Alternative medicine: under the microscope

Natural Health, Sept-Oct, 1998

Natural Health: Let's talk about the relative safety of drug therapies and alternative therapies.

Mehl-Madrona: It's clear that, for the most part, alternative therapies are safer than pharmaceutical therapies. The biggest problem in the complementary medicine world is not the toxicity of the therapies but the failure of some practitioners to realize that when a treatment doesn't work, they need to make referrals or to reassess the situation.

The treatments themselves are all very safe. I work in geriatrics, and I find that as we slowly take older patients off of pharmaceuticals and substitute herbs and vitamins and dietary therapies, Therapeutic Touch, yoga, guided imagery, and exercise, we eliminate an enormous number of the symptoms that they had from taking the 15 drugs they were carrying around in their paper bags to all their doctor appointments.

Sampson: The question is whether the effectiveness of a therapy is worth the risk. In the case of standard therapy, risks and benefits are part of every evaluation, whereas with the so-called complementaries or the fringe methods, we don't always have that, because many of the practitioners don't report their complications. This has been shown repeatedly with difficulties from chiropractic manipulation and also with acupuncture. And these are published in our literature.

The question really is benefit versus risk and benefit versus cost. If you eliminate the straw men that have been raised here, which means the straw men of bad medicine, which I'm sure we both oppose, and if you eliminate bad medicine, then there's no question, in my mind, that scientific biomedicine is worth the risk. Most of these dubious methods will be shown not to be worth either the risk or the cost.

Natural Health: In a recent report, 100,000 deaths were attributed to the use of prescription drags, making it the fourth leading cause of death in the United States.

Sampson: Again, you have to put it in context. If you eliminate all modern pharmaceuticals and modern methods, and just rely on the ancient traditional methods of other cultures, then you will have the true measurement of the worth of the two methods. There's no question, and it's been shown repeatedly, that the life expectancy of people in areas where modem medicine is not practiced is much shorter than the life expectancy in modern countries where adequate medicine is available. Granted, much of this is public health medicine, but even aside from the public health medicine, there's a remarkable difference.

If you take the report on prescription drugs that showed all those deaths and break them down as to cause, to really be fair, you'd have to eliminate all the end-stage heart disease people who died of arrhythmias, and you'd have to take away all the people in end-stage cancer, who may have died of an overdose of morphine or perhaps from the effect of complications of infection in an attempt to save their lives.

Mehl-Madrona: The Center for Disease Control has estimated that two-thirds of the Caesareans in this country are unnecessary And Caesarean delivery increases the risk of death to the mother by 2 to 11 times, depending on the study that you read. And I don't think that's because doctors are practicing bad medicine. I think it's because the conventional health care system is oriented toward increasingly technological interventions.