Years ago, I went to a party at my friend Hoag’s house in Boulder, Colorado. Boulder is one of those hippie enclaves of mostly white, affluent kids who drive beaten-up BMWs.

I found myself listening to a white woman in dreadlocks who was affecting a Caribbean accent. At one point, she asked me what I did. When I told her that I was a resident in internal medicine at University of Colorado, she lost her Caribbean accent and went on to school me about how the “Western medical establishment” was nothing but a “whore to Big Pharma.”

I was rather foggy, having been awake in the ICU for the prior 36 hours, but I clearly understood that she was yelling at me for being a doctor.

Months later, I was at another Boulder gathering but this time, I was prepared. I was talking to a couple who smelled strongly of patchouli, sweat and weed. When they asked me what I did, I told them I was a practitioner of allopathy.

“Like, what’s that, dude?” one of them asked.

“It’s, like, an ancient healing art, invented 2,000 years ago by this enlightened mythic figure named Hippocrates who passed the art down, generation to generation. I’ve devoted myself to studying and practicing it for several years now,” I said.

They both nodded their approval. She gave me a solid fist in the air, then said, “Right on.”

Of course, the Western medical establishment is not without its mistakes. The current paradigm focuses strongly on taking a pill to fix something or prevent something. In medical school, we spent an entire year on pharmacology but less than a week on nutrition. We didn’t even discuss exercise. There are all sorts of large, expensive randomized trials comparing a drug like Lipitor to another statin for a marginal benefit. And yet, when it comes to diet, the data are sorely lacking.

When I was a kid, everyone cut out butter because we were told that margarine was better for your heart than butter. Years later, margarine and all other trans-fats were named among the worst things for your heart. Butter? Bacon? I don’t know of any bacon study that was done as rigorously as the statin trials.

Or how about estrogen replacement in post-menopausal women? When I was in residency, it was believed that estrogen replacement protects post-menopausal women from heart attack. I remember listening to NPR one morning on my ride to work during a snow storm. A woman was on the air slamming the “American medical establishment” for recommending estrogen for post-menopausal women even though there were no good data to support this. I was having flashbacks to that party in Boulder and became so angry at her bogus claims that I didn’t realize I was speeding, then swerving, then slamming into the curb and denting my car. About a year later, we all learned that the heresy spouted by this woman was, in fact, proven to be true: estrogen replacement therapy is bad for the heart.

Maybe that dreadlocked, angry women had a point after all. Maybe we need to expand our paradigm beyond medicine and surgery — and not just to our diet and our exercise. What about how we clean our food and our homes? Does too clean mean getting rid of the good bacteria? And what about posture and sitting in comfy chairs? Could that cause back pain? Do our toilets cause back pain?

The paradigm should change, but I’m still not getting dreadlocks.