The last rites for alternative medicine?

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The last rites for alternative medicine? By Damian

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 26/04/2008

Few experiences are more disorientating than the erosion of faith. I

have seen it many times in my encounters with religious believers: the

fixed smile contradicted by a flicker of doubt in the eyes; the

desperate appeal to half-remembered scriptures. And then the

confession: " I've been doing some... questioning. "

Recently, I've heard these words many times. Troubled believers, their

tongues loosened by a few glasses of Chablis, admit to what Catholics

used to call " doubts " .

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Interestingly, many of them are women. The faith in question is the

system of belief built around Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

Women have always been attracted to alternative remedies. Now that

faith is crumbling.

People still fill their bathroom cabinets with herbal cold remedies

and nod respectfully at the words " rich in antioxidants " . But, like

Mediterranean peasants who still make the sign of the cross but have

lost all confidence in the Church, growing numbers no longer subscribe

to the doctrines of alternative medicine.

These are difficult times for CAM. For the past 15 years, a

multi-billion pound industry has fed off the claims of media

nutritionists, barefoot doctors, Native American shamans and homeopaths.

Suddenly, it finds itself threatened by the economic downturn: forced

to choose between pricey detox courses and mortgage payments,

customers have decided to put up with their toxins.

But CAM's real problem is not shortage of money; it is shortage of

proof. The information technology brilliantly exploited by unorthodox

therapies is now being harnessed to spread the inconvenient truth that

most of them don't work.

Sceptics in the blogosphere have assembled a global daisy-chain of

links exposing the falsehoods of alternative practitioners.

The BBC, which used to be strongly biased in favour of CAM, had these

headlines on its website recently: " University professor criticises

guides on alternative medicine backed by Prince " ;

" Complementary therapy hampers IVF " ; " Concern over HIV homeopathy role " .

When did the tide begin to turn? I reckon the consumers of CAM got the

shock of their lives when the case against MMR - in which they had

invested so heavily, not to say hysterically - collapsed.

Dr Wakefield's theory that the injection triggered autism tied

together a whole bundle of anxieties: about " Big Pharma " , synthetic

drugs, a blinkered medical establishment, lying politicians and

autism, one of the least understood but most widely misdiagnosed child

disorders of our age. Plus, Dr Wakefield's campaign made such a good

story. His claims felt right.

But they were wrong, it turned out - completely unsupported by

large-scale studies. They were, however, supported by the nutritionist

high priests of CAM such as Holford, who carried on lobbying

for Wakefield even after the latter had been accused of serious

professional misconduct by the General Medical Council.

The media nutritionists have also contributed to the erosion of faith

in CAM. For years, they had the lucrative field to themselves. No

breakfast television sofa was complete without a " food doctor " making

wild claims for berries and herbs through a rictus grin.

The most familiar was Gillian Mc, a bossy ish nutritionist

who called herself " Dr Mc " . And she might have got away with it

if it wasn't for that pesky kid, Dr Ben Goldacre, youthful author of

the " Bad Science " blog, who discovered that her doctorate came from a

correspondence college.

A website called Holfordwatch then started looking at the CV of

Holford, who was recently made a professor of nutrition by

Teesside University, despite the fact that his only academic

qualification is a 30-year-old BSc in psychology.

Growing scepticism about alternative medicine has emboldened opponents

of homeopathy. This 200-year-old quackery is available on the NHS -

but that may change, as financial pressures mount, and as

" respectable " British homeopaths continue to turn a blind eye to the

prescription of lethal homeopathic Aids treatment by their maverick

colleagues.

This month saw the publication of Trick or Treatment? Alternative

Medicine on Trial, co-authored by Edzard Ernst, Britain's first

professor of complementary medicine. He found that Britain spends £500

million a year on unproved or disproved therapies.

Compared to that figure, even Scientology is value for money.

No one is saying that orthodox medicine is a complete body of

knowledge, that Big Pharma is not capable of gross ethical lapses, or

that strange or traditional treatments do not sometimes work. But we

should welcome the fact that healthy scepticism is finally being

extended to CAM.

Instead of requests to share their wisdom, alternative practitioners

are being asked to produce double-blind randomised tests to support

their claims. They try to shrug off the demands - but, if you look

closely, you can see their ayurvedic auras vanishing into thin air.

Damian is the author of 'Counterknowledge: How we surrendered

to conspiracy theories, quack medicine, bogus science and fake

history' (Atlantic Books).

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/04/26/do2606.xml

Keep taking the alternative medicine

Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 11/02/2008

Tim Lott reviews Counterknowledge by Damian and Suckers: How

Alternative Medicine Made Fools of Us All by Rose Shapiro

The premise of Counterknowledge is familiar. The 'public domain' - the

domain of reason - is under threat from an array of conspiracy

theorists, religious fanatics, deluded postmodern academics and

quasi-medical quacks.

