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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Politics Quackery

The Three Musketeers of Woo meet d’Artagnan to fight for woo on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal

The seemingly never-ending quest of advocates of unscientific medicine, the so-called “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM) movement is to convince policy makers, patients, and physicians that, really and truly, it no longer deserves the qualifier of “alternative,” that it is in fact mainstream and even “scientific.” That very search for respectability without accountability is the very reason why “alternative” medicine originally morphed into CAM in order to soften the “alternative” label a decade or two ago. Increasingly, however, advocates of such highly implausible medical practices appear no longer to like CAM as term for their dubious practices, because it still uses the word “alternative” and they recognize that labeling their woo as “alternative” in relationship to scientific medicine implies inferiority. Such a term conflicts with their desire to “go mainstream,” and they most definitely do want to go mainstream. However, they want to do it on their own terms, without all that pesky mucking about with science, evidence, and rigorous clinical trials that we in the science- and evidence-based medicine biz have to contend with. Consequently, they increasingly use a new term, a shiny term, a term free of that pesky (and oh-so-buzz-killing, albeit rebellious) “alternative” label. Now they want to “integrate” their unscientific placebo-based practice with real, scientific medicine. Thus was born the term “integrative” medicine (IM), and it’s becoming increasingly common and accepted.

These days, perhaps the biggest complaints I have about the attitude of practitioners of scientific medicine towards CAM/IM is that most of them do not see it as a major problem. Dr. Val Jones characterized this attitude as the “shruggie” attitude, and it’s a perfect term, as is her analogy as to why “integrating” pseudoscience with medical science is not a good idea. I myself have lamented the infiltration of pseudoscience and outright quackery into medical academia and the role that the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) has played in promoting that infiltration. In addition, wealthy patrons of CAM/IM such as Donna Karan and the Bravewell Collaborative have been generous spreading their money around. In this increasingly cash-strapped health care environment, hospitals know on which side their bread is buttered and see the “integration” of woo into their service portfolio as a means of beefing up the bottom line with cash on the barrelhead transactions that require no mucking about with nasty insurance forms. Indeed, they require no forms other than little green pieces of paper or credit card forms.

Unfortunately, there has been very little pushback by advocates of scientific medicine. Sure, there were the two excellent books, Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine by Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst and Snake Oil Science: The Truth About Complementary and Alternative Medicine by R. Barker Bausell. There was even Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure by Paul Offit. However, none of these books were best sellers, and I estimate that the entire sales for all three of these books combined probably don’t match a month’s–or even a week’s–worth of sales for one of Kevin Trudeau’s books or Jenny McCarthy’s latest cheerleading for autism quackery.

That’s why over the holidays I was so happy to see an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled The Touch That Doesnt Heal by Steve Salerno. It was that rarest of rare things in the mainstream media: an all-out frontal assault on what Dr. R. W. Donnell has termed “quackademic medicine” and the infiltration of pseudoscience into medical centers whose physicians should know better. Amazingly, it even expressed fear that any comprehensive health care reform promised by the incoming Obama administration could provide the opening for CAM advocates and their boosters in Congress like Dan Burton and Tom Harkin to coopt it and insert language into any reform legislation that would force the government not only to recognize (as NCCAM does) but pay for quackery. It is a fear I share, and I was happy to see a major newspaper like the WSJ publish such an editorial. Indeed, so happy was I that when I saw Deepak Chopra recruit Andrew Weil and Rustum Roy on The Huffington Post to attack Salerno’s article, I couldn’t resist having more than a bit of fun deconstructing their nonsense with extreme prejudice.

Unfortunately, it looks as though Chopra isn’t through yet. Indeed, somehow he managed to get a guest editorial published last Friday in the WSJ. Worse, he’s even added one to his Unholy Trinity of Woo to produce an editorial by Deepak Chopra, Dean Ornish, Rustum Roy, and Andrew Weil entitled “Alternative: Medicine Is Mainstream: The evidence is mounting that diet and lifestyle are the best cures for our worst afflictions. Of course, the article was also published on Chopra’s Intentblog, along with some links to some cherry picked studies. The new addition to Chopra’s posse, apparently the d’Artagnan to Chopra’s Three Musketeers of Woo, Dean Ornish, happens to be Founder and President of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute and Clinical Professor at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). He is best known for his somewhat exaggerated claims that diet can treat prostate cancer. In this, he most resembles Andrew Weil in his distressing tendency to contaminate sound scientific medical advice with dubious and exaggerated claims about what dietary and lifestyle changes can do in and of themselves. In any event, this most recent article is the most explicit statement of the strategy of CAM/IM advocates that I and others have been warning about. It makes it absolutely explicit that Dr. Chopra et al want nothing less than for their “alternative” medicine to be treated as co-equal to scientific medicine, no matter what science and the evidence say. It begins:

In mid-February, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and the Bravewell Collaborative are convening a “Summit on Integrative Medicine and the Health of the Public.” This is a watershed in the evolution of integrative medicine, a holistic approach to health care that uses the best of conventional and alternative therapies such as meditation, yoga, acupuncture and herbal remedies. Many of these therapies are now scientifically documented to be not only medically effective but also cost effective.

