We tend to make different demands of  medicine than we do of other commodities. Instead of focusing on how these products are made, we focus on whether and how they work, assuming that the two are unrelated. But they are related. Once while undergoing chemotherapy treatments for breast cancer, a friend was warned by her doctors to be careful not to let her urine splash on her body because the chemicals from the chemotherapy made the urine toxic to the body.  The disconnection at the heart of this warning stuns me. We not only have developed a system of medicine that assumes you can cure one part of your body while poisoning another, but we have been told to accept that disconnection as a precondition for getting well.  Read more...