Why are accepted alternative therapies under attack?
Of all the recent advances in medicine, some of the most useful have involved the slow but steady acceptance of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) into established medical centers.
We’re now seeing traditional Chinese herbs offered at Duke University… massage therapy, acupuncture and meditation at Johns Hopkins… and herbs and yoga classes at the Mayo Clinic.
But just when you might think that these long-proven treatments have finally been accepted, along comes a smug group of medical mainstreamers claiming that the use of such “mystical” treatments somehow “undermines the credibility” of these “premier medical institutions.”
What they seem to have overlooked, however, is just how miserably Big Pharma has failed to offer us drugs that are safe and affordable and actually work.
If you were suffering from the chronic, debilitating pain of fibromyalgia, which treatment would you try?
☐Treatment A: Lyrica — a drug that is known to cause life-threatening allergic reactions, “suicidal thoughts or actions,” blurry vision, dizziness, weight gain, and swelling of the hands, feet and legs, panic attacks, agitation, aggression and “dangerous impulses,” to name a few.
Or…
☐Treatment B: Homeopathic bee sting venom — a highly diluted substance prepared from bee venom that contains numerous anti-inflammatory compounds. It’s known to relieve the pain of many chronic conditions with extremely minor side effects that last only a minute or two (unless you’re severely allergic to bee stings).
That last treatment, which is being offered by Thomas Jefferson University Hospital’s integrative health center, is one of many now under attack from snobbish authorities like Dr. Steven Novella.
Novella, a professor at Yale, goes so far as to call health professionals who offer CAM therapies “witch doctors.”
One of the big bones these doctors have to pick with some of the highly effective alternative and holistic treatments now available is that they’re “unproven” and have “little or no scientific evidence” to support their use.
But as an eAlert reader, you know that what’s really “mystical” is how so many extremely risky meds, both Rx and OTC, manage to get approved despite scant evidence of safety and even less of effectiveness.
Take Celebrex for instance. It’s the only “COX-2 inhibitor” left on the market. Others, like Vioxx, were snatched from the pharmacy shelves after tens of thousands who took them died from heart attacks and strokes.
After a ten-year “safety trial” to see if Celebrex is just as dangerous, it was declared to be A-OK last year. But if anyone bothered to read the details, they would find out that nearly 70 percent of the people in that trial dropped out!
And if that’s not a hocus-pocus declaration of safety, I don’t know what would be!
On the other hand, consider acupuncture. It works by stimulating your own ability to heal by applying needles (or pressure) to certain points on the body. It’s been used for thousands of years to relieve pain and lower inflammation. The side effects are nil to none, and loads of research has been done to back up the effectiveness of this ancient practice.
Yet nay-sayers are more than happy to jump in with comments that treatments like acupuncture represent “a victory of marketing over truth.”
The good news is that the evidence backing the use of CAM treatments, supplements and non-drug approaches to treating all kinds of conditions is now so strong that even the feds can’t ignore it any more.
The NIH National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health has acknowledged that time-tested treatments such as massage therapy, Tai chi, acupuncture and yoga — to name a few — are effective ways to treat conditions ranging from arthritis to back pain to migraines.
And not only are many of these CAM treatments being offered in mainstream medical centers, but they’re starting to be covered by more health policies, too.
So if your doctor tries to discredit them, it may be time to find one who’s more enlightened.
“Medicine with a side of mysticism: Top hospitals promote unproven therapies” Casey Ross, Max Blau, Kate Sheridan, March 7, 2017, STAT, statnews.com