President-elect Barack Obama and former Sen. Tom Daschle (the nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services) understand that if we want to make affordable health care available to the 45 million Americans who do not have health insurance, then we need to address the fundamental causes of health and illness, and provide incentives for healthy ways of living rather than reimbursing only drugs and surgery.

Notice three things about this introduction. First, notice who’s involved. It’s the Bravewell Collaborative, a group, a wealthy private foundation. I am only speculating, but does anyone want to guess how such an article as Chopra’s found its way into the editorial pages of the WSJ? I admit I’m speculating, but think about it a moment. The Bravewell Collaborative is a consortium dedicated to the promotion of CAM/IM in academia and “conventional” medical centers. More relevant, it is spearheaded by Christy Mack, wife of the multi-billionaire John J. Mack, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Morgan Stanley. Would it be going too far to wonder whether perhaps Christy Mack saw Steve Salerno’s article and was not particularly happy about it. Perhaps she complained to her husband, who let it be known to the editorial board of the WSJ that some “balance” was required? Or perhaps Mr. Mack saw the article himself, given how common it is for CEOs of large financial institutions to read the WSJ. Second, note the picture that accompanies the editorial. It shows a puzzled and unhappy doctor staring out of the window of his office watching a bunch of happy and healthy people, one of whom is reading a book on health foods, another of whom is meditating as she walks, and another exercising, all apparently not needing the poor physician’s services. This, of course, feeds into the typical CAM/IM myth that physicians aren’t concerned with health maintenance and are only interested in treating disease.

Finally, note yet another classic example of the bait and switch of CAM/IM, even more outrageous than Chopra’s previous foray into this scam. Note how Chopra et al refer to the “best of conventional and alternative therapies such as meditation, yoga, acupuncture and herbal remedies” and state that “many” of these “are now scientifically documented to be not only medically effective but also cost effective.” Note, as Skeptico did, how Chopra includes acupuncture, which is not scientifically validated and in fact nothing more than an elaborate placebo, along with meditation, which may be helpful for relaxation and therefore useful for some conditions, and herbal medicine, which may or may not be effective, given that herbs contain drugs, but is the equivalent to the way medicine was practiced 200 years ago.

Here’s where the bait comes in, and it’s a predictable bit of bait given the addition of Dean Ornish as a d’Artagnan:

These studies often used high-tech, state-of-the-art measures to prove the power of simple, low-tech, and low-cost interventions. Integrative medicine approaches such as plant-based diets, yoga, meditation and psychosocial support may stop or even reverse the progression of coronary heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, prostate cancer, obesity, hypercholesterolemia and other chronic conditions.

A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that these approaches may even change gene expression in hundreds of genes in only a few months. Genes associated with cancer, heart disease and inflammation were downregulated or “turned off” whereas protective genes were upregulated or “turned on.” A study published in The Lancet Oncology reported that these changes increase telomerase, the enzyme that lengthens telomeres, the ends of our chromosomes that control how long we live. Even drugs have not been shown to do this.

Note that the PNAS study examined a dietary intervention that is very, very hard to maintain, permitting only 10% of a person’s calories from fat and requiring an hour and a half of exercise and meditation daily. Very few people could maintain such a regimen, and it would take a lot of dedication and devotion to pull it off. Moreover, it was only a pilot study of 30 men. Unfortunately, that did not stop CAM/IM advocates like David Katz from misrepresenting the study as showing that diet and exercise can “reshuffle the genetic deck in our favor.” In any case, the study is provocative, but the men who participated were from a highly select group, only only 31 out of 127 eligible men. These patients were also a highly select group from another perspective in that they all had small, low grade prostate tumors deemed safe to be managed by “watchful waiting,” rather than immediate surgery or radiation therapy. These tumors all had low PSA levels and low Gleason scores. (The Gleason score is the standard measure used by pathologists to estimate how aggressive a prostate cancer is.) These men were also monitored very carefully to make sure that their tumors were not progressing during the study, and their tumors did not regress, nor did overall PSA levels change on average. Moreover, what Chopra, Cornish, et al neglect to mention is that only 1/3 of the samples contained actual tumor tissue; the rest contained only noncancerous prostate tissue, as I pointed out in my previous post. This wasn’t reported in the Results section and was only mentioned briefly in the Discussion section. Worse, not enough information was reported to allow a reader to make a reasonable assessment of whether this shortcoming introduced significant bias into the results, as it very likely could have. Indeed, it would be rather important to know what proportion of matched tumors contained no tumor in the pre-treatment biopsy or no tumor in the post-treatment biopsy. If, for example, more matched pre and post sets contained tumor in the pre-treatment biopsy but no tumor in the post-treatment biopsy than contained tumor in the post-treatment biopsy but no tumor in the pre-treatment biopsy, that could introduce an artifact that would bias the results towards the sort of results seen.

