homeopathy
On January 27, 1945, the concentration camp in Auschwitz was liberated. By May of the same year, around 20 similar camps had been discovered. What they revealed is so shocking that it is difficult to put it in words.
Today, on ‘HOCOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY’, I quote (shortened and slightly modified) from articles I published many years ago (references can be found in the originals) to remind us of the unspeakable atrocities that occurred during the Nazi period and of the crucial role the German medical profession played in them.
The Nazi’s euthanasia programme, also known as “Action T4″, started in specialized medicinal departments in 1939. Initially, it was aimed at children suffering from “idiocy, Down’s syndrome, hydrocephalus and other abnormalities”. By the end of 1939, the programme was extended to adults “unworthy of living.” We estimate that, when it was stopped, more than 70,000 patients had been killed.
Action T4 (named after its address: Tiergarten Strasse 4) was the Berlin headquarters of the euthanasia programme. It was run by approximately 50 physicians who, amongst other activities, sent questionnaires to (mostly psychiatric) hospitals urging them to return lists of patients for euthanasia. The victims were transported to specialized centers where they were gassed or poisoned. Action T4 was thus responsible for medically supervised, large-scale murder. Its true significance, however, lies elsewhere. Action T4 turned out to be nothing less than a “pilot project” for the extinction of millions of prisoners of the concentration camps.
The T4 units had developed the technology for killing on an industrial scale. It was only with this know-how that the total extinction of all Jews of the Reich could be planned. This truly monstrous task required medical expertise.
Almost without exception, those physicians who had worked for T4 went on to take charge of what the Nazis called the ‘Final Solution’. While action T4 had killed thousands, its offspring would murder millions under the trained instructions of Nazi doctors.
The medical profession’s role in these crimes was critical and essential. German physicians had been involved at all levels and stages. They had created and embraced the pseudo-science of race hygiene. They were instrumental in developing it further into applied racism. They had generated the know-how of mass extinction. Finally, they also performed outrageously cruel and criminal experiments under the guise of scientific inquiry [see below]. German doctors had thus betrayed all the ideals medicine had previously stood for, and had become involved in criminal activities unprecedented in the history of medicine (full details and references on all of this are provided in my article, see link above).
Alternative medicine
It is well-documented that alternative medicine was strongly supported by the Nazis. The general belief is that this had nothing to do with the sickening atrocities of this period. I believe that this assumption is not entirely correct. In 2001, I published an article which reviews the this subject; I take the liberty of borrowing from it here.
Based on a general movement in favour of all things natural, a powerful trend towards natural ways of healing had developed in the 19(th)century. By 1930, this had led to a situation in Germany where roughly as many lay-practitioners of alternative medicine as conventional doctors were in practice.This had led to considerable tensions between the two camps. To re-unify German medicine under the banner of ‘Neue Deutsche Heilkunde’ (New German Medicine), Nazi officials eventually decided to create the profession of the ‘Heilpraktiker‘ (healing practitioner). Heilpraktiker were not allowed to train students and their profession was thus meant to become extinct within one generation; Goebbels spoke of having created the cradle and the grave of the Heilpraktiker. However, after 1945, this decision was challenged in the courts and eventually over-turned – and this is why Heilpraktiker are still thriving today.
The ‘flag ship’ of the ‘Neue Deutsche Heilkunde’ was the ‘Rudolf Hess Krankenhaus‘ in Dresden (which was re-named into Gerhard Wagner Krankenhaus after Hess’ flight to the UK). It represented a full integration of alternative and orthodox medicine.
‘Research’
An example of systematic research into alternative medicine is the Nazi government’s project to validate homoeopathy. The data of this massive research programme are now lost (some speculate that homeopaths made them disappear) but, according to an eye-witness report, its results were entirely negative (full details and references on alt med in 3rd Reich are in the article cited above).
