Since Mental has asked us to take over his mantle, I’ll do a post that I know is dear to his heart – the vast quantities of utter hogwash that come under the heading of complementary therapies.
I recently passed by a kinesiology stall at a festival. Kinesiology, if you haven’t heard of it, claims to find health problems by…er…getting you to wiggle your arm up and down. For some reason, they seem particularly obsessed with rooting out food intolerances.
Quite apart from the sheer ridiculousness of this method, I was especially struck by a sentence in the stall’s advertising leaflets, describing how they found the alleged “food intolerances”.
Some food intolerances only require a few weeks detox from the food in question, and then you can start eating it again.
Now, I’ve never heard of a food intolerance that simply goes away after a few weeks of “detox”. Therefore a cynical bugger like me could start to suspect that there never was a food intolerance in the first place, and any perceived beneficial effect from the “detox” was purely down to placebo effect.
The capacity of otherwise educated, intelligent people to believe in and defend this drivel amazes me. So, I’m now going to present to you Zarathustra’s Top 4 Bollocks Justifications for Complementary Therapies.
Bollocks Justification#1 “Science can’t explain everything.”
Well, no, science can’t explain everything, that’s true. Indeed, many conventional medical interventions are used without a full understanding of how they work. However, science can test the effectiveness of most things. For example, science cannot provide an explanation of how homeopathic remedies are supposed to work (at least, not one that wouldn’t involve rewriting our understanding of physics, chemistry and biology). However, they can test its effectiveness through randomised controlled trials. Such trials have been done, and they almost always show the homeopathic remedies to be no more effective than placebo.
Bollocks Justification#2 “Well yes, most complementary therapies are ineffective, but they do have a more holistic understanding of the human body.”
Somebody actually said this to me with a straight face, without apparently realising that his argument amounted to no more than, “No, they don’t work, but they have a nicer philosophy.”
And is it really true that conventional medicine doesn’t understand the “holistic” nature of the body? When I had my first year anatomy lectures, the very first lecture I received was on the concept of homeostasis. That’s Day one, Lecture One. That liver we’re treating has the rest of a human being attached to it? No shit, sherlock. WE KNOW!!!!!
Or, if the “holistic” tag is meant to refer to a wider sense of personhood, I can only comment that most doctors I’ve worked with seem to understand the psychological, social and spiritual aspects of illness far better than most complementary therapists seem to understand the physiological aspects.
Bollocks Justification#3 “Complementary therapists spend more time with people and make people feel listened to.”
So go to a counsellor if you want to feel “listened to”. Or book yourself into a beauty spa for the day and get yourself pampered. Given some of the exorbitant charges by some complementary therapists, it probably wouldn’t cost you any less.
And after all, it’s the amount you pay that causes you to get an hour of listening time. Just as if you pay privately for a top Harley Street doctor he’ll let you spend as long as you like talking to him, whereas an NHS doctor will try to whisk you through in ten minutes so he can get to the next patient.
This leads me nicely on to the next one…
Bollocks Justification#4: “Conventional medicine is in the grip of major corporations, unlike complementary therapies.”
It’s true that the NHS relies heavily on the big pharmaceutical companies, and these companies would probably reclassify arsenic as baby food if they thought they could get away with it. As a result, being in healthcare can sometimes feel like being joined at the hip with Satan.
Even so, what are Holland and Barrett? Some sort of workers cooperative? Do Boots stock large quantities of homeopathic remedies because they got fed up with the profit motive and want to stick it to The Man?
No, they’re capitalist moneymaking ventures too. They’re out to make ready cash, and just like the pharmaceutical companies they have a vested economic interest in rubbishing any claims that their products don’t work. However, they do go about it in a different way to Big Pharma.
Tell a pharmaceutical company that their product doesn’t work, and they’ll produce a research paper backing their claims and hope you aren’t bright enough to spot the methodoligical flaws.
Tell a complementary therapist that their product doesn’t work, and they tell you that you’re a Bad Person.
You have a great way with words!
“Tell a complementary therapist that their product doesn’t work, and they tell you that you’re a Bad Person.”
BRILLIANT!
Thats one of the funniest pieces of writing I’ve enjoyed in a long while.
cheers .. it’s not all one way though …
I’m reminded of a complimentary therapist I saw once on the recommendation of a friend. He told me my “head wasn’t on straight” before attempting to straighten it and giving me a royal pain in the neck.
Later, and I mention this for comparison, I saw a neurologist – for the same problem with my neck – and he told me I needed “to find a new meaning in life”.