The second study cited appears to be a followup of the same study, in which the same specimens from the same 30 men were examined for telomerase activity in their peripheral blood monocytes. To put it simply, telomeres are repetitive DNA sequences at the end of chromosomes. They serve to keep chromosomes from degradation because during replication the enzymes that replicate the chromosome cannot replicated all the way to the end of it. Consequently, during each round of cell division and chromosome replication, some sequence is lost. With telomeres at the end, what is lost is noncoding repetitive DNA, and no information is lost. In most eukaryotic organisms, an enzyme known as telomerase adds these DNA sequences to the end of the chromosomes. However, in the adult it is generally active only in cells that need to divide a lot, such as stem cells and immune cells but only expressed little, if at all, in most normal cells. During aging, eventually telomeres shorten to the point where it starts to effect chromosome function. However, one tissue that often expresses telomerase at high levels is cancer, and this is part of what allows cancerous cells to divide indefinitely and also why telomerase inhibitors are a promising class of anticancer drugs. Indeed, one of the biggest challenges of anti-aging medicine is to find out a strategy to keep telomerase turned on without causing cancer. Consequently, I can see why Ornish would want to measure telomerase activity in these men. Unfortunately, most the same problems with the first PNAS study apply to this study, and, indeed, this Lancet paper looks to me like a bit of the ol’ “CV padding” in that it reports what appear to be a lot of the same things about cholesterol and triglyceride levels in the men participating in the study. Moreover, the bottom line is quite underwhelming in that telomerase activity was only mildly increased in the PBMCs, with huge error bars and a significant, but not outstandingly so, p-value.

Most importantly, though, as Skeptico points out, this is the “bait.” The interventions were diet and exercise. They were a difficult to follow diet and exercise regimen, but they were, when boiled down to their essence, diet and exercise nonetheless. No acupuncture. No homeopathy. No reiki. No CAM/IM. No nothing that can be considered “alternative,” with the possible exception of meditation therapy, which I tend to look upon as relaxation therapy more than anything else. Moreover, no one I’m aware of is saying that diet and exercise can’t have dramatic effects on health. Indeed, it’s not scientifically implausible that Dr. Ornish’s regimen might actually reduce the risk of prostate cancer or slow its progression, although his data do not really support that contention very strongly, if at all, and his two studies do fall into the realm of science-based medicine. They may be preliminary, controversial, and even mediocre science-based medicine, but they are not by any stretch of the imagination “alternative.” Funny how Chopra insists on citing them as such. Next, he resorts to his usual attacks on science-based medicine:

Despite these costs, a randomized controlled trial published in April 2007 in The New England Journal of Medicine found that angioplasties and stents do not prolong life or even prevent heart attacks in stable patients (i.e., 95% of those who receive them). Coronary bypass surgery prolongs life in less than 3% of patients who receive it. So, Medicare and other insurers and individuals pay billions for surgical procedures like angioplasty and bypass surgery that are usually dangerous, invasive, expensive and largely ineffective. Yet they pay very little — if any money at all — for integrative medicine approaches that have been proven to reverse and prevent most chronic diseases that account for at least 75% of health-care costs. The INTERHEART study, published in September 2004 in The Lancet, followed 30,000 men and women on six continents and found that changing lifestyle could prevent at least 90% of all heart disease.

The study to which he is referring is this one. However, it is not quite as Chopra represents it, as you can see if you click on the abstract and read the article. What this study did was to compare percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI, otherwise known as angioplasty) with optimal medical therapy plus PCI. Note that both sets of interventions are science-based and not in any way “alternative”. All the investigators were looking at is whether the addition of PCI results in better outcomes than medical management alone. Also note how Chopra states that bypass surgery prolongs life in only 3% of those who receive it as though that was a conclusion of the study. It wasn’t a conclusion of this study, and Chopra does not cite his source. In any case, what Chopra fails to mention was that, although overall mortality didn’t vary much, the PCI group did have some better secondary outcomes. For example, patients in the PCI plus medical intervention group required fewer procedures (32% of the medical therapy required additional revascularization procedures to 21.1% of the PCI/medical therapy group at 4.6 years) and a higher likelihood of being free from angina, albeit modest (42% versus 36% at 5 years). As for the INTERHEART study, this, too, is science-based medicine and suggests that diet and lifestyle could account for as much as 90% of all heart disease. It is also hardly new news. Yet Chopra appropriates diet and lifestyle as “alternative” so that he can make the “switch”:

And the same lifestyle changes that can prevent or even reverse heart disease also help prevent or reverse many other chronic diseases as well. Chronic pain is one of the major sources of worker’s compensation claims costs, yet studies show that it is often susceptible to acupuncture and Qi Gong. Herbs usually have far fewer side effects than pharmaceuticals.

