Which would you consider more important the doctor or the medicine?

The medicine.

I say they go hand in hand. If your doctor is not up to date on the latest meds for your alignment, then the whole purpose goes down the drain.

My doctor is a little older now and sometimes I have to remind him of the meds I take.

(he also said he quit smoking cigars, but I think he is not telling the truth).

The doctor. I don’t have a clue which medicine to take for what except for what doctors tell me. Even without a specific medicine, doctors are usually pretty crafty at working out alternatives.

However they’re both interrelated, if you were to wipe one or the other off the face of the earth, it wouldn’t matter either way, you’re still screwed.

The doctor has to prescribe the medicine, so I’d say the doctor.

I’ll do the research. Give me the Meds.

Unless it requires surgery. Then give me the doc.

@worriedguy what you said!

With all of wonders of modern medicine, I’ll take a good doctor and/or nurse anyday. By good, I mean a doctor or nurse who, first and foremost, takes the time to really l-i-s-t-e-n. My Mom was in renal failure and we knew her time was limited. Even with a miracle treatment like dialysis that prolonged her life; it was her caregivers, her doctors and nurses, who really gave quality to the end of her life. Not the medicine.

In my humble opinion I say the doctor makes all the difference.
The difference between a good, compassionate, thorough doctor and one that is just so-so can mean the difference between correct diagnosis and proper treatment or not.
Without a good doctor you might not know which medicine you need.

It hard to say what with docs nowadays receiving drug kickbacks who knows what came first?

@Rarebear Aren’t you a doctor?

@chyna Yes, he is. We think he’s important around here.

I’m chiming in with another vote for the doctor being more important.

Meds.

@chyna Yes.

Your doctor can be the smartist, kindest man in the world. He can’t help you without medicines much of the time.

@tranquilsea Thanks!

Look, the point of my answer is not to be snarky, but to make a rather obscure point that the medicine are the tools. Think of the doctors 200 years ago—they were dangerous because they had an overarching sense of their importance and didn’t know squat, and they killed people. Today, doctors have tools, called medicine, and these tools are the result of years of careful scientific research. The doctors are trained to use the tools, but without medicine, doctors are nothing but hand holders.

Not that hand holders are not important, but to my knowledge holding a hand never successfully treated a pneumococcal lung infection.

The doctor.
Medication isn’t always the answer, but having an intelligent, intuitive, compassionate expert that is willing to do everything in their power to treat and/or cure whatever ails you…. that’s priceless.
If you, like most people, have ever had a shitty doctor, I can’t see how that wouldn’t be painfully clear.

@Rarebear I agree with you (it’s really quite scary what “doctors” did 200 years ago) BUT it takes a good doctor to know what medicine you really need in the more complicated cases. So I give the doctor a slight lead over the medicine.

Great doctors are few and far between, because they actually have to listen, spend more than 2 minutes in the room and be compassionate to be great.