There is,of course, plenty of literature on the subject of Nazi ‘research’ (actually, it was pseudo-research) and the unspeakable crimes it entailed. By contrast, there is almost no published evidence that these activities included in any way alternative medicine, and the general opinion seems to be that there are no connections whatsoever. I fear that this notion might be erroneous.
As far as I can make out, no systematic study of the subject has so far been published, but I found several hints and indications that the criminal experiments of Nazi doctors also involved alternative medicine (the sources are provided in my articles cited above or in the links provided below). Here are but a few leads:
Dr Wagner, the chief medical officer of the Nazis was a dedicated and most active proponent of alternative medicine.
Doctors in the alternative “Rudolf Hess Krankenhaus” [see above] experimented on speeding up the recovery of wounded soldiers, on curing syphilis with fasting, and on various other projects to help the war effort.
The Dachau concentration camp housed the largest plantation of medicinal herbs in Germany.
Dr Madaus (founder of the still existing company for natural medicines by the same name) experimented on the sterilisation of humans with herbal and homeopathic remedies, a project that was deemed of great importance for controlling the predicted population growth in the East of the expanding Reich.
Dr Grawitz infected Dachau prisoners with various pathogens to test the effectiveness of homeopathic remedies.
Schuessler salts were also tested on concentration camp inmates.
So, why bring all of this up today? Is it not time that we let grass grow over these most disturbing events? I think not! For many years, I actively researched this area (you can find many of my articles on Medline) because I am convinced that the unprecedented horrors of Nazi medicine need to be told and re-told – not just on HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL DAY, but continually. This, I hope, will minimize the risk of such incredible abuses ever happening again.
As I am drafting this post, I am in a plane flying back from Finland. The in-flight meal reminded me of the fact that no food is so delicious that it cannot be spoilt by the addition of too many capers. In turn, this made me think about the paper I happened to be reading at the time, and I arrived at the following theory: no trial design is so rigorous that it cannot to be turned into something utterly nonsensical by the addition of a few amateur researchers.
The paper I was reading when this idea occurred to me was a randomised, triple-blind, placebo-controlled cross-over trial of homeopathy. Sounds rigorous and top quality? Yes, but wait!
Essentially, the authors recruited 86 volunteers who all claimed to be suffering from “mental fatigue” and treated them with Kali-Phos 6X or placebo for one week (X-potencies signify dilution steps of 1: 10, and 6X therefore means that the salt had been diluted 1: 1000000 ). Subsequently, the volunteers were crossed-over to receive the other treatment for one week.
The results failed to show that the homeopathic medication had any effect (not even homeopaths can be surprised about this!). The authors concluded that Kali-Phos was not effective but cautioned that, because of the possibility of a type-2-error, they might have missed an effect which, in truth, does exist.
In my view, this article provides an almost classic example of how time, money and other resources can be wasted in a pretence of conducting reasonable research. As we all know, clinical trials usually are for testing hypotheses. But what is the hypothesis tested here?
According to the authors, the aim was to “assess the effectiveness of Kali-Phos 6X for attention problems associated with mental fatigue”. In other words, their hyposesis was that this remedy is effective for treating the symptom of mental fatigue. This notion, I would claim, is not a scientific hypothesis, it is a foolish conjecture!
Arguably any hypothesis about the effectiveness of a highly diluted homeopathic remedy is mere wishful thinking. But, if there were at least some promissing data, some might conclude that a trial was justified. By way of justification for the RCT in question, the authors inform us that one previous trial had suggested an effect; however, this study did not employ just Kali-Phos but a combined homeopathic preparation which contained Kalium-Phos as one of several components. Thus the authors’ “hypothesis” does not even amount to a hunch, not even to a slight incling! To me, it is less than a shot in the dark fired by blind optimists – nobody should be surprised that the bullet failed to hit anything.
It could even be that the investigators themselves dimly realised that something is amiss with the basis of their study; this might be the reason why they called it an “exploratory trial”. But an exploratory study is one whithout a hypothesis, and the trial in question does have a hyposis of sorts – only that it is rubbish. And what exactly did the authos meant to explore anyway?
