Anti traditional Medicine

Today i woke up early and went to Gaya Street. Gaya Sreet is a place somewhere in Kota Kinabalu and every sunday, a big 'tamu' (). It was nice to be there in sunday morning, you could buy most of the thing that you want from cloth, to local craft, to fruits, cakes and everything. You can also buy pets such as cats, hamster or dogs. Cat is quite expensive. The cheapest one cost rm360 (pure breed siamest cat).

During my visit there, i also found a lot of traditional medicine sold by different stall and almost all claimed that their product is the cure of everything. There is one stall promoting a bottle of dark fluid to me and claimed that the fluid can lower your blood pressure and cure many other disease. When asked about how it could do such thing, the girl promoter told that the fluid will cause increase in inside body temperature and this suppose to bring benefit to you, or is it?

Lot of people attentively listening to the explanation. On what basis that thing could lower blood pressure and cure disease? Did they investigate it in the lab? I guess looking from the bottle, it is only a recycled bottle, nothing special about it. No FDA or maybe KKM approval. But still, people would listen to it.

Try to count in our country, how many people belief traditional medicine, and how many people belief modern medicine. I guess, more people would belief traditional medicine. In my experience, a lot of people i've met, most of them is do not trust modern medicine.

Why this happen? Mainly because education. Do you realize how hard you would explain the mechanism of beta blocker to reduce blood pressure? A medical school lecture would take one hour to describe it and many medical student do not understand anything at all after the lecture. Not until they revise it, read it a couple more times before they get it.

Compare to traditional medicine, it is always simple. Explanation like " this water will increase your body temperature and make you sweat, and all the disease will come out from your body", is so simple for everyone to understand. No need one hour to make a normal person nod their head and could not agree more.

However, simple explanation does not reflect the benefit or the harm of a medication. What makes modern medicine unpopular is, they always have side effect compare to traditional medicine. Do you ever heard a traditional medicine have a major side effect that can make you die? Never even though they do. But modern medicine, you will always found at the back of the bottle or whatever, regarding the side effect and contraindication.

I am not a person who are totally anti with traditional medicine. I would be fair. But traditional medicine supposed to be the last resort for everything. But more and more people are going to traditional medicine first before going to hospital. And when this happen, they always in the late stage and who would take the blame, those people on modern medicine site (doctors, nurse, and the whole hospital).

Hippocrates II is the father of medicine. If this greek man does not exist in this world, we would suffer today. Medicine created by him making us survive until today. Make us feel safe in combating trillions of bacteria and virus that share the same earth with us.

If you look back to those early day where medicine is created, do you think that hippocrates suddenly have an idea and make a medication out of nowhere. No. basically, medicine exist since long time before hippocrates was born. What he do is so simple, he argue regarding disease cause by God punishment and bad spirit that was believed by people before him. Even his grandfather hippocrates I use this this kind of medicine which today are known as traditional medicine. Hippocrates divide religion and spiritual belief from medicine. Since that day, medicine was born. That is the basic.

So if we look at the traditional medicine nowadays, it is actually the remnant of early medicine that is used by people before hippocrates was born. I guess traditional medicine will bring you nowhere. Trust me.

No matter how many times i say this, most people will always keep their fixed belief regarding spiritual thing such as ghost, semangat, and demons.

i have read a book written by a modern muslim scholar earlier this year saying that what is mean by "perkara ghaib"in Koran is actually describing about heaven and hell and world after death. it also reflect the unknown thing that is really exist around us such as genetic technology and medicine ( as you all know only 10% of medical knowledge is understandable until today). So this is what is meant by perkara ghaib. However, muslim would take a more simple route, believing that perkara ghaib is demons, spirit, and anything similar to it. We will get nowhere. Nowhere with this fixed belief.