Joy, pleasure, and freedom are sustainable, deprivation and austerity are not. When you eat a healthier diet, quit smoking, exercise, meditate and have more love in your life, then your brain receives more blood and oxygen, so you think more clearly, have more energy, need less sleep. Your brain may grow so many new neurons that it could get measurably bigger in only a few months. Your face gets more blood flow, so your skin glows more and wrinkles less. Your heart gets more blood flow, so you have more stamina and can even begin to reverse heart disease. Your sexual organs receive more blood flow, so you may become more potent — similar to the way that circulation-increasing drugs like Viagra work. For many people, these are choices worth making — not just to live longer, but also to live better.

Note the false dichotomy, how Chopra’s “switched” from the bait of lifestyle changes and diet, both accepted, albeit arguably underemphasized, interventions supported by science-based medicine straight to woo like acupuncture and Qi Gong without citing any studies or acknowledging that none of the studies he has cited before had anything to do with acupuncture or Qi Gong, as Skeptico so astutely noted. From my perspective, the answer to such a criticism is not to cede diet and exercise to woo-meisters like Chopra but rather to emphasize them and scientific research (not NCCAM research) into them, especially given how woo-meisters take results that show diet to be important for health and twist them into supporting the use of all sorts of supplements and other dubious interventions. Chopra also makes the unsupported claim that herbs usually have fewer side effects than pharmaceuticals. Note how clever he is. He does not claim that herbs are more effective than pharmaceuticals–or even of equal effectiveness. There is, of course, no evidence that I’m aware of to support the claim of greater efficacy. Also, the reason many herbal remedies have “fewer side effects” is because they have little or no activity, or the effective drug within is diluted with all sorts of other contaminants from the plants. Indeed, as David Kroll pointed out, the reason scientific medicine moved toward purified chemicals from plants is because using the plants themselves or extracts there of was too hit-or-miss, with variable potency from lot to lot and variable contamination from lot to lot, which is one reason why we don’t prescribe bark for cancer. Meanwhile, these days many herbal remedies are contaminated with lead and other heavy metals.

As for the part about “joy, pleasure, and freedom,” that’s just a non sequitur. There’s no reason that anyone taking advantage of the fruits of scientific medicine can’t also have joy, pleasure, and freedom, although the implication that Chopra is making is that one cannot, at least not without accepting his “integrative” nonsense. It’s also a clever allusion to the entire “health freedom” movement. Again, eating a healthier diet, quitting smoking, and exercise are not outside the realm of scientific medicine, and there is plenty of evidence that they have beneficial health effects. The jury’s still out on meditation, but there’s no reason to doubt that “having more love in your life” makes your life better, regardless of whether it does all the other wonderful things that Chopra attributes to it, including his his brilliant (from a marketing standpoint) implication that accepting his favored CAM/IM interventions will lead to better sex. The reason that woo-meisters like Chopra try to appropriate diet and exercise as part of CAM/IM at every turn because they represent the “foot in the door” for pure woo like reiki and homeopathy. The unspoken rationale is that, diet and exercise to lead to better health and can even treat some conditions; we consider them “alternative”; therefore all those other “alternative” modalities also have something to them.

Ironically, however, there is one statement Chopra and his Musketeers make that I actually mostly agree with, but not in the way they meant it:

It’s time to move past the debate of alternative medicine versus traditional medicine, and to focus on what works, what doesn’t, for whom, and under which circumstances. It will take serious government funding to find out, but these findings may help reduce costs and increase health.

I agree almost 100%. The part I don’t agree with is that it will take “serious government funding to find out.” Chopra’s implication is that more money will be needed, but between NCCAM and the National Cancer Institute’s Office of Cancer Complementary and Alternative Medicine (OCCAM), the U.S. government already spends a quarter of a billion dollars a year studying “alternative” medicine. Adding more money would be nothing more than throwing good money after bad. In fact, from my perspective, there is nothing that NCCAM or OCCAM does that couldn’t be folded into the Institutes of the NIH and evaluated in regular scientific study sections. Well, actually, there is one thing that NCCAM does that couldn’t be done by Institutes, and that’s the promotion and encouragement of CAM/IM in academic medical centers. Losing that function would be a good thing. In any case, I do agree that we should move past “alternative medicine” and “traditional medicine” (although it is really “alternative” medicine that is “traditional,” given that the vast majority of it is based on either religion or a prescientific understanding of disease). Instead, we should concentrate on medicine that has been scientifically tested and found to be efficacious and safe versus medicine that is either untested or has been tested but has failed the test. Unfortunately for Chopra et al, other than their co-opted therapies (diet, exercise, etc.) the vast majority of so-called “alternative” medicine falls into one of the latter two categories and thus would not qualify as “medicine” if the distinction between “alternative” and scientific medicine were abolished.