That self-reported mental fatigue in healthy volunteers is a condition that can be mediatised such that it merits treatment?
That the test they used for quantifying its severity is adequate?
That a homeopathic remedy with virtually no active ingredient generates outcomes which are different from placebo?
That Hahnemann’s teaching of homeopathy was nonsense and can thus be discarded (he would have sharply condemned the approach of treating all volunteers with the same remedy, as it contradicts many of his concepts)?
That funding bodies can be fooled to pay for even the most ridiculous trial?
That ethics-committees might pass applications which are pure nonsense and which are thus unethical?
A scientific hypothesis should be more than a vague hunch; at its simplest, it aims to explain an observation or phenomenon, and it ought to have certain features which many alt med researchers seem to have never heard of. If they test nonsense, the result can only be nonsense.
The issue of conducting research that does not make much sense is far from trivial, particularly as so much (I would say most) of alt med research is of such or even worst calibre (if you do not believe me, please go on Medline and see for yourself how many of the recent articles in the category “complementary alternative medicine” truly contribute to knowledge worth knowing). It would be easy therefore to cite more hypothesis-free trials of homeopathy.
One recent example from Germany will have to suffice: in this trial, the only justification for conducting a full-blown RCT was that the manufacturer of the remedy allegedly knew of a few unpublished case-reports which suggested the treatment to work – and, of course, the results of the RCT eventually showed that it didn’t. Anyone with a background in science might have predicied that outcome – which is why such trials are so deplorably wastefull.
Research-funds are increasingly scarce, and they must not be spent on nonsensical projects! The money and time should be invested more fruitfully elsewhere. Participants of clinical trials give their cooperation willingly; but if they learn that their efforts have been wasted unnecessarily, they might think twice next time they are asked. Thus nonsensical research may have knock-on effects with far-reaching consequences.
Being a researcher is at least as serious a profession as most other occupations; perhaps we should stop allowing total amateurs wasting money while playing at being professioal. If someone driving a car does something seriously wrong, we take away his licence; why is there not a similar mechanism for inadequate researchers, funders, ethics-committees which prevents them doing further damage?
At the very minimum, we should critically evaluate the hypothesis that the applicants for research-funds propose to test. Had someone done this properly in relatiom to the two above-named studies, we would have saved about £150,000 per trial (my estimate). But as it stands, the authors will probably claim that they have produced fascinating findings which urgently need further investigation – and we (normally you and I) will have to spend three times the above-named amount (again, my estimate) to finance a “definitive” trial. Nonsense, I am afraid, tends to beget more nonsense.
Since homeopathy was invented by Samuel Hahnemann about 200 years ago, a steadily growing group of critics have raised their voices more and more loudly. Usually they come from doctors or scientists and only rarely from the legal profession.
Yet, there are exceptions: an Australian barrister and professor of law has published an analysis of “a series of criminal, civil, disciplinary and coronial decisions from difference countries in relation to homeopathic medicine where outcomes have been tragic”. He concludes that “there is an urgent need for reflection and response within the health sector generally, consumer protection authorities, and legal policy-makers about the steps that should be taken to provide community protection from dangerous homeopathic practice”.
He also questions whether homeopathy can ever be registered alongside other health care professionals:
“Until such time as homoeopathy can scientifically justify its fundamental tenets,… it cannot be said that its claims for therapeutic efficacy can be justifiable. This leaves the profession not just exposed to criticisms,… but potentially open to consumer protection actions directed toward whether its representations are false, misleading and deceptive, to civil litigation when its promises have not been fulfilled, and especially when persons have died, and to criminal actions in respect of the financial advantage that is obtained by its practitioners from their representations.
