Why do we spend $34 billion in (sic) alternative medicine?

[Orrex]

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/WellnessNews/story?id=8215703&page=1

"We" in this case means "Americans," but the article is horrifying in any case.

[mr blur]

1. ... when you could be spending it on a decent Healthcare system?

Not that we don't have whackjobs over here, of course.

Sad that people have "a mistrust of the medical establishment" but will trust any old crackpot with a "natural" caure.

[Orsino]

13. Well, no matter how good our care delivery systems are...

..there's gonna be plenty that modern medicine can't treat, or can't treat quickly enough or cheaply enough for the desperate and/or gullible.

I wonder how that US$34 billion figure would be affected by single-payer health care?

[TZ]

2. This puts the lie to the old myth about the alternative medicine

practicioners not being out for a profit. In fact they make as much money as Big Pharma with FAR LESS regulation on it.It really pisses me off to hear people bitch and moan about Big Pharma not being regulated enough while these snake oil merchants can legally take ground up rat droppings and sell it as a cure for H1N1 and NOT get in trouble.

[Warpy]

3. How about because a five dollar bottle of vitamins or herbs

is cheaper than a hundred dollar doctor visit, or even a thirty dollar copay for a doctor visit?

People have been priced out of real medicine. It's a perfect opportunity for the quacks to move in.

[salvorhardin]

4. I have a bit of a problem with this study, or at least the reporting

Not sure which since I haven't read the study so I'll blame the reporting for now. Here's what I had an issue with:

According to the NCCAM study, only one-third of the out-of-pocket costs that adults spend on alternative complementary medicine went to practitioners such as naturopaths. The other two-thirds went to "self-care" purchases of alternative medicine products, which include classes such as yoga and nonvitamin, nonmineral, natural products such as fish oil, glucosamine and echinacea.

I don't like the idea of lumping in yoga and some other physical exercise classes in with the rest of the woo. There's a difference, especially with yoga, in that it's physical exercise and meditation. While the philosophy of yoga is most certainly pseudo-mystical mumbo-jumbo, people who participate in yoga and other forms of woo that at least encourage movement (tai chi, gyrotonics and pilates come to mind) often do see quality of life improvements. Not because of the woo, but because they're moving and sometimes learning how to meditate (i.e. manage stress). Granted, these are all low-impact exercises so they're not going to see any real cardio-vascular gains, but anything that gets people moving is a good thing and there I'm willing to forgive quite a bit of woo. There's also a social aspect to these sorts of exercises which may be psychologically beneficial too.

I don't think it was wrong to classify yoga et. al. as "alternative", I just wish so many different things weren't all lumped together.

[SheilaT]

14. That certainly brings up the question of

what exactly constitutes mainstream, and what constitutes alternative medicine? Are vitamins made by Big Pharma mainstream but ones made by holistic companies alternative? What about all of the over the counter stuff most of us buy without a prescription, because we think it will make us feel better? What about physical therapy? Jogging?

There's not as clear a line between the two as some might think.

[Orrex]

15. The line is also a lot clearer than a lot of people recognize

Conventional medicine maintains rigorous standards of testing and analysis intended to gauge the efficacy of a given treatment. If the treatment has not been subjected to such testing and analysis, then there is generally no basis for identifying the treatment as conventional medicine. Further, there is usually little basis even for claiming with confidence that the treatment works as described or at all. In addition, a treatment must be consistent with existing science, which has been verified to a high degree of confidence.

I use the terms "generally" and "usually" here because I suspect that there may be aspects of conventional medicine that have not been subjected to this experimental scrutiny. These may be addressed individually if anyone cares to present them.

Vitamins are mainstream if the claims made about them are reproducible and are supported by empirical evidence. The manufacturer is irrelevant.


What standards does alternative medicine maintain? Broadly speaking, if a treatment is consistent with a holistic worldview and "seems to work," it is accepted by alternative medicine whether or not it can be independently verified. In practice, it doesn't matter whether the treatment conflicts with basic chemistry, physics, or biology, and in fact this conflict is touted as a repudiation of "left-brain thinking" or as evidence of some nefarious "scientistic" cover-up. Moreover, personal and subjective experience is taken as unimpeachable and authoritative while empirical analysis is decried as suspect and paternalistic. I invite an advocate of alternative medicine to articulate a different definition, with one caveat: claims about treating "the whole person" (etc.) are insufficient because such claims are vague and metaphorical and because they don't actually distinguish alternative medicine from conventional.