Chopra’s two articles demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt what their new strategy will be in 2009. With the impending inauguration of Barack Obama as the President of the United States, it is clear that they perceive a once-in-a-decade opportunity. Obama’s stated desire to overhaul the government health care system, coupled with an increasing belief held by policymakers, legislators, and the public that the healthcare system as currently constituted is “broken,” provides Christy Mack and other influential promoters of woo the excuse to bend the ear of Congress towards their money to try to persuade them insert into any reform legislation provisions that will pay for unproven and pseudoscientific CAM/IM modalities and thereby legitimitize them–even systematize them. (Truly, if they have their way “integration” will triumph.) They will sell these provisions as “reform” and “cost-effective health maintenance,” when they represent neither. Indeed, Chopra et al make this utterly explicit in the conclusion of their WSJ article:

Integrative medicine approaches bring together those in red states and blue states, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, because these are human issues. They are both medically effective and, important in our current economic climate, cost effective. These approaches emphasize both personal responsibility and the opportunity to make affordable, quality health care available to those who most need it. Mr. Obama should make them an integral part of his health plan as soon as possible.

No doubt this is the implicit, if not explicit purpose of the “summit” being convened by the Bravewell Collaborative with the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. What I can’t figure out is why the IOM and NAS are going along with this bald-faced propaganda exercise designed to provide a patina of respectability on the CAM/IM movement and forge alliances designed to persuade Congress to do Bravewell’s bidding and promote woo at every level of the health care system and medical research. Clearly the esteemed scientists and physicians in the IOM and NAS have not yet perceived that they are being used to promote an ideological, non-science-based agenda to the new Obama Administration. If advocates of science- and evidence-based medicine remain silent, Chopra, Weil, and the Bravewell Collaborative, along with all the other forces trying to “integrate” the unscientific with the scientific in health care may well succeed. They may well succeed anyway, given their resources and how little the public understands how science is done and why “integrating” pseudoscience with science- and evidence-based medicine is not beneficial or cost effective–or even harmless.

By Orac

Orac is the nom de blog of a humble surgeon/scientist who has an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his copious verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few probably will. That surgeon is otherwise known as David Gorski.

That this particular surgeon has chosen his nom de blog based on a rather cranky and arrogant computer shaped like a clear box of blinking lights that he originally encountered when he became a fan of a 35 year old British SF television show whose special effects were renowned for their BBC/Doctor Who-style low budget look, but whose stories nonetheless resulted in some of the best, most innovative science fiction ever televised, should tell you nearly all that you need to know about Orac. (That, and the length of the preceding sentence.)

DISCLAIMER:: The various written meanderings here are the opinions of Orac and Orac alone, written on his own time. They should never be construed as representing the opinions of any other person or entity, especially Orac's cancer center, department of surgery, medical school, or university. Also note that Orac is nonpartisan; he is more than willing to criticize the statements of anyone, regardless of of political leanings, if that anyone advocates pseudoscience or quackery. Finally, medical commentary is not to be construed in any way as medical advice.

To contact Orac: [email protected]

32 replies on “The Three Musketeers of Woo meet d’Artagnan to fight for woo on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal”

We should also bear in mind that there are some prominent pharma critics who publicly promote lifestyle changes as an alternative to medication, without ever acknowledging that if someone is very high risk, they should consider using both. Some of the critics of using statins for primary prevention, such as Jerome Hoffman, come to mind. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an advocate of putting statins in the water supply, but when prescribed appropriately they are very good drugs. Privately, Jerry Hoffman has also told me that he does not believe elevated LDL causes heart disease, or at least that has not been proven. He also believes that statins act solely through pleiotropic effects (i.e., not through LDL-lowering). However, although he is often quoted in the mainstream media, I have never seen him make these THINCS-like arguments publicly.