The distressing cases referred to here which led to avoidable deaths and the multiple accusations leveled against homoeopathy require of the profession at least a formal repudiation of the practitioners concerned… In addition, they demand an unequivocal response that homoeopathy will discipline its own in a robust and open way. If the profession is to acquire any scientific credibility, which is difficult to conceive of, the deaths to which homoeopathy has contributed…also require that homoeopathy actively generate a defensible research basis that justifies its claims to efficacy of outcome for its patients. It is only then that the claims of the medical establishment that homoeopathy is a dangerous and too often a lethal form of quackery will be able to be contested rationally. In the meantime, it is timely to consider further the status that homoeopathy has within the general and health care communities and whether that status can be scientifically, ethically or legally justified”.
I believe this legal view to be highly significant. The persistent criticism from skeptics, concerned scientists and doctors has rarely been translated into decisions about health care provision. Homeopaths tended to respond to our criticism by producing anecdotes, unconvincing or cherry-picked data or by producing outright lies, for instance in relation to the “Swiss government’s report” on homeopathy.
In this context, it is worth noting that, in some countries, homeopaths who have no medical qualifications have been accused to practice medicine without a licence. The case of Dana Ullman in the US is probably the most spectecular such incident; this is how one pro-homeopathy site describes it:
Dana is perhaps the person who has done the most for homeopathy since his court case in that he pursues the evangelism of homeopathy through the NCH and his mail order company… He prescribed homeopathic medicine and was arrested for practicing medicine without a license. But he won an important settlement in 1977 in the Oakland Municipal Court in which the court allowed his practice under two stipulations:
- that he did not diagnose or treat disease and that he refers to medical doctors for the diagnosis and treatment of disease;
- that he makes contracts with his patients that clearly define his role as a non-medical homeopathic practitioner and the patient’s role in seeking his care.
But such cases are not the only occasions for lawyers to look at homeopathy. Recently there has been a class action against the Boiron, the world’s largest manufacturer of homeopathic preparations. It was alleged that Boiron made bogus claims for one of its remedies, and there was a settlement worth millions of dollars. Similar cases are likely to follow, e.g.:
- Nelsons Homeopathy (Rescue Remedy, Bach Original Flower Remedies, Pure & Clear, Arnileve, H+Care)
- CVS Homeopathic Products (Flu Relief, Cold Relief, Cold Remedy, Ear Pain Relief)
- Nature’s Innovation (Naturasil Skin Tags, Bed Bug Patrol, Naturasil Scabies)
- Boericke & Tafel Cold/Flu
- Homeolab USA (Kids Relief Cough & Cold)
In June 2003, a British High Court Judge ordered two mothers to ensure that their daughters are appropriately vaccinated. The ruling concerned two separate cases brought by fathers who wanted their daughters immunized despite opposition by the girls’ unwed mothers
The fact that, in the UK and other countries, homeopathic placebos are still being sold as “vaccines” for the prevention of serious, life-threatening infections is, in my view nothing short of a scandal. The fact that a leading figure at Ainsworth actively misleads the public about these products is an outrage. It is high time therefore that the legal profession looks seriously at the full range of issues related to homeopathy with a view of stopping the dangerous nonsense.
Vaccinations are unquestionably amongst the biggest achievements in the history of medicine. They have prevented billions of diseases and saved millions of lives. Despite all this, there has been an irritatingly vocal movement protesting against immunizations and thus jeopardising the progress made. Kata summarized the notions and tactics of these activists and identified the following ‘common anti-vaccination tropes‘ from searching relevant sites on the internet:
1 I am not anti-vaccine, I am pro-safe vaccine.
2 Vaccines are toxic.
3 Vaccines should be 100% safe.
4 You cannot prove that vaccines are safe.
5 Vaccines did not save us.
6 Vaccines are not natural.
7 I am an expert in my own child.
8 Galileo was persecuted too.
9 Science has been wrong before.
10 So many people simply cannot be wrong.
11 You must be in the pocket of BIG PHARMA.
12 I do not believe that the problems after vaccination occur coincidentally.
And what has this to do with alternative medicine, you may well ask?