It turns out the complimentary therapist was right in his diagnosis, though he failed to correct the problem, and the neurologist overlooked a rather severe compromise of my cervical spine which was/is trapping the spinal cord and some of the nerve roots.
I’m not sure how “finding a new meaning in life” would have solved that lol. I suppose my point is anyone can talk crap – and given the chance half of them do.
.. oh and I was introduced to a kinesiologist once .. it was quite scary how much he believed the utter garbage coming from his mouth.
while i agree that most complimentary therapies are bollocks an awful lot of bollocks is also talked about double blind ‘randomised’ controlled trials, too and they are not in any real sense scientific. as a statistician i know how to design a RANDOM sample of a population of ball-bearings, say and i will know both the size of the population i am sampling and what size my sample should be in order to give my results statistical significance. i will also have simple objective criteria by which to judge defectiveness if,i am say, sampling to find out many of the ball bearings my factory produces are defective. unfortunately you cant even attempt to do a random sample of human beings as they can refuse to take part and those who refuse may be quite different from those who agree. you might like to think about big pharma might go about selecting the volunteers for their trials.
FAQs – by me – about such trials
what are the criteria which you use to measure whether a drug is effective in the mental health field?
most such trials last for about 6 weeks. is this long enough to test for any potential side-effects?
the drug, say lithium, which are trying to persuade me to take was in common use long before such trials existed and it has always been well known to be toxic.
isnt it rather convenient for the drug companies that you set such store by such ‘research’ methods in that it is quite difficult to design a placebo to test whether just playing me some nice soothing music might me a much more effective and pleasant way of calming me down than that stuff which you are forcibly sticking in my bum?
sorry more still. it actually matters quite a lot that drugs which you can force on people are tested by people who have no vested interest in getting their products used.
AND please yes i do want to be listened too, or at least engaged in idle chit chat by the nurses on any ward in which i am incarcerated. and i do want my psych at least to think i might have a point when i tell her/him i can diiscern absolutely no benefit from the pill he/she wants me to swallow and that it has very nasty side effects.
by the way, i hope you wont take offence at any of the above as i know you are a caring person.
if you want to know a bit about me go to – i’ve left the www. bit out -
myspace.com/didempekun and click on the picture of an old woman – i am 75.
[video here]
you will also find – ive left the http: out
//blogcritics.org./archives/2007/07/22/141824.php – very relevant to this discussion.
Hi Margaret.
I don’t really dispute the point you’re making about the mendacity of Big Pharma. and about the side-effects associated with a lot of psychiatric meds. I particularly worry about Olanzapine, Risperidone and Quetiapine. I think we’re starting to find out a lot about some of the ill-effects of those drugs through the large numbers of people who are being prescribed it.
A psychiatrist I recently worked with is of the view that those three antipsychotics will have disappeared from the formularly in a couple of years time, because the manufacturers are getting sued into the ground in the US because of the side-effects, and a lot of the people currently on them will wind up back on the old-fashioned antipsychotics like Chlorpromazine. At least with those we have 50 years of experience of what they do to people, and have drugs like procyclidine to counteract it.
The reason I raised the issue of Big Pharma in my original post wasn’t really to defend the behaviour of the drug companies. More that I dislike the suggestion made by some that since Big Pharma are lying capitalists, that means the complementary therapists must be honest and pure as the driven snow. In fact I think the complementary therapists can be just as dishonest (often with themselves as much as with their patients) as Big Pharma.
many thanks z. i agree with everyting you say, but so much for fifty years of so-called research then!!!!
more later but am off to play bridge at my bridge club.
moe later
you are both a caring and a thinking person.
margaret
Thank you Margaret.
That’s a very good point your psychiatrist colleague makes, z.
You know, olanzapine is a very “dirty” drug which targets a whole range of receptor sites. If olanzapine was the older antipsychotic and chlorpromazine was being marketed as a new drug now, it could be sold as the antipsychotic which specifically targets the all-important dopamine receptors, unlike the scattergun approach of olanzapine.
We have seen absolutely no benefit from the atypicals that I can see. The side-effects are just as foul, if not more so; rates of compliance with medication are exactly the same (not surprising seeing as the rates of compliance with antipsychs are the same as rates of compliance with antibiotics) and God alone knows what’s lurking in the future, tardive dyskinesia-stylee.
[...] it is entirely appropriate for zarathustra to remind us of the sheer boswellox uttered by “complimentary therapists” (and he may be pleased to learn that Richard [...]