An Alternative Perspective on Alternative Medicine

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"We should make research on them before condemning them. "
umm, do u live in a closet? There HAS been research done. Double blind trials. These determine if a purported "medicine" actually does anything beyond the plaebo affect.
"natural" and "alternative" medicines are "medicines" that have failed these trials, or havent been submitted TO these trials. Most of these methods however HAVE been tested and FAILED.
I get so fed up of morons thinking scientists are just out to lie to us, of COURSE scientists are going to test this stuff to see if there is any real merit. That is the POINT in science. The fact is when it is tested and found to have NO use, people dont get over it and start to whine and say "oh they dont want to know"...seems YOU dont want to know as you all conveniently forger that scientists DID want to know, DID the experiments and tests, and found it USELESS.
This pisses me off so much. Get over it. Natural remedies and alternative medicine DO NOT WORK. We cant define "placebo" as "working" as it isnt actively fighting what is causing the problem. and since the placebo effect varies from person to person it definately itsnt something to move to from clinical medicine.
REAL medicine for REAL illness. theres no other option.

Kam of WA 9:26PM August 28, 2008

Penicillin works even when the patient is in a coma. Most alternative treatments work when the patient is awake and knows he's getting the treatment. No matter how impressive your anecdotal experience, the only way to tell whether something really works is to test it with high-quality scientific studies.
R. Barker Bausell explains this and more in his excellent new book, Snake Oil Science.

Harriet Hall of WA 1:00PM February 02, 2008

All over the nation, research is being done (and funded by the National Institute of Health) in any number of CAM modalities. I admit I did not read all of the responses in total, so I am hoping that this has already been noted. The National College of Natural Medicine, Helfgott Research Institute and Oregon Health and Science University all work in conjunction to pursue quantifiable evidence in studying conditions such as Alzheimer's, Multiple Sclerosis and HIV support. They study nutrition (considered CAM!!!). naturopathic medicine and classical Chinese medicine under the western medical model.
I don't mean to sound militant, but it seems that the writer of this article did not bother to do much research outside of the MD world. A jaded question will get a jaded answer. Maybe try asking a naturopathic doctor (ND) or university?
Does everyone here know that there are nationally accredited 4 year institutions that train licensed primary care doctors in CAM modalities? Those students must pass basic science boards to complete their education then pass national board exams to practice and in some states must complete residencies prior to practicing. Sound familiar? The requirements to attend one of these schools are nearly identical to MD programs. Naturopathic medicine simply honors "First do no harm," in a way that does not involve unnecessary surgery and prescription dependency.
I am not saying that MDs are wrong. If my arm falls off I want the most highly trained orthopedic surgeon to help me. I guess I wonder why most practitioners and patients of CAM can acknowledge the value of allopathic medicine (MD) but MDs think anything outside of a prescription pad is "quackery."

Kari of 4:38PM January 30, 2008

I went for alternative medicine treatments, starting last year - CAM (acupuncture & herbs) - and did not expect it to help much because no doctor could help.
I was surprised when it did. No placebo effect.
I had an increase in my energy level, improved digestion & it helped with pain (pain is the only item that insurance covers, if it covers any alt. med.). I am trying it for other things to see what happens.
I only wish that I had "discovered" it sooner! I also wish that insurance had better coverage for it. I think that doctors should suggest it to patients more often, especially when they don't know of anything else that will help.

