Alternative medicine: worth a try?
A Daily Dish reader who asked to remain anonymous recently wrote in about their experiences using psilocybin, also known as “magic mushrooms,” for medicinal purposes. Andrew Sullivan received so many emails about mainstream marijuana use that he and his writing team compiled them into a book — and something similar has been happening lately on the topic of psilocybin. At the Dish, it’s a sociopolitical conversation mostly about the legal status of drugs, but that’s not really what I want to talk about today.
This reader wrote:
I take small (no more than a pinch or two) quantities of psilocybin every day. Not to get high, not to unwind, but to try to heal my body. For 5+ years I’ve had an autoimmune problem that’s demyelinating my peripheral nerves – it’s called neuropathy. I do take a monthly treatment of gamma globulin to try to stabilize it, but the prognosis is for a long slow decline. Since “western medicine” doesn’t really have a clue and basically has the equivalent of sledgehammers to treat this thing, I’ve tried a host of non-Western modalities, including acupuncture and Chinese herbs, homeopathy, bio-energy balancing and strict diet. Not entirely no dice, but my condition is still declining. I suppose my fail-safe maneuver is to visit Lourdes or John of God in Brazil.
Anyway, fortunately I’ve also got contacts in the spiritual community of “medicine”, who have given me the idea of using what folks in Mexico call “the little healers”. I have a scientist friend who used it in small quantities daily to recover from bad asthma. It is reputed to help with the immune system (as well as anxiety and depression).
I am as yet too scared to undertake a full trip, which evidently can be like 6 months or a year’s worth of therapy in a few hours, but someday I will work up to it. I am befriending it right now, and I feel the mushrooms are helping my condition. You could call it merely a result of magic thinking, but what harm can it possibly cause? It’s natural, and I am determined to use whatever I can to heal.
Did you catch it? “Since ‘western medicine’ doesn’t really have a clue … I’ve tried a host of non-Western modalities.” “My fail-safe maneuver.” “The spiritual community of ‘medicine.’” “It is reputed to help.” Medicine wasn’t working out for this person, so they figured they might as well try alternative medicine as a backup. This is an attitude I’ve grown accustomed to hearing, but the frequency with which it’s repeated doesn’t make it any easier to comprehend or any more pleasant.
I think it was Tim Minchin who said it best: “Do you know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? Medicine.” These “non-Western modalities,” so appealing to our (misguided) sense of reverence toward any and all ancient wisdom, are all things that haven’t been proved to work, or have been proved not to work. Let’s take a look, shall we?
- Acupuncture: Sticking little needles all over the body at particular points, believed to heal a wide variety of ailments by manipulating “qi” or “energy flow” in some vague, magical way. It turns out that merely pretending to give someone acupuncture has equal, if not greater, healing power. Hmm.
- Chinese herbs: This is pretty nonspecific. Suffice it to say that there are plenty of herbs that do have curative effects, and many of the ones we know about have been used in actual medicines, but the simple fact that something is an herb doesn’t make it healthy by definition. The fetishization of eastern/Chinese wisdom doesn’t make an herb curative, either.
- Homeopathy: I, too, used to think that “homeopathy” was a synonym for “natural remedy.” But it turns out that it’s based such blatant magical thinking, it’s shocking that any generally sane person could buy into this scam. Homeopaths believe that the more dilute something is, the more powerful it is, so they dilute their “medicines” far beyond the point where a single molecule of the “active ingredient” would even be present in the solution. And about that active ingredient — they believe that “like cures like,” so to treat a symptom you should take something which would cause that symptom. Luckily (I guess), they dilute it into nonexistence first.
- Bio-energy balancing: What does this even mean? What is “bio-energy,” and how might an “imbalance” of it relate to peripheral neuropathy? This is just a nonsense phrase, an attempt to sound scientific and convince gullible people to open their wallets.
- Lourdes: I can only hope these last two were offered tongue-in-cheek. The shrine at Lourdes is about as credible a source of miracles as a burnt grilled cheese sandwich.
- John of God: This guy is a con artist. Perhaps he’s fooled himself too, but when you get right down to it he performs carnival tricks and scams people out of their money. Not a very good “fail-safe maneuver,” if your definition of “fail” is anything like mine.
Interestingly, the anonymous email-writer acknowledged the effectiveness of these alternative treatments: “Not entirely no dice, but my condition is still declining.” I’d chalk “not entirely no dice” up to the placebo effect, given the list that was offered and what we know about those “modalities” from scientific investigations.
I understand that people with long-lasting, painful medical conditions want some way to make themselves better. However, wanting something doesn’t make it so. The popular notion that “alternative medicine” is worth a try when you’re in dire straits can definitely be harmful. It distracts people from, and sometimes interferes with, proven science-based medical treatments. It wastes people’s time and money. In the rare cases where “alternative medicine” is not just a modern-day version of dancing around a bonfire or sacrificing a goat, where it has some actual direct physical effect, it can be very dangerous — because it isn’t regulated, hasn’t been adequately tested, and is not well-understood.
What about psilocybin? I admit I don’t have the scientific background to have an educated opinion. Perhaps it could be used for some valid treatments; our current legal framework might be constraining adequate research into these possibilities. What I can say with more certainty is that the attitude so perfectly encapsulated here — in which treatments which are “non-Western,” “spiritual,” or endorsed by “folks” in developing countries are given privileged status over evidence-based medicine — is what motivated this writer to try it. And that attitude is dangerous.
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Welcome back to the blogging world! One of the things that’s always struck me about “alternative medicines” is not that most of them seem to perform little better than the placebo effect – it’s that the placebo effect itself is so dang powerful. I think Western medicine does have a deficiency in that it over-distinguishes medicine from psychology. There seems to be real healing benefit to optimism or reassurance – or, at the very least, NOT adding piles of fight-or-flight response to your condition with stress.
Hi Chris! Good to “see” you again!
(I’ve really got to switch to Identicons, these Wavatar faces come out so unfortunate sometimes.)
You’re totally right about the placebo effect. It seems to me that to the extent that the placebo effect is real, we should study it with science and figure out a way to use it responsibly. If that’s what alternative medicine practitioners were claiming to be doing, I might be more okay with it … but if that were the case, they wouldn’t be making their own vanity journals to publish shoddy research to attempt to demonstrate why their magical thinking is reality, and arguing for it as science. They’re really trying to convince people that the antidote for poison is water that “remembers” having had a single molecule of poison in it, or that sticking surgical clamps way up your nose will cure your backaches.
Did you hear about the recent study claiming that placebos can be effective even if people know they’re taking placebos? It turned out that there were some serious issues with that study too, but this kind of thing is at least a step in the right direction.
you admit to lacking the scientific background behind psilocybin to form an opinion on it, yet you are rather blatant in your dismissive tone of referring to acupuncture as believed to work “in some vague, magical way.” clearly you lack any background in chinese medicine whatsoever, so why the bias?
there have been numerous studies which have demonstrated the efficacy of acupuncture, even though the studies admit that more research needs to be done, as it is still not fully understood. just because the principles behind eastern medicine don’t align with our scientific models of understanding the universe, doesn’t necessarily invalidate them as legitimate forms of treatment.
the studies you linked to that claimed that the placebos were more effective than the acupuncture are actually severely flawed and riddled with biases. how can the sham treatment be considered a placebo if it’s being administered in the exact same location as the real treatment?
and even if the placebo did outperform the acupuncture, it seems that you skeptics seem to overlook the fact that the acupuncture and the placebo both outperformed the standard medical treatments. at the end of the day, i think a patient suffering from a certain ailment will gladly take a placebo that outperforms the “scientifically proven” standard medical treatment.
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