flyingrose/alternative health

It is so easy to judge - to believe that what WE would have decided is RIGHT and what someone else did was WRONG. It is rarely that simple as in this poignant story featured on the StumbleUpon Buzz page right now.

How easily and often we accept forcing our belief systems on others' lives. Try putting yourself in any scenario and picture someone's belief system that is totally different than your own being imposed on you. You would not like it - and neither do they.

We do not KNOW for an absolute FACT so many things we THINK we know, so forcing our "truths" on others is a highly questionable action. A growing number of Americans no longer believe what the majority instantly accept regarding medicine - and in particular cancer treatments.

From the page: "Questions of withholding bad news, wiping out bad memories -- plastering over wayward cracks in our minds with chemicals -- are answered thousands of times everyday, without ever being asked. Ethics committees and experts exist in our hospitals, but what they have to say counts precious little down in the trenches, where intercoms fail and human minds treat human minds, in real time. You would think, by now, that the distinction between treatments using words (or ideas) and chemicals (or electric currents) is starting to blur. (If an hour of psychotherapy accomplishes the same thing as 20 mg of Prozac -- that is, a boost in mood and serotonin levels -- is there a difference?) But it is not. Everyone I know who deals with medicines that affect minds seems to operate with a very clear functional distinction between personhood -- the realm of virtue, vice, responsibility and creativity -- and brain chemistry. That distinction was clear in the eyes of my nurses that day. Something more important than a chemical balance in Ellen's brain had been violated -- only a little and, obviously, with benevolent intent. But it hadn't been as simple as pushing a rewind button. Something there had borne the unmistakable quality of wrong.

As mundane, as miserably human as a soccer mom "dying young" of cancer might be, I found such value and such meaning in the way Ellen clung to her consciousness, the personhood she needed to care for her family. Much of what we read about brain science in the media today would have us believe that we're nothing more, really, than very fancy machines. And surely what we're learning about the physical brain is exciting and powerful -- but thinking honestly, it remains so limited."