Thoughts continued

So after thinking more about this book as the days have gone on I find myself becoming more and more frustrated with what Wall had to say. His entire book had great information but no "real" conclusions about pain. There are beginnings of a conclusion but its never fully developed, at least from the medical standpoint. I am still irked about him writing off holistic healing because this was something that predated medicine and it worked. I wish he could have gotten over the whole " I am a doctor" and instead looked at pain and the treatment of it from an unbiased point of view. For everyone there's a different level of effectiveness for every treatment. You would think that after all of his research he would have been able to come to some sort of understanding of this. He hints that he does, but he never verbalizes it. While I respect him for the work on the medical side in the research of pain I respect him less for not being able to research the holistic side as well. Like medicine it doesn't have an exact measurement of how well its going to work for each individual. It's not just a placebo effect. For some people they immediately feel relief from a headache moments after they take a pain killer even though the medicine will take 20 minutes to go through their system and work. Is it the pain killer that actually worked or was it the placebo effect of taking a pill that is supposed to take away the pain and discomfort. The medical side of dealing with pain is just as hazy as the holistic because no one (as far as I have seen) has been able to fully understand pain in general. So I don't think Wall should have classified holistic medicine a placebo way of healing instead he should have looked at it as an alternative to invasive medical treatments of pain.