I don’t know if total book sales figures are available, but looking at Amazon.co.uk’s ranking:

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre: 20 (yes, it’s in the top 20 best selling books on Amazon.co.uk!)
Trick or Treatment by Singh & Ernst: 14,735 hardback
Autism’s False Prophets: Bad Science, Risky Medicine, and the Search for a Cure by Paul Offit: 75,758

Natural Cures ‘they’ Don’t Want You to Know About by Kevin Trudeau: 49,757 paperback
The Weight Loss Cure “They” Don’t Want You to Know About by Kevin Trudeau: 164,959 hardback
Mother Warriors: A Nation of Parents Healing Autism Against All Odds by Jenny McCarthy: 157,458

So, perhaps it’s not as bleak after all!

Orac,

I think it is time your blogs to appear simultaneously at Huffington Post. I am sure you would qualify as a contributor among the thousands they have already. I also noticed contributor bloggers criticizing each others’ blog posts at HuffPo.

I am sure you will be a big hit at HuffPo. New, and much wider audience and wider influence. We certainly deserve it. Mainstream science deserves it.

Who knows you could be the Surgeon General 4 years from now.

I’m really getting tired of the constant portrayal of “alternative” = lifestyle/diet/herbs/etc. vs “mainstream” = drugs and surgery. It’s total bullshit.

Evidentiary standards. Evidentiary standards. Evidentiary standards. Evidentiary standards. Some like to cheat them and some do not. Some like to overstate the data and some do not.

If I were “big pharma” and if I were evil, I’d celebrate alternative medicine. Lower evidentiary standards means millions of R&D costs saved.

Maybe Obama will take a lead from Mao Zedong and switch over completely onto woo as a cheap replacement for proper medicine? Think of the savings! 🙂

Surely not, but there is a possibility that the woo-meisters will gain a small concession and even that is too much.

If I were “big pharma” and if I were evil, I’d celebrate alternative medicine. Lower evidentiary standards means millions of R&D costs saved. [Dr Benway]

If the “alternative” business grows way big, and the pharma’s share goes way down… in the near future does that change the argument?

It is true that the best diet and lifestyle advice comes from medicine. However, CAM proponents have their own versions of such advice. In addition to myriad diets, they add supplements and “detoxification” rituals. So, even when they are generally talking sense, the details may be packed with woo. In 1993, dietitian Jack Raso published “Mystical Diets” in which he describes some of the nonsense.

I feel that you have defamed the Three Musketeers by comparing them to this trio. A comparison to the Three Stooges would be more appropriate. I can hear their battle cry:

“One for all!”

“All for one!”

“Every man for himself!”

As I read this post, it occurred to me what really frightens me about “CAM” becoming mainstreamed and integrated with scientific medicine.

It’s not the altruistic concern that people other than myself may suffer the consequences or expense of substituting CAM for legitimate medicine (or of delaying scientific medical treatment in favor or CAM), and it’s not the concern that my group health care premiums might go up as my insurance company covers more CAM modalities such as acupuncture and chiropractic in addition to services they currently cover.

What really frightens me, now that I think about it, is that at some point, CAM is could become so mainstreamed and integrated, that my insurance company will force me to use “CAM” treatment instead of ponying up to pay for real medical therapy.

If I have a medical condition for which I need some medical intervention, I don’t want to have to try acupuncture, chiropractic, or homeopathy because that is all my insurance company is willing to pay for.

I could easily see insurance companies seeing integrated “CAM” as an opportunity to control skyrocketing costs. If such CAM modalities become integrated into accepted medical practice, insurance companies could claim they are viable options for treatment and should only be distinguished from other treatment options based on cost, as they would already be accepted as effective based on their inclusion into mainstream medicine. If it’s no longer alternative, it’s now just medicine.

In addition to some of their crazy diet and lifestyle ideas, many alties are antivaxers (except for their homeopathic “vaccines”).

You say that’s not enough? You want more? A local NPR station (WAMC, Albany, NY) produces “The Health Show” which featured a naturopath talking about cancer prevention. Somehow, she missed tobacco and high alcohol consumption as risk factors!? http://www.cancer.org/downloads/STT/2008CAFFfinalsecured.pdf

Nya Nya Nya

I hear that NPR from Albany and tried to call in for a different view, too late.

The creepy part is how many “friends and family” called in to “help” cure their friends. One was for RA, he talked about diet and really trashed the TNFs and MTX. MTX as chemo (yes it is but it works for the inflammatory arthritis’s) and the TNFs as extremely dangerous. They are a miracle for many of us, and if diet worked I would be cured. He even hinted at cure via diet. How dare he.

If I had a nickel for every friend who tried to get me to try diet and CAM crap to cure my arthritis, I wouldn’t have a charge card full on TNF bills. It is very dangerous to try that stuff for a couple years before chemo. Thats how they get you, they accept a friend calling about “your disease”, what real doctor would do that?

Annie

@Annie,

I have tried, many times, to persuade WAMC to be more responsible. Over many years, Orac, Harriet Hall, Stephen Barrett and Kimball Atwood have offered support. In the end, everyone there (except, possibly, the janitor) has me on a list of crackpots who can be ignored.