JP of NJ 3:15PM January 29, 2008

First, to answer your question, yes, I would tell them not to use it. Why? Well, for one, you're paying someone involved in a deception for that deception. (As I said to you, earlier, there's more here than merely the doctor/patient relationship to consider.) No one can shoot invisible fire from their fingertips. 9 year-old Emily Rosa proved it and, if anyone claims they can, they're either criminals or in serious need of psychiatric help. There's no reason to encourage or facilitate it, either way - for any reason. As Panda Bear M.D. once said:
"When you are incapable of asking for proof of the existence of chakra, qi, or mystical fire flowing from the appendages of charlatans, maybe you have become a tad too open-minded. So open minded that you no longer have the conceptual tools to distinguish the right from the wrong, the good from the bad, or the reasonable from the ridiculous."
This is but one of the many "risks" that you seem unwilling to address.
What do you say to the families of the "reiki master", who must suffer his/her ever-growing cultish delusions, once they're propped up by (so-called?) medical science? When they find their lives shattered by divorce (and Steve Salerno, author of S.H.A.M.: How The Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless, found an exact relationship between the rise of New Age/CAM with the divorce rate) what do you say? "Too bad, I didn't mean to help this along, but Mrs. Johnson, in Room 103, had that pain again"?
And, in case you think I'm exaggerating, or dealing with topics (divorce, etc.) outside your range of study, Dr. Graham Sharpe and Dr. R.W. Donnell have, both, called for an attack on what's being called "Quackademic Medicine" - bringing the issue of societal breakdown right into the medical arena. And for what? Because too many doctors lack the courage to admit they, too, are gullible to the entreaties, and medical/spiritual blackmail, of whack jobs who never cared for an education - or the medical profession - to begin with?
You say you've followed NCCAM's development. Did you see this?:
http://www.
quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/Hearing/gorski2.html
How do you explain it?
The old saying is "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" but Avery My Man, for people like me, you guys are making this particular downward spiral into a ride on a Slip-And-Slide.
But, I guess, such as I don't matter because my mental well-being - or retreating sense of comfort and safety around so-called "science" and "medicine" - will never be included in your assessment of "risk", now will it? No, I gather it's only when you have no more authority, as an authority, that something is likely to 'click' that you've let us all down.

The Crack Emcee of CA 5:10PM January 26, 2008

You have every right to expect that when I'm wrong I'll say so. I was overly glib in suggesting that flight theory is analogous to the topic under discussion. I was recalling a discussion in the aeronautics community a few years ago that made its way to NPR, the New York Times, and other public conduits about alleged misconceptions in longstanding popular explanations of flight. (It also surfaced in an answer in The Straight Dope in July 2005--http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mairplanesfly.html.) But my statement was simplistic and sweeping. I should have cited another example, perhaps the bacterial basis of many cases of ulcers. Mea culpa.
I do understand I'm held to a high standard. I should be.
Now let's see if I can bushhog a path out of the underbrush that has piled up.
I am not credulous concerning CAM. I've been subscribing to (and reading) the Skeptical Inquirer for more than 20 years. Two shelves of my office are devoted to books like Bausell's and Robert Parks's. I've read them. I've followed NCCAM from its modest bee-pollen-fueled beginnings.
I've also read every reply to my two blogposts on CAM.
1. If you conclude that I uncritically accept CAM therapies and explanations and endorse their use, that's wrong. Go back and reread the story, my two posts, and my responses.
2. An obligation all reporters face is to keep personal views personal. My views concerning CAM are irrelevant.
3. It was the fundamental clash that got me hooked--our most respected medical bastions were offering, and by extension implicitly endorsing, therapies with little or no explanatory basis and thin or no evidence of efficacy by conventional standards.
4. A phenomenology story has to explore the forces driving the phenomenon. Follow the money. But the infusion of funds also freed up individuals with genuine curiosity and personal convictions to investigate CAM. Their voices are an essential part of such a story. So are the voices of patients. No patient in the story had abandoned conventional medicine. Every one was receiving standard care as well.
5. I hope the story and the explanatory boxes and sidebars were evenhanded but complete, maybe even provoke some to read further.
6. Clinical research is not the same as clinical practice. Research protocols should meet high standards, trials should be conducted in accordance with accepted guidelines, and results should be described fully, honestly, and dispassionately, and should be reviewed by disinterested parties with relevant expertise. Rarely does a CAM trial conform. This should be noted, and was in the story.
In clinical practice, the object is to heal or relieve the symptoms of real patients who come with real complaints. I have stated more than once in these posts and replies that if a CAM therapy represents minimal or no risk, if it is used for relief and not as a cure, and if it is not used instead of conventional therapies unless those have been exhausted, why should a patient with a history of chronic pain or who is going into or coming out of surgery not use it? Because it is woo-woo medicine?
I have yet to read a reply to a question I've posed several times: Would you tell your father or wife or best friend that they shouldn't use reiki or acupuncture or reflexology to try to relieve the pain from bone cancer or an osteoarthritic hip after they've gone through the usual regimen that western medicine can offer, because there's no scientific basis and in fact defies everything known about the body? Orac, what do you tell your patients? In one of my early replies, I quoted a physician who is nationally respected for his work and research into patient-centered care. He sees no reason to discourage patients with chronic pain, for example, from resorting to CAM.
I have always been a fan of thoughtful engagement and appreciate the strong views of those like Orac, whose own blog (Respectful Insolence) you'll see listed among my favorites, along with Science Based Medicine and other blogsites that provoke visitors to consider and reconsider their views. A blog carnival might be fun, with many bloggers in one place to hash out...whatever.
Unfortunately, the Internet does not encourage careful reading and reflection, and does encourage talking past one another. I think some of that is reflected in these posts. Let's have real dialogue. Not that long posts like this one make it easy....