In my experience, many of the arguments resonate with those of alternative medicine enthusiasts. Moreover, there is a mountain of evidence to show that many practitioners of alternative medicine are an established and important part of the anti-vax movement; in particular, homeopaths, chiropractors, naturopaths and practitioners of anthroposophic medicine are implicated.
The literature on this topic is vast, so I am spoilt for choice in providing an example. The one that I have selected is by Kate Birch, a mother who apparently found homeopathy so effective for her children that she decided to become a homeopath. Her book “Vaccine Free. Prevention & treatment of infectious contagious disease with homeopathy” provides details about the “homeopathic prevention and treatment” of the following diseases:
Rabies
Tetanus
Polio
Diphtheria
Whooping cough
Mumps
Scarlet fever
Streptococcus A
Roseola
Rocky Mountain spotted fever
Measles
German measles
Chickenpox
Smallpox
Anthrax
Plague
Haemophilus influencae
Otitis media
Influenza
Mononucleosis
Pneumonia
Tuberculosis
Conjunctivitis
Herpes simplex type 1 and 2
Genital warts
Gonorrhoea
Syphilis
AIDS/HIV
Hepatitis A, B, and C
Yellow fewer
Dengue fever
Malaria
Typhoid
Typhus
Cholera
While copying this list from her book, I became so angry that I was about to write something that I might later regret. It is therefore better to end this post abruptly. I leave it to my readers to comment.
In my last post, we discussed the “A+B versus B” trial design as a tool to produce false positive results. This method is currently very popular in alternative medicine, yet it is by no means the only approach that can mislead us. Today, let’s look at other popular options with a view of protecting us against trialists who naively or willfully might fool us.
The crucial flaw of the “A+B versus B” design is that it fails to account for non-specific effects. If the patients in the experimental group experience better outcomes than the control group, this difference could well be due to effects that are unrelated to the experimental treatment. There are, of course, several further ways to ignore non-specific effects in clinical research. The simplest option is to include no control group at all. Homeopaths, for instance, are very proud of studies which show that ~70% of their patients experience benefit after taking their remedies. This type of result tends to impress journalists, politicians and other people who fail to realise that such a result might be due to a host of factors, e.g. the placebo-effect, the natural history of the disease, regression towards the mean or treatments which patients self-administered while taking the homeopathic remedies. It is therefore misleading to make causal inferences from such data.
Another easy method to generate false positive results is to omit blinding. The purpose of blinding the patient, the therapist and the evaluator of the outcomes in clinical trials is to make sure that expectation is not the cause of or contributor to the outcome. They say that expectation can move mountains; this might be an exaggeration, but it can certainly influence the result of a clinical trial. Patients who hope for a cure regularly do get better even if the therapy they receive is useless, and therapists as well as evaluators of the outcomes tend to view the results through rose-tinted spectacles, if they have preconceived ideas about the experimental treatment. Similarly, the parents of a child or the owners of an animal can transfer their expectations, and this is one of several reasons why it is incorrect to claim that children and animals are immune to placebo-effects.
Failure to randomise is another source of bias which can make an ineffective therapy look like an effective one when tested in a clinical trial. If we allow patients or trialists to select or choose which patients receive the experimental and which get the control-treatment, it is likely that the two groups differ in a number of variables. Some of these variables might, in turn, impact on the outcome. If, for instance, doctors allocate their patients to the experimental and control groups, they might select those who will respond to the former and those who don’t to the latter. This may not happen with malicious intent but through intuition or instinct: responsible health care professionals want those patients who, in their experience, have the best chances to benefit from a given treatment to receive that treatment. Only randomisation can, when done properly, make sure we are comparing comparable groups of patients, and non-randomisation is likely to produce misleading findings.
