Here’s an oped I wrote in this morning’s Daily Telegraph:
Few experiences are more disorientating than the erosion of faith. I have seen it many times in my encounters with religious believers: the fixed smile contradicted by a flicker of doubt in the eyes; the desperate appeal to half-remembered scriptures. And then the confession: “I’ve been doing some… questioning.”
Interestingly, many of them are women. The faith in question is the system of belief built around Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Women have always been attracted to alternative remedies. Now that faith is crumbling.
People still fill their bathroom cabinets with herbal cold remedies and nod respectfully at the words “rich in antioxidants”. But, like Mediterranean peasants who still make the sign of the cross but have lost all confidence in the Church, growing numbers no longer subscribe to the doctrines of alternative medicine.
These are difficult times for CAM. For the past 15 years, a multi-billion pound industry has fed off the claims of media nutritionists, barefoot doctors, Native American shamans and homeopaths. Suddenly, it finds itself threatened by the economic downturn: forced to choose between pricey detox courses and mortgage payments, customers have decided to put up with their toxins.
But CAM’s real problem is not shortage of money; it is shortage of proof. The information technology brilliantly exploited by unorthodox therapies is now being harnessed to spread the inconvenient truth that most of them don’t work.
Sceptics in the blogosphere have assembled a global daisy-chain of links exposing the falsehoods of alternative practitioners.
The BBC, which used to be strongly biased in favour of CAM, had these headlines on its website recently: “University professor criticises guides on alternative medicine backed by Prince Charles”; “Complementary therapy hampers IVF”; “Concern over HIV homeopathy role”.
When did the tide begin to turn? I reckon the consumers of CAM got the shock of their lives when the case against MMR - in which they had invested so heavily, not to say hysterically - collapsed. Dr Andrew Wakefield’s theory that the injection triggered autism tied together a whole bundle of anxieties: about “Big Pharma”, synthetic drugs, a blinkered medical establishment, lying politicians and autism, one of the least understood but most widely misdiagnosed child disorders of our age. Plus, Dr Wakefield’s campaign made such a good story. His claims felt right.
But they were wrong, it turned out - completely unsupported by large-scale studies. They were, however, supported by the nutritionist high priests of CAM such as Patrick Holford, who carried on lobbying for Wakefield even after the latter had been accused of serious professional misconduct by the General Medical Council.
The media nutritionists have also contributed to the erosion of faith in CAM. For years, they had the lucrative field to themselves. No breakfast television sofa was complete without a “food doctor” making wild claims for berries and herbs through a rictus grin.
The most familiar was Gillian McKeith, a bossy Scottish nutritionist who called herself “Dr McKeith”. And she might have got away with it if it wasn’t for that pesky kid, Dr Ben Goldacre, youthful author of the Bad Science blog, who discovered that her doctorate came from a correspondence college. A website called Holfordwatch then started looking at the CV of Patrick Holford, who was recently made a professor of nutrition by Teesside University, despite the fact that his only academic qualification is a 30-year-old BSc in psychology.
Growing scepticism about alternative medicine has emboldened opponents of homeopathy. This 200-year-old quackery is available on the NHS - but that may change, as financial pressures mount, and as “respectable” British homeopaths continue to turn a blind eye to the prescription of lethal homeopathic Aids treatment by their maverick colleagues.
This month saw the publication of Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial, co-authored by Edzard Ernst, Britain’s first professor of complementary medicine. He found that Britain spends £500 million a year on unproved or disproved therapies. Compared to that figure, even Scientology is value for money.
No one is saying that orthodox medicine is a complete body of knowledge, that Big Pharma is not capable of gross ethical lapses, or that strange or traditional treatments do not sometimes work. But we should welcome the fact that healthy scepticism is finally being extended to CAM.
Instead of requests to share their wisdom, alternative practitioners are being asked to produce double-blind randomised tests to support their claims. They try to shrug off the demands - but, if you look closely, you can see their ayurvedic auras vanishing into thin air.
Damian Thompson is the author of ‘Counterknowledge: How we surrendered to conspiracy theories, quack medicine, bogus science and fake history’ (Atlantic Books).
Tags: Homeopathy, Patrick Holford, HIV/AIDS, Quackery // 9 Comments »
