The tricks of the quackery trade (part 4)

This series of post is quite good fun – at least for me who is writing it.  But I also hope that it is useful to those readers who are tempted to consult alternative practitioners. My intention is to stimulate people’s ability to think critically and to provide some sort of guide for patients which might help them in deciding which practitioners to avoid.

In this spirit, I now offer you the next instalment of three ‘tricks of the trade’:

NATURAL IS GOOD

Everyone working in advertising will confirm: the ‘natural label’ is a great asset for boosting sales of all sorts of things. Practitioners of alternative medicine have long appreciated this fact and exploited it to the best of their abilities. They stress the ‘naturalness’ of their treatments ad nauseam, and more often than not they use the term misleadingly.

For instance, there is nothing natural to thrust a patients spine beyond the physiological range of motion [chiropractic]; there is nothing natural in endlessly diluting and shaking remedies which may or may not have their origin in a natural substance [homeopathy]; there is nothing natural in sticking needles into the skin of patients [acupuncture].

Moreover, the notion of a benign ‘mother nature’ is naïvely misleading. Ask those who have been at sea during a storm or who have been struck by lightning.

My advice is to see through transparent marketing slogans and to tell the anyone who goes on about the ‘naturalness’ of his therapy to buzz off.

ENERGY

When one goes to a meeting of alternative practitioners, the term ‘energy’ is mentioned more often than at a board meeting of EDF. The difference is that the alternative brigade does not mean really energy when they speak of energy; they mean ‘vital force’ or one of the many related terms from other traditions.

Practitioners do prefer to use ‘energy’ because this sounds modern and impressive to many consumers. Crucially, it avoids disclosing how deeply steeped the therapists are in vitalism and vitalistic ideas. Whereas rational thinkers have discarded such concepts more than a century ago, alternative medicine advocates find it hard to do the same – if they did, there would be little else to underpin their various ‘philosophies’.

My advice is to avoid clinicians who are ‘vitalists’ because adhering to long obsolete concepts is a sure sign of dangerous backward thinking.

STIMULATING THE IMMUNE SYSTEM

‘Your immune system need stimulating!’ – how often have we heard that from practitioners of alternative medicine? By contrast, conventional clinicians are most reserved about such aims; they might try to stimulate the immune system in certain, rare circumstances. Quite often they need to achieve the opposite effect and use powerful drugs to suppress the immune system. But even when they aim at stimulating the immune system of a patient, they would not use any of the treatments alternative practitioners swear by.

How come? There are several reasons:

1. The alternative ‘immune stimulants’ do not really stimulate the immune system.
2. Stimulating the immune system is rarely a desirable therapeutic aim.
3. Stimulating a normal immune system is hardly possible.
4. For many of us, stimulating the immune system might even be a very risky business (if it were at all achievable).

My advice is to ask your practitioner precisely why he wants to stimulate your immune system. If he can give you a good reason, ask him to try stimulating his own immune system first and to show you the proof that his therapy can do such a thing.