While these options for producing false positives are all too obvious, the next possibility is slightly more intriguing. It refers to studies which do not test whether an experimental treatment is superior to another one (often called superiority trials), but to investigations attempting to assess whether it is equivalent to a therapy that is generally accepted to be effective. The idea is that, if both treatments produce the same or similarly positive results, both must be effective. For instance, such a study might compare the effects of acupuncture to a common pain-killer. Such trials are aptly called non-superiority or equivalence trials, and they offer a wide range of possibilities for misleading us. If, for example, such a trial has not enough patients, it might show no difference where, in fact, there is one. Let’s consider a deliberately silly example: someone comes up with the idea to compare antibiotics to acupuncture as treatments of bacterial pneumonia in elderly patients. The researchers recruit 10 patients for each group, and the results reveal that, in one group, 2 patients died, while, in the other, the number was 3. The statistical tests show that the difference of just one patient is not statistically significant, and the authors therefore conclude that acupuncture is just as good for bacterial infections as antibiotics.
Even trickier is the option to under-dose the treatment given to the control group in an equivalence trial. In our hypothetical example, the investigators might subsequently recruit hundreds of patients in an attempt to overcome the criticism of their first study; they then decide to administer a sub-therapeutic dose of the antibiotic in the control group. The results would then apparently confirm the researchers’ initial finding, namely that acupuncture is as good as the antibiotic for pneumonia. Acupuncturists might then claim that their treatment has been proven in a very large randomised clinical trial to be effective for treating this condition, and people who do not happen to know the correct dose of the antibiotic could easily be fooled into believing them.
Obviously, the results would be more impressive, if the control group in an equivalence trial received a therapy which is not just ineffective but actually harmful. In such a scenario, the most useless or even slightly detrimental treatment would appear to be effective simply because it is equivalent to or less harmful than the comparator.
A variation of this theme is the plethora of controlled clinical trials which compare one unproven therapy to another unproven treatment. Perdicatbly, the results indicate that there is no difference in the clinical outcome experienced by the patients in the two groups. Enthusiastic researchers then tend to conclude that this proves both treatments to be equally effective.
Another option for creating misleadingly positive findings is to cherry-pick the results. Most trails have many outcome measures; for instance, a study of acupuncture for pain-control might quantify pain in half a dozen different ways, it might also measure the length of the treatment until pain has subsided, the amount of medication the patients took in addition to receiving acupuncture, the days off work because of pain, the partner’s impression of the patient’s health status, the quality of life of the patient, the frequency of sleep being disrupted by pain etc. If the researchers then evaluate all the results, they are likely to find that one or two of them have changed in the direction they wanted. This can well be a chance finding: with the typical statistical tests, one in 20 outcome measures would produce a significant result purely by chance. In order to mislead us, the researchers only need to “forget” about all the negative results and focus their publication on the ones which by chance have come out as they had hoped.
One fail-proof method for misleading the public is to draw conclusions which are not supported by the data. Imagine you have generated squarely negative data with a trial of homeopathy. As an enthusiast of homeopathy, you are far from happy with your own findings; in addition you might have a sponsor who puts pressure on you. What can you do? The solution is simple: you only need to highlight at least one positive message in the published article. In the case of homeopathy, you could, for instance, make a major issue about the fact that the treatment was remarkably safe and cheap: not a single patient died, most were very pleased with the treatment which was not even very expensive.
And finally, there is always the possibility of overt cheating. Researchers are only human and are thus not immune to temptation. They may have conflicts of interest or may know that positive results are much easier to publish than negative ones. Certainly they want to publish their work – “publish or perish”! So, faced with disappointing results of a study, they might decide to prettify them or even invent new ones which are more pleasing to them, their peers, or their sponsors.
Am I claiming that this sort of thing only happens in alternative medicine? No! Obviously, the way to minimise the risk of such misconduct is to train researchers properly and make sure they are able to think critically. Am I suggesting that investigators of alternative medicine are often not well-trained and almost always uncritical? Yes.
