Can we keep this thread on track, create a new thread if necessary.
Done. I find the complete abandonment of mainstream medicine to be pretty scary. I had a very bad case of pneumonia (Legionnaires' Disease, in fact) some years back, and I would have certainly died without a lot of drugs a month in the ICU on a ventilator. Dr. Steve from Grouppe Kurosawa tried to cure a less virulent form of pneumonia with the natural approach, and it killed him. Steve Jobs had an extremely treatable cancer that he tried to cure naturally. Everyone knows how that turned out.
Mainstream medicine is good for things that are lethal in the very short term- trauma, stroke, MI, bad infections, etc.
It's not really that I have abandoned MSM. I simply, over the years, found MSM to be inept, fraudulent, and ineffective. I have seen too many people put their faith in MSM only to live low quality lives and die prematurally as a result.
Our decision to not carry health care insurance is simply a cost/benefit decision since we don't use MSM nor would we for a health problem. We would use MSM for trauma or an emergency (because they have the facilities and skill sets) and may use them for diagnosis purposes. I suppose that if we learned that they held the ONLY cure, we would use them, but under our control.
Personal experiences are interesting, but cannot be reliably used to prove a case for MSM or for alternative therapies. Just because one alternative therapy fails does not mean others may not have worked. The Steve Jobs case is interesting, but only proves that he made the wrong chices in both MSM and alternative therapies. There were no really good choices for MSM to cure his cancer but there were other good choices available from alternative therapies that could have been successful.
MSM has been successful in having all protocols for cancer treatment except their poison, burn and cut methods made illegal and criminal in virtually all states, and they are rarely successful. How open minded is that?
My interest in health care and nutrition and my skepticism of MSM began in my early twenties, early 1960s, when a brother of a friend had a physical including chest xrays and they found 3 spots on one lung. They wanted to take his lung out right away. A second opinion confirmed.
He went to a naturopath for a complete physical who examed him for about 4 hours without xrays, did not know about the 3 spots on the lung, and informed him that he had 4 spots on his lung. Short story is that he was put on a Gerson type program (this was before Gerson) of only fresh organic fruit juices for several weeks, then added some veggie juices, followed by some solid fruit then some solid veggies, al organic, all fresh and uncooked. No beverages except distilled water, no alcohol, coffee, tea, nada.
Six months later, his cancers were gone, completely, confirmed by a full set of chest xrays by the original (astounded) physician. Thus began my interest in nutrition and alternative methods.
The MRSA problems are a product of MSM and they have few tools to successfully deal with it. Alternative Medicine, AM, has tools to deal with MRSA quite successfully. Yet MSM will not adopt the AM tools simply because they are AM and not MSM. They would rather see you die and then shrug their shoulders than use an AM protocol that could be successful. That's how much control Big Pharma has over MSM and the USG/FDA.
I agree that in an emergency, MSM is hard to beat in getting past the immediate emergency. After that, they basically treat symptoms and not the cause(s).
In the end, we all have to take responsibility for our own health care decisions and live, or not, with the results. We have simply chosen to stay with nutrition and so-called alternative methods, which have been around much longer than MSM.