Refuting: "CAM might be bad, but big pharma is worse"

[mazyloron]

Ok, so an article that was posted on SWIFT today prompted a rather heated discussion between myself and a friend. And I'm wondering what's the best way to respond.

This is the article: $2.5 billion spent, no alternative cures found

Basically, he has a few main points:

1. CAM isn't all bad, therefore we shouldn't be so harsh towards it.
2. "Big pharma" produces products that are far more harmful than CAM. Many more people die from "big pharma," so we should ignore CAM and focus on big pharma because it's more harmful.
3. There's nothing wrong with offering false hope to people, if they want to believe it, then they deserve what they get.
4. CAM challenges the status quo and that's why it's rejected, because "big pharma" doesn't want to give up their power.
5. "Big pharma" doesn't want to cure you, they want to keep you addicted to their drugs, that's why they don't research cures, just medicine.

And, a little more info on his points, or my responses to them so far:

1. He's diabetic and his mother is hard-core into CAM (sells it on the side, like Avon or something) and got him taking cinnamon and bitter melon, which he said does cause his blood sugar to drop. I honestly don't know what to say to that one - and he likes to do the "you don't know what it's like" argument. I am not ruling out that there are some things in CAM that do genuinely work (not many), but likewise there are plenty that seem to work, but are doing something else (my thought there might be that it's causing a false reading, though it could very well be working). I don't know enough about his example specifically to say anything, nor am I ruling out that it may work.

2. "I'm highly critical of both sides, but who kills more people? big pharm or nutty herbalists?" He likes to use this one a lot. He also turns to this if I make a valid point about #1. I'm not personally aware of how many people "big pharma" kills. I'm sure some people die, but is it a lot? How about compared to the good they do? He doesn't like that response.

3. I'm not sure that he and I can do more than agree to disagree on this one. Of course, I know him well enough that I'm pretty sure he doesn't really beleive this, he's just saying it for shock value, or to look tough, or something equally ego-driven.

4. This is the typical "all big companies are evil" argument. And I'll admit, I do agree that there are big companies in any industry that wield too much power thanks to how much money they put into lobbyists, and they're sometimes motivated by profit over the public good. But that doesn't mean a wholesale rejection of "big pharma" and embracing CAM is the right reaction.

5. This one doesn't need too much more explanation. It's a common argument.

I'm not trying to convince my friend that all CAM is automatically useless or harmful, nor that all "big pharma" products are automatically perfect. I'm just trying to make the point that most here would probably agree with: CAM is not a valid alternative to modern, "Western" treatments, and it should not be assumed to be safe or harmless. Plus, given his diabetes, I'd hate to see him get carried away with treating it holistically and wind up having to take insulin shots all the time (he's not at that point yet).

But, he's a belligerent SOB who likes to move goalposts and confuse issues, and refuses to ever be wrong. (Great guy, right? This is why he's not a close friend anymore, but he's still a friend.) I'm just trying to figure out how to answer some of these claims. I know there are doctors and sceintists and all sorts of smarter-than-me people on here who have probably heard all of this before and can either explain why my friend is right, or give some pointers on how to better make my point to him.

 

[dahduh]

1. CAM isn't all bad, therefore we shouldn't be so harsh towards it.

Granted. But to know if something is good or bad, you need to have systematic clinical trials to find that out. What evidence is he offering that a particular CAM "isn't all that bad"?

2. "Big pharma" produces products that are far more harmful than CAM. Many more people die from "big pharma," so we should ignore CAM and focus on big pharma because it's more harmful.

True. Real drugs have real effects and those effects have the potential to be harmful. But to say "more people die from 'big pharma'", what statistics does he have to offer? To what does he attribute the steady increase in lifespan over the past 100 years? And if CAM remedies are truly efficacious, why should they not too be dangerous?

3. There's nothing wrong with offering false hope to people, if they want to believe it, then they deserve what they get.

That's the ethics of a charlatan. Is he really serious??

4. CAM challenges the status quo and that's why it's rejected, because "big pharma" doesn't want to give up their power.

This is possibly true, in the same way that any industry defends its turf against others. But exactly the same objection can be applied to CAM, which is a big industry in itself. Why wouldn't a chiropractor be tempted to recommend 'regular treatments' even if they are not needed, or a seller of supplements exaggerate their usefulness?

5. "Big pharma" doesn't want to cure you, they want to keep you addicted to their drugs, that's why they don't research cures, just medicine.

Exactly the same objection applies to CAM. The difference is that conventional drugs do have to jump through regulatory hoops, and reports of efficacy does usually have to appear in peer-reviewed journals before being considered acceptable. Most CAM remedies are not regulated at all. So it is more likely conventional medicine is genuinely efficacious than CAM.

The above is just how conventional medicine compares to CAM: challenge him to explain why he considers CAM to be immune to all the objections he levels against conventional medicine. I would further argue that he is just wrong on all points, but then you've got to do hard work like real research.

I suppose challenging him to stop being hypocritical, chuck insulin and suck on lemons instead, would just be too harsh...

 

[mazyloron]

Granted. But to know if something is good or bad, you need to have systematic clinical trials to find that out. What evidence is he offering that a particular CAM "isn't all that bad"?

Sadly, he's not a fan of specifics. Conveniently, this allows him to dismiss anything I offer up as "just one case," though he'll sometimes offer examples for his points. So far, he's only offered the cinnamon & bitter melon thing for controlling blood sugar. And, he says that homeopathy is ok because it's harmless, and "they're just a small group."

True. Real drugs have real effects and those effects have the potential to be harmful. But to say "more people die from 'big pharma'", what statistics does he have to offer?

None so far. I'm trying to get some out of him.

To what does he attribute the steady increase in lifespan over the past 100 years?

My guess is medical advances. Though I'll doubt he'll see the hypocrisy/cognitive dissonance in that one.

And if CAM remedies are truly efficacious, why should they not too be dangerous?

I forgot about that argument. I'll have to try that

That's the ethics of a charlatan. Is he really serious??

Like I said, I think deep down he's not, but he's got a real ego problem, he does things just to get a rise out of people, or to make himself feel tough. He says stuff like this to bait you into calling him on it, and I've learned not to give him the satisfaction.

This is possibly true, in the same way that any industry defends its turf against others. But exactly the same objection can be applied to CAM, which is a big industry in itself. Why wouldn't a chiropractor be tempted to recommend 'regular treatments' even if they are not needed, or a seller of supplements exaggerate their usefulness?

Exactly the same objection applies to CAM. The difference is that conventional drugs do have to jump through regulatory hoops, and reports of efficacy does usually have to appear in peer-reviewed journals before being considered acceptable. Most CAM remedies are not regulated at all. So it is more likely conventional medicine is genuinely efficacious than CAM.

The above is just how conventional medicine compares to CAM: challenge him to explain why he considers CAM to be immune to all the objections he levels against conventional medicine.

I've tried, so far his response is something to the effect of: "they're both just as bad, but big pharma is bigger, so we should worry about that first." And then he makes me out to be either an idiot or heartless for bothering with CAM when big pharma is doing the same exact thing on a bigger scale. This one is infuriating, I'm not entirely clear how to respond to it.

I would further argue that he is just wrong on all points, but then you've got to do hard work like real research.

I'm not against that, but I am fairly certain it will fall on deaf ears unless I at least get him to the point where he's open to it. He tends to dismiss things that look like they'll disagree with him without really reading them. (He did this most notably a few weeks ago, when I posted a link to a YouTube spoof of Mythbusters testing the myth of God. He saw the title and the thumbnail and immediately attacked Mythbusters. It was actually pretty funny.)

I suppose challenging him to stop being hypocritical, chuck insulin and suck on lemons instead, would just be too harsh...

Not really, if you knew him. It also wouldn't work. All of his close friends have been calling him hypocritical for years, and he just thinks we're "haters."

Sometimes I do wonder why I bother. But he's friends with a lot of my friends, so I can't even ignore him and his nonsense (tried for a couple of years, didn't work) and I'm tired of hearing it.

 

[maddog]

Good OP, mazyloron, and good response, dahduh!

The questions I would have for you (not for your friend) are these:
How likely is your friend to be open to actually listening, considering, evaluating what you say? Not that he needs to have a smack-his-forehead-I-get-it-now moment, but just to consider your points, such that logic may sink in and work over time... I know in this type of disagreement, I tend to keep thinking about things for a while, and sometimes *eventually* change my mind long after the initial discussion. Not that it brings any satisfaction to the person I was initially arguing with... The point is, is he really listening, or just blowing you off?

How much are you emotionally invested in the discussion?

If your answers are "yes" and/or "a lot", then I can't really add to what dahduh said. However, if your answers are "no" and "not much", then I recommend you say "Ok, whatever, I hope it works for you. How 'bout them O's?"

 

[GreyICE]

First, delink the two subjects. Pharmaceutical companies and their ethical lapses do not in any way make CAM more valid, nor does CAM's ethical lapses (one might argue that CAM is a big ethical lapse in and of itself) do not make pharmaceudicals more effective. Herbs and leeches might both have been suggested as a cure for gout, but the lack of effectiveness of the herb does not make the leeches a good idea.

Now that he's entirely focused on CAM, he has to defend CAM on its own. This kills two and five.

Okay, point 1: First, you have to differentiate sCAM from legitimate, non-drug based methods. There is such a thing as a diabetic diet. Type II diabetes often can be controlled solely through diet, with drugs on hand for emergency situations, instead of constantly using drugs. Both type 1 and type 2 can radically benefit from a diabetic diet.

There has been a tendency to lump treatments that don't rely on taking colorful pills in with treatments that revolve around magical properties of water. They're not at all the same thing.

Point 3: Actually, there's a lot wrong in offering false hope. A realistic view of the situation is required for intelligent treatment. Offer him the following situation: A diabetic imagines that fish extract and breathing techniques can control diabetes, so he eats a tub of ice cream then does his breathing exercises.

Point 5: Yeah, this one is basically true. Pharmaceutical companies always advertise their drugs as a 'cure for depression' instead of a 'tool that helps you cure your depression.' Doesn't make the homeopathic Reiki master crystal therapists any more legit.

 

[Uncayimmy]

First, one point I like to make is that if there are no side-effects, there is no effect. For virtually everything we come in contact with, we make a judgment based on risk. Every time you drive a car there is a chance you will die. Every drug you take carries with it risks of ill-effects or even death (overdoses can be a real problem). People have the unfortunate job of evaluating that risk and saying, "Yes, we know X people will get very sick and Y people will die, but we believe the benefits of having the drug available outweigh the costs of not having it." The so-called harmless remedies don't do anything, so they carry very little risk.

Another point is that big pharma is big because they are required to prove efficacy as well as safety via stringent and costly methods. These alternative treatments don't have that burden. If they did, their treatments would cost more, and they would be "big cam." Of course, looking at the number of supplements at my local drug store, I would say they are already Big Cam. I would also argue that they do *not* want studies done because they don't want the risk of their remedies being shown to be useless.

I would put the onus back on him. Would he want Big Pharma to release drugs without proving efficacy or safety?

 

[vIQleS]

Point out that big pharma is already reguated and has to prove efficacy (and advise all side-effects).

Now lets do the same for CAM. It works doesn't it? Why not test it to silence the critics?

 

[SpuriusMaximus]

1, CAM isn't all bad, therefore we shouldn't be so harsh towards it.

Depends on what you want to call bad. In my book, a scam is bad as such. But I'll get to the real harm at point 3 anyway.

2. "Big pharma" produces products that are far more harmful than CAM. Many more people die from "big pharma," so we should ignore CAM and focus on big pharma because it's more harmful.

Again, while this is technically true (most of the SCAM medicines don't do anything good _or_ bad), it's also mis-representing the problem. It's one of those cases where a carefully selected half of the truth is worse than an outright lie.

That said, "big pharma" medicines are also tested so they at least don't do more harm than the disease they're treating. With SCAM you don't get any testing at all. If it turns out that your holistic medicine destroys the liver or kidneys (see a sample of such remedies here: http://www.nydailynews.com/archives/news/1996/06/05/1996-06-05_a_bitter_pill__banned_and_to.html) well, tough luck, you got the shaft and no benefit to show for it.

But the real problem is here:

3. There's nothing wrong with offering false hope to people, if they want to believe it, then they deserve what they get.

The problem is that that false hope too often comes _instead_ of a treatment which would actually work. In fact, a lot of the SCAM practitioners _demand_ that people throw away their normal medicines. People are routinely told to interrupt their normal treatments even for stuff like _cancer_ and die a horribly painful death as a result. Because, see, the painkillers have to go too.

This is why I've said that claiming that the SCAM medicines don't do as much harm, is actually a carefully constructed lie.

Getting water for cancer doesn't just give you false hope, it removes any real possibility of surviving. It's a false hope at the expense of getting a horrible death sentence instead.

Heck, even for diabetes, since he mentions that, if you have a bad enough case, you either use that insulin or you _will_ die. Maybe his mother isn't too bad a case, but other people are, and they do die when they throw away their normal medication and go on woowoo pills instead.

Even when the SCAM practitioner doesn't tell you to throw away the normal pills, just going to him first for everything and spending some months of woowoo medication, can mean that the real disease isn't discovered until too late. Cancer, for example, is one thing where early detection makes most of the difference between life and death. If you spend some months or years taking herbal pills or homeopathic water for that lump in the breast or for that funny black thing on your skin, instead of going to a real doctor, it can mean _death_.

Yes, the death wasn't by the bullcrap pseudo-medicine, and yes technically it did do less harm by itself than chemotherapy, but it didn't help remove or contain the real harm: the actual disease.

So the whole thing "it does less harm" is just bullcrap semantics games. It's like locking someone who's having an heart attack in his room instead of calling an ambulance, and then claiming that being locked in his room didn't kill him. Yes, but the resulting lack of proper medical attention did.

4. CAM challenges the status quo and that's why it's rejected, because "big pharma" doesn't want to give up their power.

This is the standard non-sequitur, the Argumentum Ad Lazarum that's so dear to conmen and scammers everywhere. In reality all that matters is whether the treatment works or not, i.e., whether there's any scientific testing that proved so. Wishful thinking about who's big, who's the underdog, and who benefits from the status quo, or any other such handwaving, don't address that single crucial point.

5. "Big pharma" doesn't want to cure you, they want to keep you addicted to their drugs, that's why they don't research cures, just medicine.

Ah, _that_ retarded conspiracy theory. Never mind that the same big pharma and medical establishment created _lots_ of cures (e.g., antibiotics actually cure bacterial infections), and is researching new ones as we speak.

Also never mind that the poster children for the "but they don't cure X" idiocy, are stuff that's just impossible to cure for the SCAM practitioners too. E.g., curing diabetes would involve growing back some tissue which got destroyed and no longer exists. _And_ in the auto-immune case, somehow stopping the body from destroying it again, but without needing immunosuppressants for the rest of your life. (Which would kill you in the same way AIDS does.) If he thinks that taking some herbal pills or some homeopathic water is a _cure_ for that, he's at best delluded.

 

[mazyloron]

Good OP, mazyloron, and good response, dahduh!

The questions I would have for you (not for your friend) are these:
How likely is your friend to be open to actually listening, considering, evaluating what you say?

Normally I'd say not very, but he did monopolize my morning on IM trying to get me to see it his way, which is a little out of character for him. And he made a point of wanting to continue the discussion, which is extremely out of character - he's more of a "make a few outrageous claims and never talk of it again" kind of guy.

Not that he needs to have a smack-his-forehead-I-get-it-now moment, but just to consider your points, such that logic may sink in and work over time... I know in this type of disagreement, I tend to keep thinking about things for a while, and sometimes *eventually* change my mind long after the initial discussion. Not that it brings any satisfaction to the person I was initially arguing with... The point is, is he really listening, or just blowing you off?

Hard to say with him. This is a guy who pretended to support Nader for a full year just so he could see the look on his friends faces when he nonchalantly said: "Nader? No, I voted for Bush."
So, yeah, he's definitely somewhat of a [Rule10]. He could just be messing with me.

How much are you emotionally invested in the discussion?

