the drugs are better than fairy dust

I don’t normally join in the shrieks of “quacktitioner” that some of the other health blogs are so fond of, but today I’m going to make an exception. I was reading through this article on Comment is Free by Madeleine Bunting writing in defence of complimentary therapies. The article itself is (in my opinion) a bit poor, and doesn’t really have much of an argument in favour of complimentary therapies except, “Well yes, most of them are just placebos, but it’s still a safe way to give someone the benefit of placebo effect, right?” (Well yes, Madeleine, but the point of medicine is that it’s supposed to be better than placebo.)

But it was this comment on the discussion thread afterward that attracted my attention.

As a Qualified Holistic Nurse with a Masters in Holistic Nursing and many qualifications in complementary therapies and doing research in the area, I get perturbed by the ’scientists’ and their forever bashing of therapies.I understand that there are many charlatans out there but I also know there are therapists who are qualified and ethical. I educate Patients about what to look for. I also -realise that the essence of these therapies is creating an atmosphere of trust , healing and the ‘relaxation response’ This relaxation response which has been documented & researched from ’60’s by Harvard MD Benson is what plays into the dynamics. It allows for the patient to iniatate their own inner healing which is what it is all about. Pills, surgery,chemo,etc - the medical model are all important but so indeed is the Patient’s own inner healing potential. When will they ever see this!!!

Just what on earth is a “Qualified Holistic Nurse”?

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.

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I went on holiday once to a lovely little English town. It had lots and lots of bookshops and was chock full of the oddest people I have ever met. To put this in context this is when I was working on a very very busy acute admissions ward.

I was sitting in a coffee shop trying not to drool on my purchases when I heard a conversation:

Person: Oh yes, Mildred, my daughter, was not very well at all.

Other person: Did you try the fairy dust then ?

Person: Oh yes, I sprinkled some on her, it fixed her right up. She was fine after a few days.

Other person: Yeh, it’s really good stuff. Well worth the money.

One of the people had just served me my drink. I took a very close look for some powdery residue. Though looking back at this conversation I could have been hearing some encoded conversation to do with a drugs deal ? My feeling is though they were actually talking about Fairy Dust.

Is Fairy Dust made out of ground up fairy folk or made by them ?

Many clients feel they can mysteriously affect events at a distance. Often involving rays, or energies or waves or something. Often this results in them being offered a little something extra in the medicine pot.

Nurses can have the same idea.

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