I’m trying to figure out how CAM treatments are so cheap and preferable to big Pharma.

One friend of mine spends 90 dollars to see her naturopath for a half hour, and then ponies up a bunch of money for vitamins from some special source (because who knows what’s in those bottles of vitamins and such from even the health food store-those aren’t good enough). And that’s a month’s worth.

Another friend spent hundreds of dollars on colonics. And if there’s special woo water used, it’s a bit more.

Both of my friends who are into this stuff have pushed on me homeopathy, special diets, and herbs for my rheumatoid arthritis. I actually did all of this CAM stuff (and crystals, too) twenty years ago, and if it didn’t work then, it ain’t going to work now.

I adore the new medicines for RA. I was so hopeful with the mtx, and when it made me sick, I was wary of Enbrel. When I was able to walk like a human being again, and the pain was 95% gone, the gratitude I felt for the people who developed it was immense. Not only will my joints be protected from damage and my pain be kept under control, I can now exercise, and strengthen my body to fight the effects of RA.

But I can’t seem to get these friends to realize I’ve already been there and done that, so we just don’t talk about medicine, though ever so often, one of the four people Orac wrote about comes up, especially Weil and Chopra. I keep my mouth shut. They aren’t ready to hear that maybe these docs are misguided.

And still willing to dish out the money for woo.

You did a post on an article from Parade Magazine last month. The comments to that post seem to be closed, so I am posted the link to another real gem from Parade: “You can survive!” by Ben Sherwood. This is my favorite part:

“6. Outlive a Heart Attack
Going into cardiac arrest is never a good thing, but if it happens, one of the best places to be is in a casino in Las Vegas. Whether or not you can survive depends on how fast rescuers can shock your heart back into normal rhythm through chest compression or defibrillation. In Vegas, security cameras and guards are constantly scanning casino floors in order to catch cheaters, thieves, and troublemakers. If a visitor collapses, someone will notice right away. Security personnel are trained in the use of defibrillators and usually can administer the lifesaving shocks within two to three minutes. As a result, the heart-attack survival rate in Las Vegas is 53%. Compare that to rates of 16% in Seattle (which has some of the nation’s best response systems) or 2% in Chicago.”

Rjaye, If you think that’s bad, when I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007, an old friend who is a Christian Scientist tried to tell me I could cure myself with prayer.

Marilyn Mann,

You mean to tell me you didn’t pray?! Of course you did, and that is the complementary part. I am glad you are alive and well to post here! What your friend fails to understand is that ‘while it is important to pray, you should have surgery (pray for the surgeon and his/her team) and get chemo and radiation, too’.

There is nothing wrong with prayer/worship/crystals/magnets; as long as you are doing the evidence based medicine too, that is my point.

Imhotep,
How do you know Marilyn prayed? You seem to assume that Marilyn has faith, and that faith includes the belief that her deity intervenes in the laws of physics of the universe based on an individual’s pleadings.

The problem with the word complementary, is that it implies some benefit or effect. It something does nothing, that it isn’t really complimentary.

I guess whether there is anything wrong with prayer/crystals/magnets/lucky rabbits feet, magical thinking and voodoo charms depends on how you look at it. What is the line between a positive thinking and false hope? How much do the crystals/magnets/etc cost? Is the use of unproven methodologies strictly limited to a purely complimentary role, or does it lead to a delay or replacement of scientific medicine?

I was saddened to learn that Dr. Dean Ornish has joined the quack brigade. I met him in the early 1990s when he spoke at the U. of Nebraska Medical Center about reversing atherosclerotic heart disease with diet, exercise, meditation, and (only if needed) antihypertensives. Only a small percentage of patients improved, because the Ornish program consumed the patients’ lives, and most dropped out of the study. But, this limited success was followed by best-selling books, speaking tours, and (apparently) a 50-point drop in IQ (perhaps the Ornish diet lacks some essentially fats and his neurons croaked). It’s bad enough that Ornish thinks many common diseases can be cured by diet, but now he lends his prestige to sellers of snake oil.

Karl,

Even the most devote atheists find some type of “spirit” to pray to in time of need.

That is an excellent point you present; it is how you look at it. Complementary medicine should not replace the evidence based medicine, but one should be careful not to ridicule another persons “beliefs”.

CAM is like a religion to some people and I think we all can agree that when someone’s thoughts are “religious” in nature, attempting to change their mind may be difficult…..and sometimes dangerous.

Ridiculing a herbalist or a person that follows homeopathy will surely prevent them from having a follow-up visit and that automatically leads to non-compliance with Western/Evidence Based Medicine. Then when they die, the family says “Well, she/he, went to an MD and they did nothing for him/her.” Thus, perpetuating the myth and furthering their own belief system.

