Science fiction: after spending half a billion taxpayer dollars, alternative medicine gurus still can't prove their methods work. How convenient

Washington Monthly, April, 2002 by Chris Mooney

Therein lies the problem implicit in testing popular CAM treatments--do too good a job, and you could find yourself out of work. So perhaps it's small wonder that many CAM proponents have figured out that the "ideal outcome" for any test is one that's inconclusive (or that can be made to seem that way). The past few years are rife with examples of scientific studies that have carefully debunked worthless practices, but which proponents continue to promote.

For example, last April the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a study by Vanderbilt University psychology professor Richard Shelton that found that the popular herb St. John's Wort had no effect on major depression. Yet rather than accept his findings, groups like the Council for Responsible Nutrition (a dietary-supplement industry trade association) circled the wagons and denounced the study--along with Shelton's recommendation to discontinue the use of St. John's Wort until positive benefit can be proven.

The practice of reflexology postulates a correspondence between specific "zones" on the hands and feet which, when pressed, can heal ailments in other parts of the body. But it, too, has been tested and failed. A recent study in Complementary Therapies in Medicine proved that reflexologists were unable to identify specific illnesses in patients, and another in Respiratory Medicine revealed that reflexology fared no better than a placebo in curing bronchial asthma. But the 25,000-member International Institute of Reflexology in St. Petersburg, Fla., remains unconvinced.

Another discredited treatment is therapeutic touch, in which a practitioner's hands move over a subject's body to "decongest" or "balance" the patient's "energy field." As ridiculous as that sounds, it took a 1998 article in JAMA, based on the science project of a nine-year-old schoolgirl, to debunk it. In an accompanying note, JAMA's editor Dr. George Lundberg commented, "practitioners should disclose these results to patients, third-party payers should question whether they should pay for this procedure, and patients should save their money unless or until additional honest experimentation demonstrates an actual effect." Yet many top nursing school continue to teach and promote it.

The list goes on and on. Practices such as colonic irrigation (running a tube through a patient's rectum in order to "cleanse" the intestines with warm water), iridology (diagnosing illness by studying the iris of the human eye), and ear candling (inserting a burning candle in the ear canal to remove "impurities" from the brain and sinuses) have all been debunked as useless or dangerous (the FDA has even banned the importation of ear candles). That hasn't stopped many people from practicing them.

Other CAM techniques probably don't even merit study. For instance, as I waited to meet Dr. Cai at the George Washington center, I picked up a pamphlet on homeopathy, which, for the uninitiated, is a water-based treatment that uses substances ranging from belladonna and garlic to zinc and ambergris. The catch is that most of these potions are diluted to the point that they're just water--one tenet of homeopathy being that substances somehow become more powerful as they're diluted. No matter that this violates fundamental laws of chemistry. Homeopaths insist that water "remembers" the presence of a substance it once contained and uses it to cure illness. Even proponents have trouble explaining how that's possible. Yet legitimate medical schools like George Washington University continue to promote it, while the NIH wastes money studying it.