The explosion in health care options now available to the average North American can be daunting. But with a framework for what constitutes good medicine, bad medicine and everything in between, you should be able to dispel some of this uncertainty. To get a complete picture of both good and bad medicine, one has to look at that medicine in three dimensions. The first dimension is the quality of the therapy itself. This dimension is a number line. You could think of quality scores existing on a scale from minus-10 to plus-10. The second dimension is the approach of the clinician and how well they can deal with disease in two key regards: a holistic approach to deal with the whole body, and a reductionist approach, which focuses in on one part in isolation. This dimension can be thought of as a spectrum from holistic to reductionist and how well …