I was talking to a good believer the other day. “I had the worst allergies last week,” she said. “But then I got something at the health food store that really worked.”
Health food store?
“Yeah, it was these white pills. They really worked! I just put a few under my tongue every hour, and when I woke up the next morning, my nose was clear!”
“It wasn’t homeopathy, was it?” I asked.
“It might have been,” she said. “Yeah, I think it was.”
“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” I said. “I have to say, though, that homeopathy isn’t what it seems. Can I tell you my experience with it?”
“Sure.” She’s patient.
You may remember that in order for me to be deconverted from my particular brand of Christianity, three conditions had to be met:
- It became important to me that my beliefs be grounded in fact.
- It became clear to me that my beliefs were either not supported by fact, or contradicted the facts directly.
- I lost the fear of what might happen if the belief system were false.
My rejection of ‘alternative medicine’ and new age horsecrap ties into my emerging skepticism about religion, and falls under Point Number Two. Here’s the story.
In my undergrad days, I worked in the university library. I soon came down with terrible allergies — I think it must have been the dust. One older couple, seeing my distress, suggested I try some chalky white pills they used. I put two under my tongue and — amazingly — my symptoms stopped!
Magic! From then on I was a homeopathy believer. Harmless, natural, and not in the grip of Big Pharma. Ha! Take that, you money-grubbing traditional doctors! The fact that I never managed to replicate the amazing results of the first time didn’t faze me at all. I knew what I’d experienced.
From there, I got into other alternative therapists for my persistent acne. One was the Zinc Guy. He always prescribed the Zinc Drink to me and my friends, even though we all had different conditions. Hm.
Another was the Electric Acupuncturist. He liked to stick people with needles attached to big batteries. Not painful, but twitchy. He said that many of his patients only needed to see him once; they never came back, so he presumed he’d cured them.
Homeopathy, massage, and chiropractic all failed to clear up my very aggravating and embarrassing problem. The naturopaths were short on results, but had no shortage of explanations for the delay. For one thing, they claimed to heal the whole person from the inside out. Do you have any idea how long it takes to heal a whole person? Patience! And the practitioners were never wrong. If I showed any signs of improving, they took credit. If I got worse, it wasn’t that their methods were bogus. I was having a ‘healing crisis’. If I just kept at it, I’d be better in no time. This went on for years.
In desperation, I went to a real live dermatologist, who fixed everything with simple antibiotics in a matter of weeks. That was a pisser. I realised that I’d been had by an entire industry of quacks.
From there I read everything I could find debunking alternative medicine, homeopathy in particular. I found out that scientific studies (e.g. on PubMed) showed either negative results or weak positive results that weren’t replicable. I found that people (including me) are naturally clueless about issues of health and medicine because it’s so complex and multi-factorial, and our brains have problems reasoning under those conditions. We are especially susceptible to the placebo effect and anecdotal evidence.
Of course, just because I’d had a bad experience didn’t mean alt-med was a con job. That would just be trading one set of anecdotal evidence for another. What did matter was that naturopathy in general has not been able to establish its claims empirically.
“So,” I concluded to the believer, “when it came down to my own experience versus scientific evidence, I had to be a bit humble and accept that I’d been wrong. Which is hard to do, because we accept our experiences as fact. They’re what make up our lives! But our experiences don’t always mean what we think they mean.”
Now to the religious tie-in. My religion placed a heavy emphasis on having a personal spiritual experience with God, the Holy Ghost, what you may call it. And I have had many experiences I would describe as ‘spiritual’. Yet these fall under the heading of ‘feelings and experiences’. They may be enjoyable and personally meaningful, but they do not qualify as good evidence to establish the existence of a supreme entity or the truthfulness of a proposition.
People at church are hoping that if I pray, I’ll have some kind of spiritual experience and believe again. They miss the point. If that did happen, it would only prove that I could be swayed by bad evidence just like everyone else.
My run-in with alternative medicine helped me to realise that our feelings and experiences can be wrong. And if you use placebos, medicinal or religious, the consequence is that, unless you get better by pure chance, you just stay sick.
