Additional Aternative Medicine

A doctor friend of mine (most of my friends are doctors) discovered in his research that alternative medicine is not so much alternative as additional. Most people who resort to it when they have discernible disease do not hesitate to avail themselves of orthodox medicine also; in effect, they back two horses in the hope that one of them will win.

Alternative medicine is as popular as ever. It is an industry generating many tens of billions a year. This is surprising in one way, but unsurprising in another. It is surprising because we live in an age of scientific rationality, in which orthodox medicine has powers and abilities undreamt of even fifty years ago. You might have thought that the philosophy that brought about this astonishing transformation would have become universally accepted as a result, but this is far from being the case.

Great as the transformation has been, the fundamental law of human existence – one man, one death – remains the same. Moreover, many chronic conditions such as osteoarthritis and irritable bowel syndrome, to name only two, are imperfectly relieved, and never entirely cured, by modern medicine; it is only to be expected, therefore, that people should look elsewhere.

The historical reasons for the success of a movement such as homoeopathy are not difficult to understand. Its doctrine was developed at a time when orthodox medicine had little understanding of the causes of disease and its therapies were often brutal and even harmful. People were purged at both ends of the alimentary tract, bled and blistered. Surgery was horrific. They probably died almost as often of their treatment as of their disease.

By contrast, homoeopathy was harmless. It caused no side-effects and if people recovered spontaneously of their disease, as they often did, their recovery could be attributed to the treatment. If they did not recover – well, everyone has to die sometime, and at least the treatment would not have added to their suffering.

But I think there is more to the continuing popularity of alternative medicine than this. I suspect that a good part of its popularity is an implicit rejection, or even fear, of what many see as the inhumanly mechanistic philosophy of orthodox medicine. It is a widespread criticism of the latter that it fails to treat the ‘whole’ person: that, on the contrary, it treats him as if he were just a specimen of something or other.

This criticism is partly right and partly wrong. All doctors are taught and know perfectly well in the abstract, that disease is multifactorial and that a person’s habits, beliefs, culture and individual psychology affect the way in which it manifests itself. Good doctors take this into account. But in practice, a mechanical approach often prevails. An internist of my acquaintance calls the MRI scanner ‘the answering machine’: every patient is automatically put into it and out comes the diagnosis. A patient feels as if he is only a part to be assembled on a production line. No one is interested in him as an individual.

Against this, alternative medicine seems warmer and friendlier. Alternative practitioners seem to have more time to devote to their patients than the orthodox. Moreover, the theories on which they work imply a mystery if not the mystical: there are or things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, doctor, especially where I am concerned. My case is special, not just a run-of-the-mill case of disease x, y, or z. Alternative medicine is perfectly adapted to an age of neo-paganism, to the needs of people who claim to be spiritual but not religious.

That is why scientific effort to prove the efficacy of alternative treatments, by such methods as double-blind trials, are beside the point. Should such a trial prove that an alternative treatment is effective, it will soon be absorbed into orthodox medicine and thereby lose its mystique. But if it should prove ineffective, faith in it will remain unaffected, just as those who predict the end of the world on such and such a date are quite unperturbed in their faith when the end fails to happen on the date predicted.

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Does the continued popularity of alternative medicine matter? Overwhelmingly (it seems to me) the answer is no. There may be a few cases in which a belief in it prevents someone from seeking treatment for a serious but treatable disease, and thereby causes avoidable death. But as I have said, most believers in alternative medicine also avail themselves of the orthodox variety. Supposedly healing herbs and minerals can be poisonous (I have seen people poisoned with lead and arsenic by Ayurvedic practitioners). But these cases are few and far between, certainly by comparison with those of people harmed by orthodox medicine, even though the number of people saved by alternative medicine approaches zero. I have long since ceased to be irritated by the irrationality of others in this matter, for we are all of us irrational about something and all of us in need of consolation at some time or other in our lives.