Guest post by Louise Lubetkin
A few months ago The Economist ran one of its Where Do You Stand? polls asking readers whether alternative medicine should be taught in medical schools:
In Britain and Australia, horrified scientists are fighting hard against the teaching of alternative therapies in publicly funded universities and against their provision in mainstream medical care. They have had most success in Britain. Some universities have been shamed into ending alternative courses. The number of homeopathic hospitals in Britain is dwindling. In 2005 the Lancet, a leading medical journal, declared “the end of homeopathy”. In 2010 a parliamentary science committee advised that “the government should not endorse the use of placebo treatments including homeopathy.” So, should alternative medicine be treated on a par with the traditional sort and taught in medical schools?
It may surprise you to discover that more than two thirds of the almost 43,000 respondents were of the opinion that yes, it should.
Given that the use of alternative therapies is now so widespread, a plausible case can be made for giving medical students a comprehensive overview of the field as part of their training. But that’s not at all what the poll asked. Here again is how it was worded:
So, should alternative medicine be treated on a par with the traditional sort and taught in medical schools? (emphasis added)
That such a hefty majority of those who responded – and Economist readers are generally affluent and well-educated – came out firmly in favour not just of the teaching of alternative medicine but explicitly of parity between it and standard medicine, is both a reflection of the seemingly unstoppable popularity of alternative medicine and also, in a wider sense, of just how respectable it has become to be indifferent to, or even overtly hostile towards science.
It is ironic that since its very first issue in 1843 The Economist has proudly displayed on its contents page a mission statement declaring that the magazine is engaged in “a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.”
It would seem that a significant sample of its poll-answering readership has a somewhat distorted vision of the struggle between intelligence and ignorance. In this postmodern worldview truth is relative: science is simply one version of reality; anti-science is another – and the two carry equal weight.
The very term “alternative medicine” – I use that expression with the greatest reluctance – is itself an outgrowth of this phenomenon, implying as it does that there are two valid, indeed interchangeable, choices in the sphere of medicine, a mainstream version and a parallel and equally effective alternative approach. That the term “alternative medicine” has now so seamlessly entered our language is a measure of how pervasive this form of relativism has become.
In fact, alternative medicine and mainstream medicine are absolutely not equivalent, nor are they by any means interchangeable, and to speak about them the way one might when debating whether to take the bus or the subway to work – both will get you there reliably – constitutes an assault on truth.
How did alternative medicine, so very little of which has ever been conclusively shown to be of even marginal benefit, achieve this astounding degree of acceptance?
Certainly the pervasive and deeply unhealthy influence of the pharmaceutical industry over the practice of medicine has done much to erode public confidence in the integrity of the medical profession. Alternative medicine has nimbly stepped into the breach, successfully casting itself as an Everyman’s egalitarian version of medicine with a gentle-sounding therapeutic philosophy based not on pharmaceuticals with their inevitable side effects, but on helping the body to heal itself with the assistance of “natural” and freely available remedies.
This image of alternative medicine as a humble David bravely facing down the medico-pharmaceutical establishment’s bullying Goliath does not, however, stand up well to scrutiny. Alternative medicine is without question a hugely lucrative enterprise. Moreover, unlike the pharmaceutical industry or mainstream medicine, it is almost entirely unregulated.
According to the US National Institutes of Health, in 2007 Americans spent almost $40 billion out of their own pockets (i.e., not reimbursed by health insurance) on alternative medicine, almost $12 billion of which was spent on an estimated 350 million visits to various practitioners (chiropractors, naturopaths, massage therapists, etc.) The remaining $28 billion was spent on non-vitamin “natural” products for self-care such as fish oils, plant extracts, glucosamine and chondroitin, etc. And that’s not all: on top of this, sales of vitamin and nutritional supplements have been estimated to constitute a further $30 billion annually.
And then, of course, there’s the awkward fact of its almost total lack of effectiveness.
Look at it this way: illness is the loneliest and most isolating of all journeys. In that bleak landscape, scientifically validated medicine is not just the best compass and the most reliable map; it’s also the truest friend any of us can have.
So, should alternative medicine be treated on a par with the traditional sort and taught in medical schools?
Not on your life.
