Reader's Digest: 6 Rules for Using Alternative Remedies Wisely...REALLY?

Reader's Digest: 6 Rules for Using Alternative Remedies Wisely....REALLY?

This article in the October issue of Reader’s Digest is typical of the all-too-often back-handed praise the traditional allopathic medical model bestows on alternative therapies. The main message to patients is to use alternative therapy with caution; implying that it may be dangerous and/or possibly delay real medical care at the risk of peril, at worst…and a waste of money, at best.

 

Except for #1 and  #4 below, I don’t take issue with their specific rules of engagement. Those two aside, the remaining rules are reasonable. So what is my problem here, and why blog about it?

 

The most glaring and rankling observation I make is the holier than thou blanket statements. After all, shouldn’t the patient follow the same 6 rules for using medical doctors, drugs and surgeries?

(Note: my comments are in RED)

 

6 Rules for Using Alternative Remedies Wisely

from Reader's Digest October 2011  Kathi Kemper, MD, chair of the complementary and integrative medicine department at Wake Forest School of Medicine

1. Discuss it with your doctor first. Most physicians are surprisingly open-minded about complementary therapies, our experts say. I suspect that many MD’s may be open-minded to alternative therapies, but certainly not most. I suggest it often boils down to geographic location and community mindset; ie. if the community is prone to alternative therapies, it will attract more MD’s open to them as well. Always tell your doctor about herbs or supplements you’re taking because some interact with medications. How is this any different than telling your doctor about other medications that you may be on from other MD’s? Ask for evidence. Ask your MD for independent evidence (NOT corporate sponsored studies performed and published by the pharmaceutical and medical supply manufacturers...which are beyond biased, and outright corrupt) that supports their recommendations as well. While the medical community speaks as if all they do is supported by hard evidence, only 15% of everything MD’s do (from drugs, to surgeries, tests, procedures, etc) has the type of double blind evidence that they demand of all other forms of therapy.

2. Testimonials are not enough.  If you’re not sure whether something is legit, check it out on the site for the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (nccam.nih.gov) or the National Library of Medicine’s Medline Plus (nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus) or other evidence-based sites, such as mayoclinic.com. Beware of red flags. Clearly, the same is true for all medical treatments as well…only more so, because the fatal and disabling consequences of medical care gone awry are way more prevalent…beyond comparison!

3. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Remember that problems that have stumped medical science, like Alzheimer’s, are magnets for snake oil salesmen. Request references. Again, it is foolish, and more dangerous, to believe otherwise of medical treatments.

4. A legitimate practitioner will be able to offer references from at least two medical doctors and be willing to work with your physician.  A good place to start your search: the Consortium of Academic Health Centers for Integrative Medicine (imconsortium.org).Choose herbs and supplements wisely. While it can’t hurt to ask your MD if they have heard anything (good or bad) about a particular alternative health practitioner, their word should not be final. It is too often akin to asking the manufacturers of Coke if you should drink Pepsi. Opinions and referrals of satisfied patients, for both medical and alternative practitioners, are always a good idea.

5. The label should include a list of ingredients and an expiration or best-used-by date. Keep in mind that these products aren’t regulated as tightly as drugs; ones from developing countries sometimes contain heavy metals like lead, other herbs, or pharmaceuticals. Add a layer of protection by consulting consumerlab.com, which tests supplements for contamination and strength. Its website provides buying advice; $2.25 per month gives you access to all its reports. One should always know as much as possible about what one puts in one’s mouth! I suggest it would be very difficult to find any statistically significant incidence of harm done by supplements. On the other hand, prescription medications (mostly, used as prescribed (>100,000 deaths/year)…but also legal prescriptions used illegally (~40,000deaths/year) ) are one of the leading causes of death in the United States. Again, there is no comparison between the pandemic deaths caused by pharmaceutical drugs and miniscule incidence of harm caused by herbs and supplements. Understand the limits. One of the greatest fallacies perpetuated by the medical community is that medical care fixes anything and everything that ails you.  Let's be clear: the only thing that heals you, is YOU.

The medical model is a disease model whose invasive interventions (drugs/surgery) work to coerce the body to comply. In extreme cases, these major medical interventions can border on the miraculous, buying time for the body’s immune and healing responses to kick in. If the problem/disease/injury has exceeded your body’s ability to heal itself, extreme medical measures may only succeed in keeping you alive longer than you wish. More importantly, this invasive and chemically-based model applied to everyday health has proven disastrous.

Alternative health practitioners typically guide patients to lifestyle choices that promote health and direct care at supporting the body’s innate capacity for self-regulation and self-healing.

