Alternatives to medicine

You want to avoid being ill. What do you do? You have to focus on your well-being.

The above is what goes for deep thinking (you could possibly add the adjective new age) and is the fount of what is called alternative medicine. One of the deepest thinkers is Dr. Andrew Weil who stresses the “importance of nutrition in keeping patients well” [1]. As an aside, how can a patient be kept "well"? A patient is someone who is by definition "ill". So, alternative medicine keeps an "ill" person "well"! The good doctor must have meant keeping his clients well. 

As I see it, the only difference between my mother and Dr. Weil is she worried about me and Dr. Weil cares, for the sake of hefty profits, about his patients/clients, most of who must be loaded (How else can one afford his concoction Origins^TM Mega-Mushroom Skin Relief Soothing Face Lotion, at $61). What is, however, good about Dr. Weil’s therapy program is it does not seem to have a catchy name, unless you think Integrative Medicine is a catchy name!

How much more catchy you want a name to be? How do you fancy herbal remedies? We must remember that our ancestors lived on naturally occurring herbs and plants (before the advent of agriculture). In the probabilistic sense, then, there must have been some herbs that helped avoid some diseases. What is the proof?

We are living aren’t we? The one undeniable truth of evolutionary biology is this: every ancestor of every one of us lived long enough to leave a progeny. That is proof enough for me to claim that some plants at least had medicinal properties.

I would be the first one to acknowledge that aspirin, of the “take-two-and-call-me-in-the-morning” variety came out of bark of willows. It was, if not discovered at least identified in the first decades of the 19^th century. Turmeric is another such medicinal plant. “Chinese herbs may (my emphasis) improve chemotherapy for colon cancer.” Good. But with what confidence do we adopt this remedy? It is not only that we do not know, we cannot even know. Alternative therapies are “inherently unsuited to double blind randomized trails,” say some practitioners of such therapies.

Moreover, these instances do not imbue any kind of therapeutic legitimacy to any plant just by naming it a medicinal herb. But that is the kind of underhanded sales job is being done in the name of herbal remedies.

What about acupuncture? Yes, somewhat exotic than cycle tire puncture. It “can relieve nausea and some types of pain.” A lot of uncertainty for it to be certified as medicine, wouldn’t you say?

I do not want to talk about homoeopathy because my mother was too adamant for her own good, and it is quite probable that the homoeopathic medicines she took ate her stomach from inside. Or was it the cancer of duodenum? I would never know.

US senator Tom Harkin helped set up the National Centre for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), “world’s leading medical research outfit”. But the returns have been meager, acknowledged by its proponent. Even after an investment of $1.5 billion there is not much to show.

And then, there is Reiki. Even NCCAM says that it could not find any meaningful correlation between the therapy and claimed cures or wellness. But, alternative medicines do enhance the wellness (the metric being not well-being but wealth) of one tribe – those who offer these therapies.

 But, if you are looking for your wellness, please listen to your body and be responsive and responsible. Going beyond that, the soundest advice I can give is that the best alternative to alternative medicine is conventional (as opposed to traditional) medicine, under the helpful attention of a caring physician.

Live well!

Raghuram Ekambaram

References

1.    The believers, The Economist, April 14, 2012