Socratic Questions

Questions for Clarification:

1. What is alternative medicine?
2. What are the various forms of alternative medicine?
3. What are the various forms of alternative medicine?
4. What is the difference between alternative medicine?
5. What is the difference between alternative medicine,especially TCM and conventional medicine?
6. What are the merits of TCM?
7. How well trained are practitioners of TCM?
8. How does TCM work?
9. Labels of boxes of alternative medicine say "natural". Does "natural" equal "safe"?
Many herbal therapies and diet supplements can act like drugs in your body. Can cause various side effects.
10. How "natural" is "natural"?

Questions that Probe Assumptions
1. Can conventional bio-medicines (antibiotics, surgery, chemotherapy) solve all health problems?
2. Is TCM more effective, more economical, less invasive and less harmful than conventional medicine?
3. Does it mean that TCM, that has been proven over centuries, is necessarily good?
4. Is TCM able to reduce the number of prescription drugs?
5. Is TCM really cheaper?

Questions that Probe Reasons and Evidence
1. Are there potentially dangerous interactions of TCM with prescription drugs and over the counter medicine?
2. How can you determine whether statements made about TCM are true? Is there objective evidence that TCM is effective? Based on personal recounts and anecdotal evidence?
3. What is the quality of the evidence offered?
4. Is TCM just giving explanations rather than evidence? Many accounts on how magnets can improve flow of 'chi'. These are just suggestioins how something can work but crucially nothing has yet been shown to work at all.

Questions about Viewpoints and Perspectives
1. Is health defined as just an absence of disease? Does health involve more than just the physical body?
2. Do people want to be treated as a person and not as a diagnosis?
3. Is there a right kind of TCM?
4. Should a sick person see a doctor or a TCM practitioner?

Questions that Probe Implications and Consequences
1. Based on what we know, is TCM safe?
2. How much of TCM contradicts known facts?

Questions that Probe Questions
1. If TCM is so safe, why do some insurance companies not cover TCM treatments?
2. If the Western doctors consider all other forms of non-western medicine as alternative medicine? Would it not be the same if all non-western medical practitioners consider western medicine as alternative medicine?

Done by: Nicolette