Alternative medicine
Harriet Hall at Science-Based Medicine:
Chiropractors, homeopaths, naturopaths, acupuncturists, and other alternative medicine practitioners constantly criticize mainstream medicine for “only treating the symptoms,” while alternative medicine allegedly treats “the underlying causes” of disease.
Nope. Not true. Exactly backwards. Think about it. When you go to a doctor with a fever, does he just treat the symptom? No, he tries to figure out what’s causing the fever and if it’s pneumonia, he identifies which microbe is responsible and gives you the right drugs to treat that particular infection. If you have abdominal pain, does the doctor just give you narcotics to treat the symptom of pain? No, he tries to figure out what’s causing the pain and if he determines you have acute appendicitis he operates to remove your appendix.
I guess what they’re trying to say is that something must have been wrong in the first place to allow the disease to develop. But they don’t have any better insight into what that something might be than scientific medicine does. All they have is wild, imaginative guesses. And they all disagree with one another. The chiropractor says if your spine is in proper alignment you can’t get sick. Acupuncturists talk about the proper flow of qi through the meridians. Energy medicine practitioners talk about disturbances in energy fields. Nutrition faddists claim that people who eat right won’t get sick. None of them can produce any evidence to support those claims. No alternative medicine has been scientifically shown to prevent disease or to cure it. If it had, it would have been incorporated into conventional medicine and would no longer be “alternative.”
Are these practitioners treating the underlying cause, or are they simply applying their one chosen tool to treat everything? Chiropractors treat every patient with chiropractic adjustments. What if a doctor used one treatment for everything? You have pneumonia? Here’s some penicillin. You have a broken leg? Here’s some penicillin. You have diabetes? Here’s some penicillin. Acupuncturists only know to stick needles in people. Homeopaths only know to give out ridiculously high dilutions that amount to nothing but water. Therapeutic touch practitioners only know to smooth out the wrinkles in imaginary energy fields. They are not trying to determine any underlying cause: they are just using one treatment indiscriminately.
How do you define “cause”? …
LeisureGuy. Who are you and what is your name. You might try researching CAM and specifically, he clinical studies being done with acupuncture and chinese herbs before you start making claims such that there is no evidence to “support.” There is plenty of clinical science being done. Do you homework.
Cheers,
Don
Don
20 December 2009 at 10:03 pm
Rabid, extreme, and vilifying editorials always raise my ire (as a scientist) regardless of their position. We call Medicine an Art rather than a Science because it isn’t as cut-and-dried as Ms. Hall would have us believe. The Scientific Method is only one form of epistemology (how and what we understand as truth). It is a very good one BTW, and has led to tremendous progress and development in health care. It does however have many serious gaps, i.e. it is still a work in progress. I don’t necessarily disagree with Ms. Hall’s basic contention that evidence-based anything is preferable to superstition, but extreme positions such as hers remind me too much of the self-righteous zealotry that was in fact the very antithesis of the scientific method for hundreds of years.
Acupuncture was used in China for perhaps thousands of years, backed by anecdotal experience ( which in sufficient quantity qualifies as “evidence”). It was ridiculed in the West for hundreds of years under the Scientific cosmology, but eventually acquired due respect in specific applications once the “hard” science was done. Had Ms. Hall been in charge, I’m not sure it ever would have been looked into.
Steve
21 December 2009 at 7:21 am
I agree that some traditional (or alternative) medicine works—indeed, Big Pharma regularly tracks down and tests traditional herbal cures in search of the Next Big Thing. And the fact that I have posted something doesn’t mean that I agree with every aspect.
Still, the theoretical bases that alternative medicines cite, often based on undetectable “fields”, are laughable. An experimental approach is, I admit, an approach that I favor in most areas dealing with real-world phenomena.
With cultural phenomena, the same approach works, but gives you information about the cultural reality. Example: comedians regularly use an experimental rather than theoretical approach. They believe a joke may be funny, so they tell the joke and that experiment provides evidence on whether the joke, as told, is funny or not to the audience at hand. When a comedian does take a theoretical approach, working out the (cultural) truth of it via experiment, it can be quite interesting. I’m thinking of Steve Martin’s approach he described in his memoir Born Standing Up.
LeisureGuy
21 December 2009 at 9:12 am
“Acupuncture was used in China for perhaps thousands of years, backed by anecdotal experience ( which in sufficient quantity qualifies as “evidence”). It was ridiculed in the West for hundreds of years under the Scientific cosmology, but eventually acquired due respect in specific applications once the “hard” science was done. Had Ms. Hall been in charge, I’m not sure it ever would have been looked into.”
Acupuncture, like homeopathy and any number of other alt-meds, has been looked into. It really, really has. And in trial after trial, it has found to do no better than placebo. Which is fine — placebos are excellent.
Any claim that a given remedy is more effective than the “conventional” one is, by definition, a claim that it outperforms placebo. Neither alternative nor scientific medicine advocates can wriggle out of that.
Catchling
29 January 2010 at 3:24 pm
Speaking of looking into claims, take a look at this article on a thorough double-blind test of homeopathic medicine. Same as placebos.
LeisureGuy
29 January 2010 at 3:52 pm