, and to tell you the truth my friends as a patient I don't give a damn of what evidence based medicine says about alternative medicine treating migraine cause as far as im concerned the pain is still there making my own expert opinion so real !


regards

The British Medical Council position is against most current alternative / complementary Medicine. These work like a placebo. The GMC only concurs with Acupuncture.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/c...icle3798760.ece
http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/alternat.html

As a present or future doctors, you should be a believer in the "Scientific Method."

Anything that can not be replicated by others with the same result / outcome should be discarded.