Avery of DC 11:16AM January 26, 2008

Mr. Comarow,
I am not trying to flame you, and have taken great pains not to insult you, but you seem to be, deliberately, missing or ignoring my point:
This is no academic exercise to those of us who must suffer as the collateral damage of this New Age fad that you - a quality control agent - seem to want to leave open-ended, though you admit there's nothing credible to back it up, but anecdotes and "feelings". You haven't said one thing to indicate you take anything anyone else says seriously, when the facts (which, considering your job, we thought you'd be concerned with) are all on our side. Mr. Comarow, you are wrong.
For me to see this nonsense presented as though there's little to no risk, when I'm telling you, clearly, what those larger risks are and they're huge (and have more than enough links, from around the world, to back it up) while being joined by the likes of James Randi, and some of the other most distinguished and knowledgeable medical and scientific voices on the web, many of whom have studied this topic, from all sides, for years - all telling you you're wrong and the issue seems outside of your scope of understanding - is deeply troubling.
We trust you, Mr. Comarow, don't you understand that? We expect you to return that trust with acknowledging when you're wrong - that's what fair brokers do - and on this, man, you've really blown it. There's more going on here, by a long shot, than you're acknowledging in your coverage or your posts.
The least you could do is address that.

The Crack Emcee of CA 10:36PM January 25, 2008

Avery - Some of your readers have, indeed, started to boil over.
I could easily be one of them, but I'll try to keep the lid on.
Perhaps the reason it frustrates and angers some of us to see a credulous acceptance given to CAM is that we take the question of its efficacy (or lack of it) very seriously indeed. Take homeopathy (please). Would it be surprising if a substance retained a therapeutic effect even after it had been diluted until not one molecule of the active ingredient remained? It would be more than surprising; it would overturn most of what we think we know about physics and chemistry. Now, that could happen -- but it is not very likely. Some really convincing evidence would have to be presented, and instead we have hundreds of studies with negative results. In most of these cases, the jury is in. Homeopathy, therapeutic prayer, healing touch ... have all been studied, and found to work as well as placebos. And your comment was ... what was that again?
<blockquote>
[If] we lack an understanding of or explanation for how something works (as was the case for decades for how an airplane could stay airborne), ...
</blockquote>
Avery, I just wanted to cry when I read that one. You managed to get the aeronautical history wrong in a false analogy that evinced a complete misunderstanding of our medical knowledge. It's a trifecta of error. It doesn't help anyone understand the topic at hand. It's ...
Well, OK, I guess I boiled over after all.

Jim Easter of CO 5:57PM January 25, 2008

I am sorry about your mother-in-law, who was certainly real and loved. I'm not sure what point you're making about your wife--that she's susceptible to dubious notions because of messages she absorbs from mainstream media? And that these messages tell her she can walk through walls and cure cancer with her hands?
At any rate, reread my post. The words you quoted are from Barker Bausell's book, not from me. I read his book, interviewed Bausell, and returned to it in yesterday's post because of its endorsement by two commenters, and to make the point that Bausell isn't nearly as hard on CAM or those who use it as some of the posters here are. I could quote other parts of the book to the same effect. Has he drunk the Kool-Aid, too?

Avery of DC 8:18AM January 25, 2008

Sure, that's why my mother-in-law is dead, but, I guess, she's "hardly anyone" to some people. Or how about Corretta Scott King? She died in Mexico searching out an "alternative treatment" for cancer; was she "hardly anyone", Mr. Comarow?
And how many "hardly anyone's" are we talking about, to support a multi-billion dollar industry, Mr. Comarow? Enough for the killer quacks, operating in Vegas, to crow they can make it the alternative therapy capital of the country maybe? That's a lot of money for "hardly anyone" to be doing it. Enough for CAM to be in many hospitals in the country - and in the newspapers, promoted on PBS, etc. - while I'm trying to convince my wife, who's not "stupid", that she can't walk through walls or cure cancer with her hands?
Mr. Comarow, I'd say there are millions of them, and they're all "someone" to their loved ones, wouldn't you?

The Crack Emcee of CA 3:25AM January 25, 2008