Alternative medicine / healing

[Wyrmfang]

Then of course it's also a question of the person who prescribes or recommends these things, as many doctors are "sponsored" by certain med companies.

Even doctors? Any data for this? Although I wouldn´t be surprised. An obvious thing is that when the great majority of medical research is funded by medical companies, researchers are often under strong pressures. And as they are people like everyone else, they often give up. For example, if the leader of a research group is already paid off, he asks to use your data, and does this in a fabricating way, very very few people risk their job and income possibly for the rest of their life. Namely, unless you can prove, who is guilty, it is you who gets the bad reputation for being difficult and disrespecting.

But this and what I wrote above are political problems, so they have nothing to do with the theoretical question of the objectivity of science. In the eyes of the dull majority these things of course do invalidate science, as people generally conceive objectivity in the very naive way of "being always true" and they don´t see that the objectivity of science is vulnerable to societal factors. Even the businessmen in the medical companies are not always that selfish but simply stupid; I know cases when they would like to fund a research, and the researcher has to explain that the nature of scientific research is such that you cannot decide beforehand what the result is, and this comes as a sincere surprise. That is, they take science merely as something that gives a "valid" stamp to their product. What then bugs me quite a lot is, that when precisely more proper science (not only medicine, but sociology, economics etc.) would be desperately deeded, people in the alternative med. circles blame "the scientific method".

[Heith]

Even doctors? Any data for this?

Well, yes. Here is a few examples:

GlaxoSmithKline in China (bribed doctors and authorities for over 300 million euros.). Same company is being charged for bribing doctors in Poland (2014) but I am not sure if this is solved yet.

Stryker Corp (violating the FCPA by bribing doctors and other government officials in five countries to obtain or retain business and make $7.5 million in illicit profits. Stryker agreed to pay more than $13.2 million to settle the SEC's charges. (10/24/13))

Biomet (SEC charged the Warsaw, Ind.-based medical device company with violating the FCPA when its subsidiaries and agents bribed public doctors in Argentina, Brazil, and China for nearly a decade to win business. (3/26/12))

Smith & Nephew (violating the FCPA when its U.S. and German subsidiaries bribed public doctors in Greece for more than a decade to win business. The company and its U.S. subsidiary agreed to pay more than $22 million to settle civil and criminal cases. (2/6/12)

Johnson & Johnson – (SEC charged the New Brunswick, N.J.-based pharmaceutical company for bribing public doctors in several European countries to win contracts for their products and paying kickbacks to Iraq to illegally obtain business. J&J agreed to pay $70 million to settle cases brought by the SEC and criminal authorities. (4/8/11)

As you perhaps remember, it's not too long ago since any kind of gifts from medical companies to doctors were banned in Finland.

[Nokkonen]

All right, we are back on track. Thanks for mediating!

We are talking completely past each other. I´m interested (in this conversation) on theretical epistemic claims and you are interested in the first person practical point of view.

I agree with you, Fra Wyrmfang. This thread started from personal experiences, but of course we can divert it into talking about theoretical epistemic claims too. No harm done there, I just feel like you took a couple of my sentences and put me in a box with a big label on top and I wanted to get that cleared out of the way so we can hopefully continue talking about this because it is such a fascinating topic.

If something proves to have a real effect, it is of course at this point unknown how it has that effect. However, where I must entirely rest my case is, that it can always be fully studied by science whether something has an effect besides the placebo in the first place.

I agree with you on this one too, and like said, I do "believe" in the scientific method in general, as it means research that is subject to criteria like being as free as possible of individual bias, being repeatable (is that a word??!), able to be proven false, and that is subjected to peer review. And yes, of course it can be studied whether something works or not besides the placebo. It is a great way to learn about the world.

Still, I insist that there is a place for some forms of "alternative health" in the world (and by that I mean anything that is said to have an effect, but hasn't [yet?] been proven scientific evidence), although much more should be done in alternative health circles to be responsible about it, especially regarding claims on how much it can help a person.

I'm most interested in nutritional healing because of personal reasons (and I'm going to disregard homeopathy for a moment because it's an easy target and not very exciting to talk about). Now, I have been loosely following what happens in the field of atopic syndrome research for years. It's one of those conditions that is chronic, can be mild at best, but at worst it can make a person's life a living hell. When one talks to a doctor, they tell that it just comes and goes and the best thing they can do is to prescribe medicine to control the symptoms, but that's pretty much all that can be done. In the science side of atopia research, things like probiotics and Omega-3 oils have been studied, and it has been found that neither of them has had a strong healing effect, although they have had an effect on the condition. Probably more studies like that will keep coming.

But I liken that kind of study to species biology where one thing is taken in isolation vs. ecosystems approach. As far as bacteria are concerned, human body is an ecosystem. We have, after all, more bacteria than human in us. If claims in alternative health are correct that bacteria are vital for health, even more vital than we know, and responsible for things ranging from ADHD to eczema, this ecosystem idea gets interesting. That's why I think that studying effects of a single supplement is not the answer, although it is interesting in its own right, and alternative/complementary health has really been a forerunner in experimenting with more holistic solutions. Undoubtedly, research will follow. In fact, I think many things, like honey and probiotics, enter into scientific studies just because alternative health approaches have found help from them.

The main question therefore is: if one has practiced years something that works for him, and eventually it becomes studied scientifically with negative result, does he still keep claiming that the effect is real and science is "too crude" to acknowledge it?

I don't know. It depends on a person. Personally, I would definitely keep using/doing whatever was working.

I think more interesting question would be, however, what the responsibility of an alternative health practitioner is when things from alternative field are debunked. Should they just admit they are wrong? Perhaps move their method out of the field of medical claims into the spiritual, as is the case with energy medicine?

Like Heith said:

Sadly, I have seen what can happen when modern medicine is completely rejected; I know a little kid who is now deaf because his parents refused to take him to the doctor when he had an ear infection.

Yep. That is pretty irresponsible. Also, I wish I could just slap anti-vaccination people on the head and make them get back on the vaccination schedule. Future gets scarier and scarier with every little snotty-nose without proper immunization.

I think the real problem with many alternative approaches is that claim to do more than they actually can, like the Gerson Protocol cancer treatment that the Wellness Warrior promoted. (Excellent analysis on her story: http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2015/ ... ssed-away/) When AH leads to people deciding not to get treated through conventional medicine, it's downright tragic. There's not nearly enough emphasis on having alternative medicine SUPPORT conventional treatment instead of supplanting it.

I haven't looked into homeopathy actually ever because I don't believe in it. (I have had 2 friends who, after everything else failed, got help from it, but perhaps I have 10 friends who didn't and just never mentioned it.) Well, today I did, and they do seem to make claims for more effect than they are scientifically able to produce. And I can definitely see that being a problem, especially since they also make it look like conventional medicine in that they give out these little pills and directions on how to take them, just like real doctors.

Anyway, this post is getting awfully long and I haven't even started with angel balls and prayer healing so I better stop here. Almost.

Then of course it's also a question of the person who prescribes or recommends these things, as many doctors are "sponsored" by certain med companies.

That is a fact. Doctors in Finland have been wined and dined and showered with gifts by medical companies who have also been largely responsible for their professional development conferences. I mean I don't think anybody has been asked or pressured into preferring one brand of medicine over another, but human mind is susceptible for these kinds of things. It's changing, though, at least in Finland, with anti-corruption measures.

In USA, the situation seems to be bit different because most of the doctors are private practitioners whose income depend on the services they provide (?) and whose student loans to medical school are astronomical. I talked with this one doctor who said that it's easy to get into the money making bandwagon and it seems kinda necessary with all that debt hanging over one's head. From patients point of view, I've talked with some American friends about this and they say that one has to be really careful of not getting unnecessary tests etc. done, or getting scared with the scare tactics some doctors use to get people to come again and do more. I wonder if this contributes to people getting paranoid about "the Big Pharma," vaccines and all. At least here it doesn't seem that the experts are all that trustworthy.

What do you people think is the biggest threat in alternative medicine and do you have theories on why it is so popular?

[Wyrmfang]

Still, I insist that there is a place for some forms of "alternative health" in the world (and by that I mean anything that is said to have an effect, but hasn't [yet?] been proven scientific evidence), although much more should be done in alternative health circles to be responsible about it, especially regarding claims on how much it can help a person.

I haven´t contested this. Actually contesting it would mean thinking that science is now perfect, which would of course be absurd.

But why this kind of personal/pre-scientific study should be associated with "alternative medicine" when this term carries all the weight of the absurdities related to it. The whole term "alternative" seems to refer to a kind "different scientific principle" (which of course is never explicated but is simply used as justification for knowledge claims, usually by relativizing knowledge in general), which is of course not the case if something is simply not studied yet.

Deep-ecological thinking is of course not in contradiction with science, although historically natural sciences tended to disregard the holistic nature of nature.

The main question therefore is: if one has practiced years something that works for him, and eventually it becomes studied scientifically with negative result, does he still keep claiming that the effect is real and science is "too crude" to acknowledge it?

I think more interesting question would be, however, what the responsibility of an alternative health practitioner is when things from alternative field are debunked. Should they just admit they are wrong?

Isn´t this exactly the same question I asserted (if by wrong we mean wrong on epistemological level concerning facts)? I think this is what should be done. For example psychoanalysis is not generally mocked (well, some scientists do mock it) because it does not claim to be a science at all but a hermeneutic theory on the first person level. It has a kind of truth-claims but not as objective factual claims. It of course entirely legitimate to practice whatever works for oneself, even if it is irrational from the factual viewpoint. Namely, people in general are anything but completely rational, and so the completely rational ways of acting in the world is not anything to be desired. On the contrary, if one tries to live so, the result is just worse kind of irrationality.

Perhaps move their method out of the field of medical claims into the spiritual, as is the case with energy medicine?

I don´t think this would change anything if it is still claimed that this "spiritual" has a causal effect on the material body not admitted by the scientific community. Or is energy medicine something like meditation, purely mental practices? Then it´s of course legitimate as long as people don´t claim it can disqualify the need for physical treatments.

What do you people think is the biggest threat in alternative medicine and do you have theories on why it is so popular?

Do you mean alternative medicine as a whole or the danger of some particular phenomena on the field?