While I am trained in the sciences, to be objective, and tend to see all complementary medicine as pseudo-scientific, lately the world of the subjective has begun to haunt me. Keep in mind I have no medical training. But, I’ve had a hard time writing off the effectiveness of a placebo and wonder why we don’t investigate more deeply.

I’ll try to illustrate. If you feel stressed out, you may develop tension. This is an effect of your mental state on your physical state. “Feeling stressed” is subjective. But the tension, if measured by say a rise BP or tightening of certain muscle groups, etc can be measured. So it is an objective change in your physical state. This is pretty obvious.

There have been studies that correlate weakened immune systems and higher frequencies of illness among people who receive a great deal of contempt from their partner.

Again something highly subjective that has a measurable effect.

When it comes to something like acupuncture, and a lot of other complementary medicinal practices, why do we not give weight to their ability to manipulate the subjective side of the healing equation. I’m not trying to argue that acupuncture works. But wonder about the role “feeling” something has in medicine.

The statement, “They feel like it helps so it helps a little” is, to me, one that is under analyzed given that the changes are measurable. If we know certain feelings can assist in the healing process, why do we not dig deeper and try to find out what feeling may have helped create the illness?
Is that nuts? Has medicine solved the origin of disease to point where this query is no longer valid? To say “thinking positive” or “thinking negative” will help or hurt a patients chances of recovery means to me there is much more to learn about the role of thinking in healing.

Furthermore, alternative practitioners tend to charge for their services and often give 30 minute appointments – enough time to talk and, more importantly, listen. I also suspect that it is a rare alternative practitioner who tells a patient that ‘there is nothing we can do’. A patient who has been told there is no certainty in a diagnosis at a hospital is likely to reach for certainty and in my experience (limited but not uncommon from what I’ve read elsewhere) some alternative practitioners seem more willing to provide certainty. The last time I went to an osteopath he told me to stop taking anti-depressants – a very dangerous kind of certainty indeed.

Finally, you may wish to amend the text to read complementary rather than complimentary – that would be a most endearing form of treatment!

Alternative practitioners themselves I think are somewhat deluded, and, rather than antipathy towards the educated medics, I think it is more that they genuinely don’t think there’s too much to medicine. If it were a class thing then alternative medicine would be the preserve of the working class, not the middle class.

The keyword here though is complimentary. Compliment good medicine, but never use only alternatives.

As for vaccines, people just ignore science. There are countless research papers proving that there is no link between MMR and Autism, but just because a tabloid doctor said there was 10 years ago, people still refuse to vaccinate their children. Madness. Another problem is religion. I have met people of certain orders that do not use medicine due to one line in a religious text, that has been taken totally out of context. But people do insist on believing in superstitions and not qualified professionals. Humans eh?

It’s a pity I didn’t know about this event as I would have liked to attend myself but thanks for the write up!

I’ve experience it myself when I voiced my suspicion of cold laser therapy administered by a chiropractor, they go ape mad and start obsessively attacking you. One of their favourite methods is to accuse you of a conspiracy.