SaveYourself.ca • Sensible advice for aches, pains & injuries
published 12/05/06, updated 1/14/11
Modern health care consumers are faced with a hair-raising dilemma: the hard choice between medical care that is often cold and tangled in red tape,1 or the so-called “alternative” options, nearly all of which are unproven by definition, and which would have long ago been adopted by doctors if they actually worked.2 It’s no choice at all.
I am so concerned by some (not all) of what passes for health care in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) that I gave up my credentials as an Registered Massage Therapist at the beginning of 2010 and I have move on to greener pastures. I am an alt-med apostate — one of the very few.
I quit because I wasn’t proud of being an “alternative” health care professional. I quit because there is no realistic hope of redefining alternative health care as simply the “warm and friendly” alternative to big and institutionalized medicine — it’s a lovely idea, but it’s never going to happen. I quit because the anti-scientific character of alternative medicine is well-established.3
However, for the record, alternative medicine didn’t have to turn out that way.
Alternative medicine could have grown-up to be something different and better than it is. And for individual ethical professionals, alt-med still doesn’t have to be that way. Being an alternative health professional can still be mainly about better bedside manners — spending more time with people, and offering a few of the more plausible and harmless treatment options, rather than pushing a bewildering array of dubious and unproven “miracle cures” on people.
Should we keep an open mind about astrology, perpetual motion, alchemy, alien abduction and sightings of Elvis Presley? No, and I am happy to confess that my mind has closed to homeopathy in the same way.
Mike Baum, The dangers of complementary therapy, Breast Cancer Res. 2007; 9(Suppl 2): S10
People love to hate “mainstream” medicine. Why? Simple: because it’s largely institutionalized. And institutions generally suck the life out of individuals.
Like many alternative health care professionals, I was originally inspired to pursue my career by some poor care I received from doctors — or so I thought. I have since come to understand that most doctor bashing is deeply unfair, routinely rooted in patient’s fear and pain, and in ignorance of the high-stakes, no-win situations that doctor’s face every day. The training and clinical experience doctors obtain deserves respect, and — however unwise it may be — their infamous arrogance is justified in many ways. The good doctors I know are my role models.
And they would be the first to admit that health care systems are in trouble around the world. Consider the increasingly grim outlook for the National Health Service in the UK. Jonathon Tomlinson, a London GP, writes:
I believe that the corporatisation of healthcare is dehumanising. By this I mean that real, whole people living with their hopes and worries, ideas and expectations, are broken down by the process of corporatisation into biological parts not for diagnosis and treatment but so that they can be measured and converted into profits. We are far more than the sum of our biological parts; we also have relationships with our past and future, our family and friends, our work and environment, our country and our home. We are irrational and passionate as well as calculating and objective; we need kindness, affection and understanding as well as diagnoses and treatments. And healthcare is far more effective when this is taken into account.
Patients not Profits; the NHS and Corporate Healthcare, by Jonathon Tomlinson
People are frightened to go the hospital. Many people have real horror stories about hospital experiences.4 Statistics about illness and surgical damage caused by doctors and hospitals are like something from a third world country.56 Here in litigious North America, medical malpractice lawsuits are more an epidemic than any epidemic.7 Even while our economy groans under the weight of common problems like back pain, a few doctors have proven that the majority are appallingly incompetent at treating musculoskeletal conditions,8 and cannot offer nutritional advice.9 And the litany of problems with universal health insurance here in Canada, or with for-profit medical institutions in America, is overwhelming. Pharmaceutical companies are perpetrating some of the largest health care frauds in medical history.10
The roots of all this evil are an impersonal, institutionalized approach to health care, and of course the profit motive.
On the other hand, so-called “alternative” health care is dangerously anti-scientific — as a group, many CAM practitioners are actually hostile to science. This is the main reason I got out. Sometimes CAM attacks doctors and medical care for some of the right reasons (see above), but mostly for the wrong ones. CAM generally treats science as the enemy!
Naturopathic doctors in North America are trained well enough to know better,11 but still routinely sell products and services of dubious value, in league with a supplements and “natural” medicines industry that is almost as profitable and actually much more corrupt and dishonest than their “Big Pharma” counterpart.12 Homeopathic remedies in particular have been proven to be ineffective over and over again,13 and they have recently suffered serious public relations damage from exposés like the 2006 BBC story about dangerous anti-malarial substitutes.14 For the last ten years, acupuncture has failed one fair scientific test after another,15 like the recent inability of acupuncturists to treat back pain in a particularly well-designed German study16 — yet acupuncture persists as a profession as if this research never happened. Doctors of traditional Chinese medicine, now popular in the west, continue to rely far too heavily on a variety of unproven folk remedies as if they were effective simply by virtue of being popular in China for a long time.17
In the physical therapies, the profession of chiropractic remains popular but the value of the profession’s services remain controversial. I avoid criticizing chiropractors directly on this website, due to legal concerns.18 Questioning chiropractic is better left to heavyweight experts and organizations.19 Training standards for massage therapy are all over the map; even here in BC, where massage therapists are trained better (and more scientifically) than anywhere else in the world,20 my own colleagues still routinely promote scientifically questionable ideas to patients (see sidebar). And a dizzying variety of superstitious sub-disciplines like craniosacral therapy, reflexology, and reiki — fringe therapies that have failed to prove their efficacy despite many fair tests.21
In general, CAM practitioners are not the humble alternative to doctors — indeed, they generally seem to think much too highly of their abilities and suffer from healer syndrome. These practices and attitudes constitute a clear and present danger to the health of patients, and to their pocketbooks. Journalist and chronic pain patient Paula Kamen brilliantly exposes them for what they are in “Mind-Wallet Connection,” a chapter of her brilliant book, All In My Head, where she describes an tragicomic series of failed attempts to cure her nasty, chronic migraine with alternative therapies:
I was becoming turned off by what I saw as a lackadaisical attitude on the part of many healers. They had all the time in the world to follow “the mystical course of nature.” Just as no neurologist had ever admitted to me, “I don’t know,” none of them had said, “Well, you’ve given this enough of a try. You can stop these twice-weekly sixty-dollar visits.” If I didn’t stop these sessions, they would go on indefinitely, and we would grow old together.