Your question about physical therapy makes no sense, because the standards by which one becomes a licensed physical therapist are very strict and require extensive study of anatomy and physiology--both of which are aspects of conventional medicine. Beyond that, the benefits of physical therapy are well supported by numerous studies.

Your question about jogging doesn't make any sense, either. The value of exercise is well documented empirically (as are the benefits of good nutrition, by the way).

[SheilaT]

18. I am trying to point out that many people do things like

take vitamins because they think it will do some good, not because there's scientific research supporting that belief. In addition, we are constantly learning from mainstream medicine that they are wrong about something or another. Remember several years ago when surprise, surprise, they decided that hormone replacement therapy was worse than nothing? It's stuff like that which also leads some people to turn to alternative medicine.

My comment about jogging and physical therapy was mainly referring to the fact that neither is a prescription medicine, but it was too vague a comment to make sense or be entirely relevant to the discussion

[Euromutt]

20. A lot of that is due to the execrable level of science reporting

The fact is that medical scientific findings in particular are subject to an extensive amount of caveats, which the mainstream media generally utterly fail to report; thus, what should read "researchers' tentative findings indicate that substance x may reduce risk of disease y," gets reported as "study shows x cure for y."

And it's in the nature of science that certain findings will later be proven wrong, and new hypotheses need to be explored. Sure, alt med never changes its tune, but that's because alt med isn't evidence-based, therefore, new evidence doesn't change the paradigm. I guess if you value consistency, being consistently wrong is better than being inconsistently right.

[Orrex]

5. In another thread (to which I will not link) I was asked why I think people choose alt met

I listed "price" as the first reason.

You're absolutely correct; in the face of astronomical (and rising) costs, people have little choice but to seek treatments that they can afford, even if those treatments are of limited or dubious efficacy.

[mr blur]

6. That may be true in the US,

but over here a prescription costs a flat rate of £7.20, whatever the meds. - If on benefits, no charge at all. Woo treatments will cost more than this. And there are still plenty of Woo buyers here. On the other hand, you can only get a presription if a doctor agrees that you have a problem, not because a psychic tell you that your chakras are misaligned.

[Orrex]

7. I'm offended by your casual dismissal of the problem of misaligned chakras

Where's your decency, man?

[mr blur]

8. I have no decency

My karma ran over my dogma.

[charlie]

9. I wonder how much pharmaceutical ads have to do with it

I returned from overseas after nearly a decade and a half and was surprised to find my hotel room TV blaring prescription ads around the clock. That wasn't the way things were when I left. All of them included a litany of side effects, some of them so long your lungs would ache with sympathy for the voiceover who had to read them in one breath. The warnings belied the golden-hued scenes of couples walking on the beach, and gave the impression that this was STRONG STUFF, to be handled as gingerly as poison.

Then you've got alt-medicines, which aren't obliged to prove their efficacy or required to divulge ill effects. Wholly innocuous because they're natural, and if they don't work, no harm, no foul.

By inserting themselves whole hog into the marketing arena while being hamstrung like that, pharmaceuticals can make feel-good "wholesome" products look attractive.

[csziggy]

10. And they have no compunction claiming the products are "natural there are no side effects!"

Read an ad today that blatantly made that claim. I've got to write the magazine the ad was in and complain to them.

[LeftishBrit]

16. Deadly nightshade is natural; so are cobras and rattlesnakes

Natural does NOT always mean safe to humans!

[dropkickpa]

19. Cliffs are natural too!

I could name LOADS of candidates in desperate need of cliff therapy!

[semillama]

11. This cartoon may explain:

http://www.marriedtothesea.com

[Q3JR4]

12. I got an idea.

Let's look at the statistics for each of the 50 states, find the towns with a higher birthrate of males than females, get samples of water from each of them, then mix them all together to make a "male serum." We should do the same for the towns with higher birthrates of females than males to get a "female serum". Let's dye the "male serum" green and the "female serum" blue so we can keep them apart. I can see the headlines now.

Announcing! Revolutionary! New!
Choose your baby's sex!
Male Child:    $30
Female Child:    $30
Guaranteed or 150% of your money back!<sup>*

*Original receipt, Original packaging, and notarized proof of the child's sex required to claim.</sup>

We could take a piece of that $36 billion. I would have already done it too if it wasn't for the fact that Richard Dawkins suggested it.

Q3JR4.
Also I have a conscious and that doesn't help for scams of this nature...

[Deep13]

17. Because we really are that fucking stupid. nt