We would be better served if we truly understood the limitations of medical interventions.

6. Complementary medicine should be just that—an addition to conventional care. It shouldn’t be a substitute for seeing your doctor….and seeing your doctor, having and passing regular scans of all sorts, and taking routine prescription drugs shouldn’t be equated with being healthy, or disarm you from taking responsibility for your health by committing to a lifetime, lifestyle of health and wellness.

Upshot: people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.

Modern medicine needs to stop creating fear and casting aspersions about Alternative Therapies and look to cleaning its own house.

Modern medicine is the leading cause of death in America. The statistics are more than frightening. This statistic alone is mind numbing:

“In the US, over 12,000people die every week (624,000/year) from health care gone awry. These aren’t people who die because of the illness or injury that brings them to the doctor. These are people who die because of the care they receive once they get there.”

Placebo & Research

Placebo & Research

It has been my experience that two of the most common questions asked of alternative health practitioners are:

1. What is the research?

2. Is it placebo?

These are excellent and appropriate questions. But, with that said, these questions are ingrained in us, like knee-jerk responses, to ask of all alternative therapies, serving as tools/weapons used by the prevailing medical paradigm to undermine alternative treatments and distract from the dangers of allopathic medicine.

Let me explain.

First, and most obviously, I am reasonably sure that most patients are not asking these same questions of their doctors about all prescribed drugs and recommended courses of care; from statins to anti-depressants, from chemotherapy to radiation, from cardiac catheterization to bypass, from mammograms to prostate screens, and on-and-on. It is assumed that the research exists and supports the treatment, and that treatment is, not only, not placebo, but better than placebo.

In the same way the knee-jerk response has been ingrained to ask alternative practitioners, it has been ingrained into us to trust medicine, and specifically not ask doctors.

Throughout their history, the AMA and its extension, the FDA, have suppressed and persecuted alternative treatments that challenge medical dominance. One of their most powerful tools has been controlling and denying funds to research alternative therapies. Their consistent justification has been: ‘just by looking at it gives it a level of credibility we don’t want to promote.’ The self-serving result has been their mantra ‘there is no research to support... (fill in the alternative therapy).’ How convenient?

At the same time, the quality and reliability of medical research and its peer review have been totally corrupted by their highly profitable incestuous relationship with BigPharma. It is corporate science, plain and simple. And, it has emphasized research on dangerous pharmaceuticals and invasive medical procedures to the willful exclusion of the empirical and scientific evidence of natural remedies that work.

In what I believe is one of the most damning statements ever made, in September 2001, the editors of the 12 most prestigious medical journals published a unified message titled Sponsorship, Authorship and Accountability:

“We are concerned that the current intellectual environment in which clinical research is conceived, study subjects are recruited and the data analyzed and reported (or, not reported) may threaten (scientific) objectivity….In light of that truth, the use of clinical trials primarily for marketing makes a mockery of clinical investigation and is a misuse of a powerful tool.”

And yet, they continue to print and disseminate what they know to be fraudulent research that results in widespread use of unsupported and lethal treatments. At the same time they propagate skepticism, doubt and fear about alternative therapies.

As for the dreaded placebo…

The fundamental principle and underlying effect of placebo is as a catalyst that activates the mind/body’s innate capacity for self-regulation and self-healing. Placebo pills alone have been 30 to 90% effective. And, the placebo effect for successful outcomes has been estimated to occur in 30 to 70% of all therapeutic treatments. That is, that the patient got better because of the placebo effect, and not the specific treatment. In addition, “A paper published in the October 19 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine – entitled “What’s In Placebos: Who Knows?” calls into question the foundation upon which much of medicine rests (comparative testing to placebo), by showing that there is no standard behind the standard – no standard for the placebo.”

It is sad and emblematic of the major problem of the medical model that it denigrates the placebo effect and uses it in a pejorative manner to undermine and cast doubt on other effective forms of therapy, up to and including alternative treatments for cancer. And while patients routinely ask alternative practitioners whether or not their treatment is placebo, the patients are distracted from asking their medical doctor critical questions regarding their medical treatment:

1. What are my absolute risks verses benefits of treatment?

2. What is the NNT? the number of patients needed to treat to see the outcome you are saying?

Bearing in mind that hospitals are killing 12,000 patients per week (624,000/year), as a result of the care they received and not because of what brought them to the hospital in the first place, one can see the supreme importance of these questions!

In my opinion there is no better treatment than placebo to activate the mind/body’s life-force capacity to heal itself. The question then becomes not if the therapy is placebo, but (with, or without, supporting research) how often does it succeed in improving the health of the patient?