26 November 2006 at 11:22 pm
So true – I had severe eczema for years and if I had saved all the money I spent out on homeopathy, acupuncture, naturopathy etc. I’d be rich. To be fair though I had resorted to those methods because allopathic medicine was also useless. In the end I tried Chinese Traditional Medicine and after 3 months of drinking the nastiest concoction in the world it all disappeared and never came back (15 years ago).
I hadn’t learned my lesson though and went for homeopathy when my health started deteriorating 6 years ago. In the end it turned out to be an underactive thyroid which is easily treatable. To be fair though I’d been seeing my doctor for 2 years and he’d been discounting my problems as ‘just your age’ until he went sick and I went to the other doctor and he took one look at me and said you need thyroxine now.
I do think that medicine and particularly psychiatry are sometimes based on some equally dubious science, however, and the so called ‘gold standard’ of RCTs in ‘evidence-based practice’ is far too widely applied beyond what is reasonable to generalise from.
(sorry about the grammar -it;s late here)
29 November 2006 at 7:44 pm
So this is more of a question than a comment and has to do with the placebo effect. So there is always a certain % of people who do not respond to proven medications. (possibly proof of a psychosymatic condition rather than a physical one) If then a placebo (choose your own herbal medicine here) works to allieve the symptoms, does that not then make it a valid clinical tool?
29 November 2006 at 10:53 pm
Herbal medicines are another thing altogether. Aspirin is willow for example. Herbal medicine can be extremely potent. Allopathic medicine can make herbal medicines more predictable and therefore safer and more effective, but there’s no question that herbal medicines work. Chinese Traditional Medicine is largely herbal.
There is definitely a place for placebo in some treatments – pain management for example – but that’s because of the neural pathways that control pain. On the other hand if I have TB I’ll take the pills, thank you!
But Dan’s original point was more to do with faulty logic and I fear we have sidetracked the original entry!
verification word today: hopops
any definitions?
30 November 2006 at 2:51 am
Hopops (n.): The bad leftovers in the bottom of a truck after the grain has been emptied from it.
You’ll have to excuse my grain-obsessed comments, even though the work has been slow. Silly rain. Would’ve been good in September!!
30 November 2006 at 3:45 am
Hopops: An irritating condition involving persistent dislocation of the knee, common in high jumpers.
I have had people occasionally say, Well, who cares if X therapy is a placebo, if it makes people feel better? Like hypochondriacs, or those soldiers from that episode of M*A*S*H?
The problem is that placebos are fake medicine. Giving (say) a child fake medicine means the child isn’t being helped and may get worse. In the meantime, the parent has given money to a con artist.
I think parents who purposely endanger their child’s health in this way are acting irresponsibly and should be held legally responsible for any harm that may come to their children.
Even if people don’t have kids, and they’re just using the stuff on themselves, they should want something that works significantly better than a placebo, not ‘just as well as’. That said, you’re absolutely right; the placebo effect is quite something.
More at this article: If the Goal Is Relief, What’s Wrong with a Placebo?
I agree with snowqueen about herbalism. Lots of drugs are just synthesised versions of chemicals in plants and things.
Can I be a pedant for a minute and complain about the word ‘allopathic’. It was invented by Hahnemann the Homeopath to describe regular medicine, and it was normally used in a deprecating way. Since I find homeopathy to be no kind of medicine at all, I reject the label ‘allopathy’ and just call it ‘medicine’ instead.
But that’s enough linguistic prescriptivism for one day. Say whatever you want.
29 May 2007 at 1:19 am
I’m a bit late to the party, save a cheese doodle for the new kid.
Although I do get peeved about homeopathy quite regularly, Chiropractic is the area that gets me worked up the most, and has been the source of some titanic arguments in my house.
Being in some degree involved in JW’ness for most of my life has complicated things as well. Especially in Perth as there is an office of Witness Chiropractors here who have used there “networking” to promote the techniques.
Chiropractic is quite popular with JW’s (along with Bryan Adams and “The Princess Bride”)and it seems to be quite easy for them to conflate the two areas and use good ