What do you call ‘alternative medicine’ that actually works? ‘Medicine’ - Bill Nye
This is a tricky time to be in health and wellness. You’ve got the ‘conventional medicine’ guys who are working from a frame of reference of the ‘minimum requirements to keep you alive’ or ‘what does or does not kill you’. That is a very different set of standards than ‘what requirements do you need for optimal health?’ Plus, you have a lot of quackery and disingenuous people selling a lot of garbage, which tends to mean everyone in the health and wellness field gets painted with the same ‘quackery’ brush.
Wellness care has very different requirements than conventional healthcare, and the lack of general consensus of terms has led to a lot of misrepresentation, miscommunication and just general misunderstanding on both sides of the fence. Conventional medicine doctors look at alternative and complementary medicine as quackery, but a lot of those treatments are not nor should ever be used as a treatment for illness care but rather as a complement to conventional medicine during rehabilitation and recovery or as a means of maintaining a standard of health or achieving an optimal state of wellness. Often a lot of the research gets misrepresented or overstated in terms of conventional medicine. A claim of milk thistle, for example, which supports liver functioning, does not mean that milk thistle can cure liver disease. But there is evidence to suggest that it can provide the liver with things it needs to function at a more optimal level. Those are two very different extremes. And from a preventative medicine standpoint, an extremely important one. Because a liver that is functioning at an optimal level will have a bigger impact on overall wellness over time than a liver that is only sub-optimally performing. It’s like your car engine and the argument between the most and least expensive versions of fuel. Using the more expensive one means less impurities in the gasoline, less gunk builds up on your engine over time, and so the parts last longer. The same thing happens in the body. A liver or a kidney only partly functioning means certain metabolites build up in the body. That’s why we have medications and dialysis in the first place. But your conventional medicine doctor is looking at it from the perspective of what will kill you in the shortest amount of time, and your integrative or preventative medicine doctor is looking at it from a ‘how do we get the most mileage and the least amount of build up over the longest term’ stand point. And here’s the thing about this entire argument that drives me absolute nuts - BOTH ARE INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT AND CORRECT!! You’re both right. Both sides are arguing true things. Which one is more important depends on the patient you have in front of you. Which one does THAT patient need?
And this is why researching these types of therapies is often difficult. Because the gold standard of medical research is based on the effectiveness of a treatment against a particular illness or condition. But complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) therapies and treatments are often working within a healthy state to improve that healthy state. It’s a much narrower threshold between healthy and optimally healthy than between healthy and disease. But if we are moving into a more preventative health care framework, the difference between healthy and optimally healthy is a very important one. And there is a lot of real and genuine research that has to be done so that proper guidelines and practices are put in place to protect the public and to prove the effectiveness of treatments and therapies and to determine which ones work best for maintaining which healthy states.
And conventional medicine needs to keep right on being its awesome, kickass, save the day self. Because we need it to. This shouldn’t be a fight against each other. We’re on the same team!! Both sides should be working together for the best outcomes for the patients. Because we are all going to get to sick and/or injured. And I want my emergency room doctor to know how to set a bone and prevent infection and blood clots and all of those horrible, life threatening things that will keep me alive. And then I want to be able to go to my integrative medicine doctor for my ‘return to optimal wellness’ plan so I can recover from that injury or illness and return to my best healthy state as fast as possible. What we’re lacking is an organized system on the ‘wellness’ side that’s as established and structured as conventional medicine already is. We’re not competing with it. It will always be necessary. But we are not at all talking about the same type of healthcare. It’s not even the same as comparing orthopedic surgery to cardiovascular surgery. Because both of those are surgeries and should only be required because ‘health’ has been compromised. ‘Wellness Care’, and establishing best practices and requirements and guidelines around it is something that has to be accomplished. Because otherwise, we leave it up to the quacks and the charlatans who promise pie in the sky treatments that make people sick or take their money. And so dismissing ‘sound therapy’ or crystal healing or magnets or any of the many other modalities as having ‘no effect’ is ill-conceived. They actually have demonstrable physiological effects. Whether or not those effects contribute to wellness or not, and for which specific kinds of ‘healthy state’ conditions they may or may not impact is all research that needs to be done in structured and well-designed ways with well-defined criteria and terms, etc etc. Because the daily minimum requirements of vitamins and nutrients is a very different threshold than the optimal daily requirements for optimal health. So, how about we quit slinging mud at each other, realize we’re all talking about two very separate things, and agree that we’re all equally awesome. We work together. Hence, complementary. No one’s saying dogwood cures cancer or anything… oh, wait… Okay, hang on, bad example. White willow bark isn’t useful… Nope, not that one either. Poppies! Nope. Wait… opium became heroin became morphine became fentanyl… Marijua…. wait. Nope. Penicillin! Crap, hang on, now I’ve reversed it. That was bread mold…
I’m going to get back to you on this… I forgot that everything is synthesized from something, and a lot of the conventional medicine drugs we use today came from isolations and derivatives of plants and other naturally occurring things.
That sounds bitchy, and I mean it to be. Because we poo poo crystals and yet what electronic device doesn’t rely on them? We say magnets can’t possibly have an effect on our knee pain and yet we have a lot of very specific MRI imaging that says that magnets actually have a very useful and important physiological effect on the body. So what you mean is that the studies that have been done to date on magnets and pain have been inconclusive so far. But what are the criteria you’re using to judge effectiveness? Because I know of some anterior cervical spine surgeries that have an 11% effectiveness outcome that are routinely used despite a much higher incidence of poor post-surgical outcomes. But lets all jump on the magnet knee brace. At least those magnets, at worst, won’t do anything for your knee pain. They won’t give you liver failure or renal failure or bowel obstruction, etc etc. And sure, it's entirely possible that someone’s bilking someone out of their money here. I’m in no way saying that we don’t need to come up with regulations and requirements. We do. But by NOT doing the research we aren’t doing anyone any favours. Someone has to be doing the work that these things don’t have an effect. Just to prove it. Because again, we know that magnetic fields and radio waves have a very measurable and demonstrable effect on our physiology. There’s a reason patients have muscles contractions in those MRI machines if the field strength gets too high. Now, granted, we can get into a discussion on ‘minimally effective and safe dosaging’ here, but I’ve got posts on that elsewhere. After all, anything can be a poison, it's a question of concentration. But just because we haven’t figured out a way to measure something yet doesn’t mean the effect isn’t there. Why do we have science at all if we already know everything? And just because it comes to the human body suddenly all the rules change? We segment the study of the human body into so many different disciplines that we forget we aren’t all talking about the same thing and we forget to take into account the frame of reference for the information.
I’m all for discussion and open dialogue. I just don’t like all the name calling and egocentric behaviour. We call something ‘mindfulness’ and suddenly it's a medical therapy and acceptable, but someone else calls it ‘ascension processing through the 4th light ray’ and now it's quackery. The effect it has on the physiology of the patient, from the wellness side of the discussion, is determined by the beliefs of the patient, how well they feel like their beliefs are being represented by the provider of care, etc etc. So to dismiss that person’s beliefs, or to have it performed by someone ‘less woo woo’ would impact the strength of the physiological response. And on the wellness care side of things, you actually need that. From a healthcare side of the fence, I totally get your argument and agree. But the thing that’s going to determine which practitioner is effective for that patient is which one creates the bigger response for the patient. You can’t have a woo woo person go to a hardcore medical doctor. It’s the same effect as the nocebo effect. It will cause more anxiety and more symptoms because of it. They can better relax and activate their parasympathetic response with a shaman, or a reiki practitioner, or an energy healer. And we cannot say that that practitioner isn’t creating a valid physiological response for that patient. Because they are. What we need to do is to help develop guidelines and diagnostics to better be able to predict which practitioners work best for which patients and which conditions so we can send the right patients with the right types of complaints that can be helped by those therapies than just write the whole thing off altogether. Because it’s about the experience of the patient that matters in that case.
And yes, I’m aware that there is some logic here that my argument suggests that all of those therapies are utilizing the placebo effect and therefore don’t work. But so too are a lot of things in the peak performance world. Again, peak performance world, anything that enhances the effectiveness of something IS considered a treatment. There’s the ‘Mind Body Connection’ and how to utilize it IS a valid therapy in that instance. Because you’re not dealing with preventing or curing an illness. You’re trying to enhance and optimize your physiological responses. The woo woo crowd are the same. So we have to rethink the way we approach that world if we want to develop ethical standards and guidelines and proper regulations around it to protect the patients.
The point is many medical advancements that revolutionized ‘medicine’ came from pretty ridiculous origins. I mean, bread mold? Seriously? You want me to take bread mold to fix my infection? That sounds made up. And even Bill Nye, who I love more than anything, just did an experiment on the second episode of his new show on stomach acid that kind of highlights my point. He set up an experiment to highlight that sometimes ‘natural supplements’ are ineffective utilizing an acid base experiment. He used acid to simulate overactive stomach acid and then neutralized it with milk of magnesia. And then used the ‘organic remedy’ for upset stomachs that didn’t neutralize it because it contained vinegar. Which, yes, okay, but the claim of the supplement was not that it was an antacid. It was ‘for upset stomachs’. And often an ‘upset stomach’ results from a lack of stomach acid causing a lack of digestion of food stuffs, which in turn begin to ferment, causing the ‘upset stomach’ symptoms, in which case the organic remedy would be the better choice and not the milk of magnesia, which would exacerbate the symptoms. Which only illustrates the fundamental lack of understanding of the physiological causes of the presentation of various symptomology and why we need better guidelines around the uses and treatments of various things. And just better education.
Just because something is labelled ‘organic and natural’ does not mean it is ‘healthy’. And just because something is is labelled ‘organic and natural’ does not mean it is ineffective. But understanding when to use vinegar and when to use milk of magnesia when you have an upset stomach comes down to whether or not you understand what might be causing your symptoms and how to tell the difference. In which case - performing the correct diagnostics is the key (the burp test in this case). The same goes for his experiment with the magnets. I agree that they don’t affect the iron in blood, and therefore likely have little if any effect on blood flow through action on the iron in the blood. However, we know that patients can experience muscle contractions and nerve activation from the magnetic fields of MRI machines, which means that magnetic fields CAN impact the physiology. Does that mean that magnets on knee braces work? I have no idea. At the very least if the brace claims to help by improving circulation by affecting the iron in the blood, then likely that is a false claim, but they may impact circulation based on the affect of stimulating vasomotion of capillary beds through neuronal activation, but I’d have to look at the research on that. Regardless, it highlights my point that we need more rigorous testing of the claims and some guidelines around them. But to poo poo them outright is as misguided as saying that bread mould as a treatment of bacterial infection is ludicrous. Because yup, it very well could be. But under the proper circumstances, as crazy as it sounds, it is also true. And thankfully, science was there to be non-judgemental and open minded enough to figure out what those conditions might be and then design a treatment protocol around them.
Time and time again history has shown us that the people who wind up making huge impacts on science are ridiculed and harassed and ostracized and then, eventually, shown to be correct. Why can’t we learn from our own experiences and stop picking on people for their curiosity? I’m not saying we shouldn’t be rigorous and have standards. Discussion and disagreement are how sound theories are eventually agreed upon. But why do we have to ridicule and belittle others for their open-mindedness? Being a skeptic is healthy and great. And doing an experiment that shows what something isn’t is just as important as showing what it is. And Bill Nye, by highlighting what happens when we fail to understand the concepts behind something enough to design proper experimental conditions can be just as misleading as the ‘false claims’ he was trying to show. The public doesn’t know that his premise was flawed. What his experiment with the stomach acid showed was that using vinegar when stomach acid is too high will not result in neutralization. Which is helpful. But his study design failed to prove his premise that organic natural products are ineffective. It was just as flawed as the science he was trying to debunk. Which kind of just exacerbates the problems of flawed science…
Okay, I think I’m done ranting now.
Til next time, folks!