This blog is great/thanks for allowing me to post!

Imhotep wrote “Even the most devote atheists find some type of “spirit” to pray to in time of need.”

Where did you come by this information? It sounds to me like mere, wishful thinking of a true believer.

“Even the most devote atheists find some type of “spirit” to pray to in time of need.”

Actually I don’t, nor do any of the atheists in my family. My mother’s attitude is that if praying isn’t useful there is no point in doing it and if praying is useful, then our grandma is up in heaven (she was very religious) and will be praying for her family members so hard that there was no need for any of us to pray.

I agree with your point that ridicule in the immediate situation is generally counter-productive. Ridicule in more abstract situations can be a lot more useful though, I think.

Joe wrote “Where did you come by this information? It sounds to me like mere, wishful thinking of a true believer.”

In my 16 years of practicing medicine, I have witnessed it many times. With that being said, I have also witnessed a similar ‘shoring up of the beliefs’ of “true believer athesists”. Prayer does not have to be the outward voicing of words to God or Jesus; but can also be the inward reflection and self discussion with the mind/soul.

As a surgeon, I too want everything to be scientifically tested and proven. And I can see that everyone here has the same desire for peer review and the absence of quackary; here is a story that I hope to never have a series of to publish.

Last summer, an elderly lady came to my office for hematuria, blood in the urine. I performed an office cystoscopy (look into the bladder with a telescope). I have been using a video camera for several years now for 2 reasons; I don’t want to have neck surgery before or after I retire and when patient’s can see what I am seeing through the scope it is easier to explain the surgery that they may need. Needless to say, this particular woman had a 3cm bladder tumor that was growing in her bladder. I saw it, she saw it and my nurse saw it. I schedule her for surgery right away, but she wanted to delay it to “get things in order” was her excuse. I strongly urged her not to delay, as this could/would allow the tumor time to continue to grow and advance the stage. Two months later she came to the Operating Room and when I did the cystoscopy, there was no tumor present.
This event really un-nerved me. I don’t like giving people anesthesia for ‘no reason’, because it is dangerous. Truly baffled, I went to talk to her son, who was in the waiting room and explained the situation and the lack of finding the tumor that was there only 2 months ago.
He informed me that this has happened to her before with other “masses” in the body! He told me she was not particularly religious too. I have no explanation for this and like I said, I don’t want to have a “publishable series” of cases like this either!

And no, she did not have surgery elsewhere, because I thought of that first and spoke with her primary physician about that possiblity!

Imhotep,
So because you are unaware of any natural process that can lead to the natural disappearance of a tumor, you are arguing the God of gaps did it? Thus it follows that anything we can’t currently explain is the result of a supreme being. (If we don’t have an explanation for it, there is no explanation other than a supernatural one.)

Since I came to the realization that there is no reason to believe in a god, there have times I sincerely, desperately wished there was a god to pray to, but I didn’t pray to any spirit.

If you really believe that “Even the most devote atheists find some type of “spirit” to pray to in time of need.” than you would seem to have some difficulty seeing outside your own context.

My other point was really that the word complimentary in CAM is a complete misnomer. It’s a Complete (ineffective) Alternative to Medicine. There is scientifically proven medicine, and there is everything else.

I don’t think too many people would advocate a physician ridicule a person for believing in CAM, but it’s important the patient be made aware that there is no scientific basis for believing in the efficacy of “CAM” like homeopathy, and that if their body needs help in getting healthy, it is going to come from scientific medicine and not from implausible modalities like homeopathy, and that their patient’s use of “CAM” treatments should in no way affect their choices regarding scientific medicine.

Regarding your one example, my response would be, “she/he abandoned real medical treatment, relied on CAM, and look where it got her/him.”

I have a question. Why not do a double blind study? Use people who are say hypertensive or a group of people who are uncontrolled diabetics. Randomly assign half the participants to Deepak and half to yourself. Find the results. I’d love to read the study.

Ornish appeared on the Gary Null Show(WNYE radio)yesterday, as I described @denialism blog(“The War Has Begun…”), and he wasn’t there to challenge,question, or debate.

Karl,

I have no attribution to any supreme deity/god or crystal for the event that happened to my patient this summer. Please don’t assign me to that category; I am only relating an experience that I can not account for with Western Medicine…..as of this date, no one else can either!

I think you and I agree on this more than you think. I do not practice “woo”, but I am careful how I communicate with people that do practice many forms of “woo”.

Keep up the good work.

Imhotep wrote “Even the most devote atheists find some type of “spirit” to pray to in time of need.”

Where did you come by this information? It sounds to me like mere, wishful thinking of a true believer.

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