This is a hot topic. There are a lot of current books addressing this subject including Snake Oil Science: The Truth about Complementary and Alternative Medicine, Healing, Hype, or Harm?: A Critical Analysis of Complementary or Alternative Medicine (Societas) and Suckers: How Alternative Medicine Makes Fools of Us All.
I decided I would read only one of those books and select the one that would appear the most balanced. Just by their titles that expressed an over the top anti-alternative medicine bias, I immediately disqualified some of the mentioned books. I ended up selecting "Trick or Treatment" because the authors themselves seemed pretty balanced in their approach by letting clinical trials do the talking. If anything, their background suggested a pro-stand on the whole thing. Indeed, Edzard Ernst, MD is the world's first professor of complementary medicine.
I started this book by reading the Appendix where the authors write summaries and share the clinical evidence (or lack of) on 30 or so alternative therapies. Their findings corroborated my other readings on the subject. And, it confirmed that the authors did not have a hidden bias against such alternative therapies.
Now imagine if medicine had not changed whatsoever over the past 200 years or so. Additionally, envision it was founded by a charismatic figure whose writings would be unquestionable to this day. Such a discipline would have no means of self-improvement and discovery. It would be frozen in time forever and would be more of a religion than a science. In actuality, this would mean the entire body of Western medicine would be limited to one single deadly universal "cure": bloodletting. That seems really absurd. Sadly enough, that is the fate of acupuncture, homeopathy, and chiropractic therapy today
The authors' excellent scientific investigation uncovers that the foundations of acupuncture, homeopathy, and chiropractic therapy have no scientific bearing and defy common sense.
Acupuncture was invented over 2000 years ago and, has not changed since. Its core concepts of body meridians and chi are myths that have no physiological evidence. The famous Chinese surgeries done with the patient awake without anesthetics turned out to be frauds. The patients actually received massive dose of anesthetics and sedative in pill form.
Homeopathy is even stranger. Its core principle is that the more you dilute an ingredient the more potent it becomes. With this rational you should suffer an overdose by the time the ingredient is entirely eliminated from a water solution. This does not make any sense. Yet, homeopathic remedies are so diluted that not a single molecule of the active ingredient remains in the remedy. Supposedly, water has a "memory" of the ingredient that was in it and so does sugar pills. I was personally disappointed in those findings as I truly thought Arnica was an excellent muscle pain reliever. But, knowing what I know now I'd be hard pressed to use something that has no active ingredient left in it.
Chiropractic therapy also lacks any scientific bearing. The core concept of subluxation (misalignment of the vertebrae) and the related universal cure of spinal manipulation are just myths. To think that spinal manipulation can cure you of asthma, diabetes, or anything else is delusion. Also, neck manipulation, a very prevalent practice, is dangerous as it can impair one of the main aortas going to the brain and cause strokes sometimes days after the neck manipulation. Those findings did not surprise me. I had been to two chiropractors. One advanced that he could cure me of adult acne, yet his own skin was twice as bad as mine. The other one gave me a back and neck adjustment that I'll never forget and left me just about traumatized.
The authors show that all three of those disciplines fail the tests of effectiveness and occasionally safety in any well structured clinical trials. What those disciplines exploit is the placebo effect and the body's own ability to recover when left to its own devises. Thus, practitioners assign full credit to their therapy and so do the patients who believe in those. But by doing so, the practitioners just perpetuate myths.
When it comes to herbal medicine, the record is a lot more mixed (meaning much better). The authors uncover that many herbal remedies have successfully demonstrated health benefits in rigorous clinical trials. They provide excellent summary of those findings in table 1 on page 203. They also share the risks and side effects to watch for in table 2 on page 214.
The underlying main topic of the entire book is the development of the scientific method as it pertains to testing drugs and cures. This entails how to capture the placebo effect, how to conduct rigorous and accurate clinical trials, how to eliminate various biases, and how to use meta-analysis. The authors dedicate two full chapters out of six on the subject. Additionally, all other chapters reiterate the subject to such a degree that I feel the book could have been better organized. In other words, the two chapters covering the scientific method should have been longer. And, the four other ones should have been more focused on the actual topic of the chapter.
One should not derive that because most alternative therapies do not work that conventional ones do not have issues. To further explore how the actual practice of the scientific method is not always perfect, I recommend the fascinating Inside the FDA: The Business and Politics Behind the Drugs We Take and the Food We Eat. For explorations about the concerning prevalence of erroneous diagnostics I recommend How Doctors Think. Also, to learn more about the flaws of current medicine practice I recommend The Last Well Person: How to Stay Well Despite the Health-Care System. And on the excessive practice of cancer screening I suggest Should I Be Tested for Cancer?: Maybe Not and Here's Why.
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About the author
Top reviews from other countries
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CheeriohReviewed in France on February 11, 2019
Excellente démonstration, une grande claque, dommage qu'il ne soit pas traduit
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- Phil CheshireReviewed in the United Kingdom on May 31, 2011
Essential read but Kindle edition is lazily adapted (5 stars for content; 1 star for Kindle edition quality)
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