The phenomenon is underpinned by the dynamics of turbo-capitalism,

happy to promote the fraudulent along with the authentic, and from the

untrammelled democracy of fools whose vast and expanding constituency

is the internet.

The premise is persuasive, but it is also shooting fish in a barrel.

Yes, the rise of Islam threatens the rule of reason and flirts with

Holocaust denial. Yes, most alternative medicines are tosh. Yes,

pseudo-histories such as The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and 1421:

The Year China Discovered America are unreliable and misleading. One

can applaud the spotlight being thrown on these frauds once again. But

it's not exactly front-page news.

The gullible, like the poor, are always with us.

With Counterknowledge, Damian attempts to move the argument

beyond the marshalling of well-established facts by pointing out that

the level of mass delusion is now rising to critical levels.

He suggests that the commitment to factual truth that once anchored

mainstream news organisations is being eroded by fierce competition

from the Blogosphere. He likewise worries that CAM - Complementary and

Alternative Medicine - is finding its way on to university curricula

and, increasingly, is being publicly funded through the NHS.

Meanwhile, in the universities, postmodernism, with its implicit

assertion that one person's truth is as valid as another's, and its

sacrifice of properly established evidence in the face of pressure

from racial, sexual and minority pressure groups, has led to the

mass-production of Higher-Ed magical thinking.

All these are fair points. But may be panicking

unnecessarily. He struggles, for instance, to demonstrate that CAM is

actually dangerous. He points to the great MMR vaccination scare as an

example - which in fact had little or nothing to do with CAM.

Similarly, he worries about the popularity of 9/11 conspiracy theories

peddled by internet hit films such as Loose Change. But no mainstream

news channels give any credence to those theories whatsoever.

uncovers one or two minor universities that teach CAM as if it were

scientific medicine. Absurd, yes - but rare.

When he attacks pseudo-science he finds himself grouping Intelligent

Design theories with Creationist Theorists and Darwin deniers. He

admits, for instance, that he is unable to understand the arguments of

Behe, the professor of biochemical sciences at Lehigh

University, Pennsylvania. Behe suggests that systems of irreducible

complexity inhabit a cell which cannot be explained by evolution.

, unable to counter Behe's arguments, 'takes the word of the

scientific community (who condemn Behe) on trust'. Which is fine,

except that you have to bear in mind that scientists can also be prone

to taboos.

Plate tectonics and quantum mechanics were both fiercely opposed by

the majority of scientists and were considered pretty loopy. The same

was true of global warming (global cooling was the great fear of most

Earth scientists in the 1970s).The Big Bang theory was reviled by many

cosmologists for the same reason ID is hated - because it implied some

kind of theological origin to the universe. Perhaps is right

in asserting that faith in scientists is the best we can do.

What is the appeal of counterknowledge?

It simply seems to make us feel safer. Such a random, threatening, act

as 9/11 - the logic goes - could not have taken place as reported,

because it implies a world out of control. The idea that Bush -

tangible, visible and a well-established 'enemy' - organised it is

less threatening than the idea that it was a distant, invisible ragbag

of terrorists.

In an increasingly democratic world, people believe what they want to

believe and then seek out 'experts' who will support their beliefs.

Our uncertainties are assuaged, our fear of chaos is appeased. The

fact that a theory may be manifestly untrue is neither here nor there.

And the internet gives the conspiracy theorists the added kick of

being part of a 'secret society' of believers.

All this is true. The problem is, what to do about it? makes

a plea for 'business' - particularly serious book publishers - and

state bodies such as universities and the NHS to be more rigorous.

Such urging is to be applauded, but it will not be enough to stop the

spread of counterknowledge, because counterknowledge is the inevitable

product of democracy, capitalism and the 'century of the self'.

This is a highly enjoyable, well-written book for the sceptic and one

which can be deployed to great effect at dinner parties. But

does not answer the central question: what do we do to promote real

knowledge in a world where reality is something that more and more

people wish to avoid?

CAM, to which Damian devotes a chapter, is examined in

greater detail in Suckers: How Alternative Medicine Made Fools of Us

All. As in Counterknowledge fish in barrels are manifest. Rose Shapiro

skewers one 'cure' after another - pharmaceutically contaminated

Chinese herbal 'remedies', sugar pills sold as homeopathic solutions,

osteopathy based on 19th-century quackery.

But believers in this sort of thing will continue to do what most

(overwhelming middle-class, middle-aged and female) followers do -

hand over their money on the off-chance that the medicine might work

without having to take prescription chemicals.

And they are not completely barmy, because such a transaction triggers

the placebo effect (or the power of suggestion if you prefer) and

therefore tends to produce a measurable result.

This is annoying for rationalists, but it seems quite useful. CAM

won't work for me, because I think it's stupid, but it may work for

someone who is susceptible. That doesn't seem to cause the rest of

society any great harm and may even do it some minor good.

It is an unpalatable truth for rationalists like Shapiro and

that not all lies are harmful.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/02/11/botho111.xml