All In My Head, by Paula Kamen, p191
Like community policing or town meetings, house calls and humane, personal, socially interactive medical care has nearly disappeared from civil society. Such qualities are more likely to be found in places we consider “primitive” or “underdeveloped” because they lack adequate facilities — yet they may well be “friendlier.” The voice of Dr. Patch Adams, the most prominent medical spokesman for a “nicer” kind of medical care,22 has been completely drowned out. The failure to transcend bureaucracy and to be more about people than machines and money is the true shame of modern medicine.
Alternative health care, therefore, should be all about spending time with patients, listening to them, being personal with them. Alternative health care should be to mainstream medicine what small-scale organic farming is to industrialized farming.
Alternative health care, therefore, should be all about spending time with patients, listening to them, being personal with them.But it isn’t. Instead, alternative health care has firmly established itself as the alternative to scientific health care. The message our industry sends out to the public is: “We’ll sell you whatever the doctors disapprove of. We’ll tell you what you want to hear. We’ll sell you ideas and potions that you’ll enjoy believing in, and we won’t spoil the experience with any boring, depressing science.”
But science is not the enemy: arrogant, impersonal, institutionalized health care is the enemy. That is what we should be the alternative to.
Science is a pretty good system for slowly but surely revealing all that is true in nature. However strange or difficult to understand, whatever actually is can sooner or later be understood as a part of the natural world — there is no such thing as “paranormal,” for, if it exists, it is normal.
Being anti-science is like being anti-honesty.
And science is not guilty by association with bad things that some people do with science.
I can appreciate the confusion, though, among alternative health care professionals and consumers alike. The “bad guys” try to use science all the time to defend ethically dubious practices. As long as tobacco companies and polluting industries continue to claim that “studies show” that they are innocent, it’s going to be hard to shake the impression that science is guilty by association. As long as technology continues to be used so disastrously to make war, it will be easy to see science and scientists as evil.
Being anti-science is like being anti-honesty.And it’s not helping that politicians now reflexively refer to “the science” without ever actually understanding it or properly referencing it. In fact, science tends to get co-opted by practically anyone who wants to seem legit for the duration of a sound bite: even the flakiest of flakes will greedily cite a scientific study that seems to support their ideas,23 only to turn around and ignore and attack science the moment it clashes with their ideology.24 Talk about a fair weather friend!
In alternative medicine, hypotheses function more as fixed beliefs, and there is no study that can invalidate them. No matter how many times a hypothesis fails, the worst that happens is a call for more research.
Dr. Peter Lipson, for ScienceBasedMedicine.org
Just because science and poor medical care often seem to be mentioned in the same breath does not mean that they are actually the same thing, or that the shame of medical care is also the shame of science. On the contrary, just as alternative health care professionals have a lot to answer for in their rejection of science, doctors are also guilty of abusing and ignoring relevant scientific evidence.25 Many doctors do not “practice what they preach.” While this is defensible — doctors are human too, and should not have to paragons of virtue in order to practice medicine — it is a neglected issue.
It will never happen, but … my prescription for alternative medicine is simply to embrace the science and embrace the client. Focus on spending time with patients discussing rational, science-based clinical options. Be more personal than most doctors. Be the alternative to institutionalized care. But also learn and promote the science of medicine!
Other interesting reading:
This treatise on critical thought is one of my all-time favourites, a book that makes ten others unnecessary, the kind of book that will change how you think forever.Most doctors are well aware that there are serious shortcomings in the medical management of most musculoskeletal problems, especially chronic pain cases. Dr. Jonathon Tomlinson, an instructor at St. Leonards Hospital in Hoxton, explains that “undergraduate training is focused on hospital orthopedics (broken bones and anything else that’s amenable to surgery) or rheumatology (nasty inflammatory diseases) which comprise a minority of the aches/pains/strains and injuries that people actually suffer from.”
Medical researchers have done many studies showing that most doctors do not understand aches and pains or heed expert recommendations. A good recent example is a paper in the Archives of Internal Medicine showing that family doctors frequently ignore guidelines for the care of low back pain — see Williams et al.
More generally, the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, and the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association, have both published papers recently showing that physicians simply do not have an adequate understanding of musculoskeletal medicine. In 2002, Freedman et al felt that “It is ... reasonable to conclude that medical school preparation in musculoskeletal medicine is inadequate.” Then again in 2005 in JBJS, Matzkin et al concluded that “training in musculoskeletal medicine is inadequate in both medical school and non-orthopaedic residency training programs.” Most recently, in 2006, Stockard et al wrote “82% of allopathic graduates ... failed to demonstrate basic competency in musculoskeletal medicine.”
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