It has officially begun again. As i sat down to nibble on my delicious smelling toast and have a power-sip of my muscle generating milk and sustagen, i was – as has happened nearly once a year since i was long enough to be frustrated by it – slapped in the face by an article of the benefits of natural therapies. Ooo has that created tension in the minds of some readers already? But i haven’t even told you that acupuncture doesn’t work yet!
Natural therapies are a group of therapies which are not widely accepted in traditional medicine and science. Yeah ok, i know that is a sweeping definition of it. But for examples of natural therapies check this out (though i have considerable distrust of some of these listings – for example there are few people who would consider psychotherapy as delivered by a trained professional, a natural therapy). Some of the more common therapies people will be familiar with are acupuncture, homoeopathy, naturopathy, reiki and massage. Many of these therapies aim to treat people in a more holistic way, which is that they treat a combination of the body and the mind or they consider a range of factors that traditional medicine might ignore.
So why do these alternate forms of medicine seem to upset me so? Thanks for asking. To explain it, it is probably worthwhile briefly explaining the placebo effect. The placebo effect is the provision of a fake treatment or substance that produces positive health effects in the individual. Most commonly in research studies, the placebo is a sugar-pill (note: if you eat M&M’s, you will not be curing yourself!) or fake operation where a small incision might be made but no procedure conducted. This effect can be tremendously powerful with some studies reporting up to 50% improvement when using the placebo alone. This can often be comparable to the therapy being delivered. And it is this, my fellow jelly-beings, that is the crux of the natural therapies debate.
Natural therapies DO work. Well they kind of work. Ok only some of them kind of work. I recently read a book called “Trick or Treatment” which was a review of the research on a few major natural therapies and their evidence base (I recommend skimming this book if you are interested in this stuff – it is a bit of a rambling read at times). I was actually quite surprised to see that acupuncture had a very limited evidence base. But when i thought about why this surprised me, i realised i’d fallen into into a classic thinking trap. I thought it worked because i knew so many people who had had it done and seemed to get some relief out of it (see this post on availability heuristic). But when i looked at the principles of acupuncture, it is actually based in chinese-medicine and the idea of meridians and chi and energy-flow in the body. Quite an ethereal concept indeed! The research has shown that there is a very strong placebo effect involved in this process (as shown by creating fake needles that do not penetrate the skin properly but feel very much like proper acupuncture). Yet there is certainly evidence that for some conditions, acupuncture can be effective ABOVE AND BEYOND the placebo effect. They just don’t know the mechanism by which it works.
Let’s go back to the start though, with the article in the newspaper that got me all hot and bothered about natural therapies. Immunisations. No, immunisations are not natural therapies! But nearly once a year the papers start running with the debate of whether to vaccinate your child. You should. You really, really should. The fear of vaccination is that it can CAUSE health problems – an argument which has been particularly strong for autism. The problem with this though is that it shows an absolute lack of understanding of cause and effect. For example, the age that many children get vaccinated is also around the same age that autistic symptoms begin to be identified. So vaccination isn’t actually causing autism, but rather just happening at a similar time (the classic example is that does the rooster’s crow cause the sun to rise?). Vaccination has been shown through stacks of research (like that from the World Health Organisation) to be a safe means to protect your child from disease and, to be frank, death. But what has vaccination got to do with all this?
Because of the scaremongering created around vaccinations, people turn to alternative therapies. Like homoeopathy. Homoeopathy works on the principle that like cures like so they take an ingredient believed to help cure something and water it down to the point that (as Dr Karl described it), it’s like taking a thimble-full of something that might actually work and tipping it into the biggest lake in the world and then drinking the water and expecting something to happen. There is no evidence that this therapy works. And the scary thing is that rather than vaccinating children, people are using this instead.
“It works! My child recovered/never got (insert a preventable disease)”
Flawed point. It works because everyone else is protected agains the disease and so it is not around to catch it. Herd immunisation is the idea that out of 99 people who are protected from something, there is a buffering effect for the 1 that doesnt. What happens though is that when enough people don’t get vaccinated, herd immunity doesn’t work as well. As i heard someone report it on the radio – we are re-introducing diseases that we have effectively cured, diseases which 50-100 years ago wiped out millions and millions of people.
This has been a rambling and disjointed attempt at creating an argument. I apologise for that – i got excited! This idea though is probably one of the most unpopular points of view that i have. People always come back with “so what if it placebo, it works.” And that is an excellent point. I don’t argue with or judge anyone who wants to try a treatment to improve their health. What i object to is when practitioners of these therapies make claims that a) they cannot support with research, b) charge excessive amounts of money/encourage a large number of sessions and c) provide advice that can potentially be harmful or life-threatening (for example ‘Trick or Treatment’ reported a number of acupuncturists recommending people alter the dosage of the medicine provided to them by a doct0r). Western medicine doesn’t know it all. But it sure knows a lot. People who claim to be able to cure all sorts of things without any proof that they can do so should not be your first port of call for illness. Definitely something to consider i think but i dont think they should be your priority.
Think differently about anything i’ve said? Let me know – i’m happy to have my arguments challenged!
Meanderings of Life 