Eh...normally I just let his BS go, but he gets a lot of my other friends worked up about things, some of which are patently false, and he has a history of finding something people actually care about and championing the opposite, to turn all of their friends against them so he can laugh at them.

So, I don't really care, his opinion means little to me...but, at the same time, it would probably give me a certain level of satisfaction to shut him up for once. Which, of course is not the right motivation...

If your answers are "yes" and/or "a lot", then I can't really add to what dahduh said. However, if your answers are "no" and "not much", then I recommend you say "Ok, whatever, I hope it works for you. How 'bout them O's?"

Heh, now that would piss him off. He's decided to be a Nats fan...simply because everyone else we know is an O's fan.

Oh, and really, writing all of this out makes me think I should have changed my wording from "my friend" to "this jerk I know but have to interact with socially far more than I'd care to."
(where "jerk" is a substitution for several words that would probably get me suspended if I were to use them here)

I'm remembering why I didn't talk to him for nearly two years. Those were good times.

Also: I really didn't mean for this to turn into a "complain about this guy" thread. I would much rather debate him rationally, or at the very least be able to have sane, rational responses to his vitriolic blather. But he does come up with some weird stuff that I have a hard time responding to rationally (which is probably on purpose, on his part).

 

[athon]

Others have covered these well, however I have five minutes so figured I'd offer my own two cents.

CAM isn't all bad, therefore we shouldn't be so harsh towards it.

Technically, there is no such thing as 'CAM'. Think of medicine as a giant tool box. You display certain symptoms, which indicates that your functioning as an organism is impeded. A medical practitioner has to use what diagnostic tools they have available to work out what is most likely to be wrong, and then has to make a decision as to what tools they can use in their tool box to fix it.

Not all tools are the same. Some will certainly address the problem, but will do so at the expense of other functions. Others may cause few problems but will only work in very particular situations.

So, the practitioner needs to make a decision based on the chances of successfully diagnosing the problem, chances of their choice of solution working, and the risk of creating other problems for the patient.

There is no alternative to doing this, as much as people would like to hope. The problem is knowing with some precision the limitations of those tools. The problem with CAM is not always that the methods have zero effect on biological systems - it is that the philosophy surrounding it makes it exempt from the same parameters that makes medicine so useful.

"Big pharma" produces products that are far more harmful than CAM. Many more people die from "big pharma," so we should ignore CAM and focus on big pharma because it's more harmful.

Well, there's so many problems with this statement I'm not sure where to start.

What, exactly, constitutes 'Big Pharma'. Are we talking select companies? Some other features of pharmaceutical producers? All producers of pharmaceuticals? What distinguishes a pharmaceutical from a CAM remedy that has been artificially produced? What are the facts of numbers of deaths? How do we know it was due solely to the pharmaceutical and not due to the poor decision making of the doctor, such as prescribing a contraindicative to another medication the patient is on? Or the patient had an unusual reaction?

By no means am I say that the pharamceutical industry is above and beyond reproach. Yet to say we should focus on it rather than CAM is like saying we should let people rape because murder is worse, and we should focus on it more.

There's nothing wrong with offering false hope to people, if they want to believe it, then they deserve what they get.

Yeah, I hear this one a lot.

Hope is free. It comes with any situation where the patient feels that they can deal with their future.

I agree that strength of mind is important and patients need to be councilled so they can deal with the uncertainty of their fate. Yet this should not be dependent solely on a view that their medication will be their salvation, but rather a realistic outlook that helps them appreciate the risk they currently face.

Hope for an improvement in health is certainly better than fear and despair. Yet acceptance of possibility provides a far better peace of mind.

CAM challenges the status quo and that's why it's rejected, because "big pharma" doesn't want to give up their power.

Haha, I love this one. It's insane when you think about it.

If CAM worked, it would be built upon and improved. We wouldn't have 200 year old witchdoctory - we'd have methods that relied on those principles yet modified to provide far more benefits. We'd have found other uses for it, such as in diagnostics or in forensics. And so-called 'Big Pharma' wouldn't bother competing. It would buy it up and sell it.

"Big pharma" doesn't want to cure you, they want to keep you addicted to their drugs, that's why they don't research cures, just medicine.

