> If the AMA would support the right to alternate medical
 > treatment, your position would be valid.  But I believe that the
 > AMA has intervened to remove physicians from practice because of
 > "moral" grounds.  This is a problem for the medical community to
 > realize that they do not have a monopoly on knowledge, and that
 > people should have the right to treatments which do not have
 > current endor{*filter*}t.
 >
 > This does not mean that information as to the competence of the
 > provider of diagnosis and treatment should not be available.  It
 > is not now, I do not consider a diploma, etc., to be adequate
 > evidence, especially if it was obtained many years ago.

For a guy who professes to be a scientist, you're "logic" is all over the map.

Point: the medical profession's "monopoly on knowledge."  Look around you.
Watch CNN.  Pick up a newsmagazine.  Read NEJM at the library.  Watch the
Lifetime cable programming.  Ordinary people are swimming in medical
knowledge.  Dismissed.  You lose.  Point's mine.

Point: AMA supporting "alternate medical treatment."  Nobody from the AMA is
standing in the door of the chiropractors, nutritionists, colon
irrigationists, macrobioticists, baratricians, phrenologists, reflexologists
and what-have-you.  Nor does the AMA bar those practitioners from obtaining
whatever "medical knowledge" they require to perform their arts.  The AMA is
there to promote medical science and provide organizational services for its
members.  It's for the organizations formed by those practicing the
alternative care to promote such treatment.  You lose.  Point's mine.

Point: competence of the provider.  Nobody's figured out how to measure that
yet.  Governments settled on licensure decades ago.  Nobody thinks that's a
perfect system.  Medical societies, in particular the AMA and the AAFP,
pioneered continuing medical education as a requirement 25 years ago, and a
number of specialty boards require periodic re-certification.
This one should be a draw, but you lose because you didn't bring out the
information.

You are so busy doctor-bashing, you have forgotten to provide any information
on the outcomes of the alternative providers.  How are they doing, Herman?  
Have any anecdotes?

=Dick=

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