The SPECTATOR recently published an article about the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) tendency to push so-called alternative medicine (SCAM). Here are a few excerpts from it: 
World Health Organisation (WHO) is meant to implore us to ignore hearsay and folklore, and to follow the scientific evidence. So why is it now suddenly promoting the likes of herbal medicine, homeopathy and acupuncture? In a series of tweets this week, the WHO has launched a campaign to extol the virtues of what it calls ‘traditional medicine’. ‘Traditional medicine has been at the frontiers of medicine and science, laying the foundation of conventional medical texts’, it asserts. It goes on to claim that ‘around 40 per cent of approved pharmaceutical products in use today derive from natural substances’ … it then poses the question: ‘which of these have you used: “acupuncture, Ayurveda, herbal medicine, homeopathy, naturopathy, osteopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, unani medicine?”’
… That some folk medicines might sometimes appear to work – in spite of apparently having no active ingredients – is itself explained by scientific inquiry: there is a proven ‘placebo effect’ that causes people to report an improvement in their symptoms as a result of taking something that they think will make them better.
The WHO should be having nothing to do with promoting any medicine which has not been proven without rigorous trials. So why is it suddenly pushing all kinds of dubious cures? It is hard not to see the latest campaign as part of the fashionable campaign to ‘decolonise’ medicine – which means refusing to see western science as superior to belief systems that have derived from elsewhere in the world. The WHO published a podcast on this subject in May, in which a Canadian medical historian, for example, denounced the concept of ‘tropical’ medicine as a construct by colonial powers to try to promote the false idea that the Third World presented a danger to Europe. …
… the WHO has achieved a massive amount by unashamedly exporting rigorous scientific inquiry to parts of the world which it had yet to reach. It wasn’t folk medicine that eradicated smallpox; it was western medicine, and the WHO should not be apologising for that. Promoting quackery seems an odd – and potentially disastrous – direction for the organisation to take.
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Personally, I concur fully – except for the notion that the WHO started its SCAM-promotion only recently. The truth is that it has done so since many years, and since many years we have on this blog discussed this bizarre trend. In my view, it is a relfection not of the science but of the politics that inflence the WHO to a very large extend in the realm of SCAM.
8 Responses to The promotion of quackery by the WHO: an odd and potentially disastrous direction to take.
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David Gorski is also on the case:
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-world-health-organization-promotes-quackery-yet-again/
Note the past tense. Traditional medicine may have been at the frontiers of medicine and science some 200 years ago. It no longer is.
So what? Most natural substances – including the vast majority in use in traditional medicine – do not have the medicinal properties ascribed to them. IIRC, there are some initiatives under way to evaluate those traditional medicines in a scientific manner, and only very rarely are any therapeutic effects confirmed.
ALL of these have been scientifically evaluated and found to be no better than placebo. Also note that at least half of these forms of quackery are NOT ‘traditional medicine’. Even acupuncture nowadays is completely different from the way it was practised only 100 years ago.
There is a REASON why western medicine has all but abandoned traditional medicine such as bloodletting and nostrums based on e.g. animal manure(*): scientific progress showed that traditional medicine was not only useless, but often quite harmful.
*: Still widely used in ayurveda, together with highly poisonous ingredients such as mercury, lead and arsenic … And THIS is what the WHO wants to promote? The fools …
Correction:
A few of these have proven efficacy and are thus not quackery. However, TCM lists approximately 100,000 different ‘medicines’, yet only a couple of hundred have so far been found to do anything. Then again, most haven’t been researched yet, but I for one will not be holding my breath …
“It wasn’t folk medicine that eradicated smallpox; it was western medicine…”
Hmmm…
As a wise man pointed out: “There is no such thing as ‘Western medicine’ – only medicine which works and medicine that does not.”
‘Traditional medicine’ is promoted because thar’s gold in them thar ills.
And its proponents lack integrity.
Sigh squared.
And then there’s this:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041383/life-expectancy-india-all-time/
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041350/life-expectancy-china-all-time/
If traditional medicine is actually beneficial, then why was life expectancy in India and China so appallingly low until the introduction of western (OK Dr. Rawlins, read: effective) medicine?
Yep. I think I first noticed it around 2011 or so, and we at SBM have been complaining about the inclusion of quacky “traditional medicine” diagnoses in the ICD-11 ever since this inclusion was announced around 2017 or so.
An article from the NEW SCIENTIST on the same subject
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2390541-we-need-evidence-about-the-risks-and-benefits-of-alternative-medicines/
Scientific advancement has shown that traditional medicine is not only worthless, but frequently extremely hazardous; this is why western medicine has almost abandoned practices like bloodletting and nostrums based on things like animal manure.