Yet oddly, when pressed, advocates of CAM claim their methods can't 'cure'. Just 'treat'. Black, meet kettle.

Athon

 

[mazyloron]

But the real problem is here:

3. There's nothing wrong with offering false hope to people, if they want to believe it, then they deserve what they get.

Agreed. And this one stems from his ego, where he's decided it's cool to say things like "they deserve to die...social darwinism...blah blah blah." It's hard to tell if he really means it, because he's made that sort of thing his go-to-shocker for so long, he sounds like he means it.

The problem is that that false hope too often comes _instead_ of a treatment which would actually work. In fact, a lot of the SCAM practitioners _demand_ that people throw away their normal medicines. People are routinely told to interrupt their normal treatments even for stuff like _cancer_ and die a horribly painful death as a result. Because, see, the painkillers have to go too.

This is why I've said that claiming that the SCAM medicines don't do as much harm, is actually a carefully constructed lie.

Getting water for cancer doesn't just give you false hope, it removes any real possibility of surviving. It's a false hope at the expense of getting a horrible death sentence instead.

Heck, even for diabetes, since he mentions that, if you have a bad enough case, you either use that insulin or you _will_ die. Maybe his mother isn't too bad a case, but other people are, and they do die when they throw away their normal medication and go on woowoo pills instead.

Clarification: He has diabetes. His mother sells woowoo pills, but is not diabetic.
Not that this diminishes your point in any way.

Even when the SCAM practitioner doesn't tell you to throw away the normal pills, just going to him first for everything and spending some months of woowoo medication, can mean that the real disease isn't discovered until too late. Cancer, for example, is one thing where early detection makes most of the difference between life and death. If you spend some months or years taking herbal pills or homeopathic water for that lump in the breast or for that funny black thing on your skin, instead of going to a real doctor, it can mean _death_.

Yes, the death wasn't by the bullcrap pseudo-medicine, and yes technically it did do less harm by itself than chemotherapy, but it didn't help remove or contain the real harm: the actual disease.

So the whole thing "it does less harm" is just bullcrap semantics games. It's like locking someone who's having an heart attack in his room instead of calling an ambulance, and then claiming that being locked in his room didn't kill him. Yes, but the resulting lack of proper medical attention did.

Another clarification: he's far from a hard-core wooster. He doesn't go around pushing CAM on people, nor does he generally put down "conventional" (a.k.a. effective) medicine. I'd be floored if I ever saw him do anything with crystals or reiki or even acupuncture. He does have insulin for emergencies (he's not at the daily shot stage yet). He doesn't seem to condone things like holistic cancer treatment - he says people stupid enough to use it deserve to die, and he says the only reason I'm against it is because people who refuse modern medical treatment are doing it on religious grounds (I wouldn't agree that it's the only reason, this is what he thinks I think), and thus I'm against it because I'm so rabidly anti-religion (which is not exactly the case, though I am an atheist).

He's more of the type who thinks most herbal/natural remedies should be considered to be just as useful in treating anything that doesn't require a trip to the hospital. Which, I guess, is better than some woosters, but still leaves him wide open to tons of bogus and unhealthy treatment options.

This is the standard non-sequitur, the Argumentum Ad Lazarum that's so dear to conmen and scammers everywhere. In reality all that matters is whether the treatment works or not, i.e., whether there's any scientific testing that proved so. Wishful thinking about who's big, who's the underdog, and who benefits from the status quo, or any other such handwaving, don't address that single crucial point.

Yeah, I've tried similar arguments. I'm hoping rephrasing that properly might actually work.

ETA: I didn't mean that you didn't phrase it properly, just that it needs to be phrased in such a way as to get through to him.

Ah, _that_ retarded conspiracy theory. Never mind that the same big pharma and medical establishment created _lots_ of cures (e.g., antibiotics actually cure bacterial infections), and is researching new ones as we speak.

Yeah, I'll be bringing that up next time we talk about this.

Also never mind that the poster children for the "but they don't cure X" idiocy, are stuff that's just impossible to cure for the SCAM practitioners too. E.g., curing diabetes would involve growing back some tissue which got destroyed and no longer exists. _And_ in the auto-immune case, somehow stopping the body from destroying it again, but without needing immunosuppressants for the rest of your life. (Which would kill you in the same way AIDS does.) If he thinks that taking some herbal pills or some homeopathic water is a _cure_ for that, he's at best delluded.

So he's homeopathic?

 

[Tricky]

I just wanted to link the SWIFT article too. Our own Jeff Wagg was essentially pointing out the article, but added some choice points.

 

[mazyloron]

Thanks to the rest of you for the responses, I don't have time to reply to all of them.

Athon - I had actually thought of the murder analogy also, good one. I was figuring I'd use something similar.

 

[mazyloron]

I just wanted to link the SWIFT article too. Our own Jeff Wagg was essentially pointing out the article, but added some choice points.

Yeah, SWIFT is what got me to that article. Jeff had a good writeup.

I was also surprised by the (unfortunately named) "Alternative Medicine" site on MSNBC. They have quite a few other articles saying similar things to this one, and they seem to take a very skeptical, evidence-based approach to their topics. In particular, they have an article on contaminants, and a rather good one on dubious claims made by "natural" products.

 

[jimtron]

This knee-jerk anti-big-pharma thing has really gotten out of control; it seems to be all too prevalent. Lots of good points made here, I'd just like to add a couple things...

Western vs. Eastern medicine, alternative vs. mainstream, pharma vs. "natural"--these are false dichotomies. There's proven and unproven medicine. Science is widely misunderstood and under-appreciated. I remember a recent Chicago Tribune article about an "alternative treatment" that was "not yet proven by mainstream science." As if the scientific method wouldn't apply to anything new or unusual.

People need to learn how to use critical thinking and understand what the scientific method is all about. If you ask folks how to discriminate between treatments that actually work and ones that only seem to work, I think many would say that they go with their "gut feeling." I don't think they're equipped to compare health treatments in a critical way.

Who cares if a remedy is Western or Eastern or alternative or mainstream or old or new or normal or strange. We all want the same thing: treatment that is truly efficacious and relatively safe (and hopefully affordable). Isn't that all that really matters to all of us?

eta: Here's what I want to ask all proponents of "alternative medicine:" name the strongest example of an alternative remedy/treatment/whatever that is definitely safe and effective, and that is shunned or ignored my "Western medicine." I'd be surprised if there was one true example of this.

 

[athon]

Western vs. Eastern medicine, alternative vs. mainstream, pharma vs. "natural"--these are false dichotomies. There's proven and unproven medicine. Science is widely misunderstood and under-appreciated. I remember a recent Chicago Tribune article about an "alternative treatment" that was "not yet proven by mainstream science." As if the scientific method wouldn't apply to anything new or unusual.

Slight digression: my pet hate is 'western science'. Ugh!

But, yeah, the 'not yet proven by science' line is another one that gets brought out often. It's plainly presuming the conclusion, as if we have the answer and science is used just to prove it.

A horse with a wheelbarrow if ever there was one.

Athon

 

[arthwollipot]

I like what Tim Minchin said in Storm (and I've been riffing on this for a number of days now):

You know what they call alternative medicine that's been demonstrated to work?

Medicine.

 

[mazyloron]

I like what Tim Minchin said in Storm (and I've been riffing on this for a number of days now):

You know what they call alternative medicine that's been demonstrated to work?

Medicine.

Yeah, that was a very amusing poem. I've heard the line a few places before, I think. But he put it well.

I used that on my "friend", he didn't seem impressed.

 

[mdcatdad]

Ok, so an article that was posted on SWIFT today prompted a rather heated discussion between myself and a friend. And I'm wondering what's the best way to respond....
[*]"Big pharma" produces products that are far more harmful than CAM. Many more people die from "big pharma," so we should ignore CAM and focus on big pharma because it's more harmful.

Human bodies differ. Drugs are made for the general population and warnings are given to those populations which are known to suffer adverse side effects.

By contrast CAM makes no distinctions. Their products are for "everyone"

 

[MattusMaximus]

I like what Tim Minchin said in Storm (and I've been riffing on this for a number of days now):

You know what they call alternative medicine that's been demonstrated to work?

Medicine.

Wins thread