This article from The Atlantic Magazine makes some interesting points. It starts like this:
"Medicine has long decried acupuncture, homeopathy, and the like as dangerous nonsense that preys on the gullible. Again and again, carefully controlled studies have shown alternative medicine to work no better than a placebo. But now many doctors admit that alternative medicine often seems to do a better job of making patients well, and at a much lower cost, than mainstream care—and they’re trying to learn from it"
Of the 142 radomised controled trials that have been done to date in homeopathy over half (74) were statistically strong enough to be able to draw firm conclusion, of those 85% demonstarted homeopathy worked better than placebo. So we know homeopathy works, e have the evidence and millions use it. But even though this article does not take that in to account it still makes some interest points.
Two quotes as a sample:
"Berman’s clinic (University of Maryland) is hardly unique. In recent years, integrative medical-research clinics have been springing up all around the country, 42 of them at major academic medical institutions including Harvard, Yale, Duke, the University of California at San Francisco, and the Mayo Clinic. Most appear to be backed enthusiastically by administrators and many physicians. “Doctors tend to end up trained in silos of specialization,” says Jay Perman, president of the University of Maryland at Baltimore and a practicing pediatrician. “We’re taught to make a diagnosis, prescribe a therapy, and we’re done. But we’re not done. The patient’s environment matters. When it comes to alternative medicine, it’s not clear what the mechanism is that can make it helpful to patients, but it may be that it helps create the right environment.”
"Unfortunately, the drugs we’ve thrown at these complex illnesses are by and large inadequate or worse, as has been thoroughly documented in the medical literature. The list of much-hyped and in some cases heavily prescribed drugs that have failed to do much to combat complex diseases, while presenting a real risk of horrific side effects, is a long one, including Avastin for cancer (blood clots, heart failure, and bowel perforation), Avandia for diabetes (heart attacks), and torcetrapib for heart disease (death). In many cases, the drugs used to treat the most-serious cancers add mere months to patients’ lives, often at significant cost to quality of life. No drug has proved safe and effective against Alzheimer’s, nor in combating obesity, which significantly raises the risk of all complex diseases. Even cholesterol-lowering statins, which once seemed one of the few nearly unqualified successes against complex disease, are now regarded as of questionable benefit in lowering the risk of a first heart attack, the use for which they are most widely prescribed. Surgery, widely enlisted against heart disease, is proving nearly as disappointing. Recent studies have shown heart-bypass surgery and the emplacement of stents to prop open arteries to be of surprisingly little help in extending the lives of most patients"
You can read the whole thing from here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/12/the-triumph-of-new-age-medicine/8554/
Tags: alternative medicine | Homeopathy | doctors
This entry was posted on 29 September 2011 at 15:00.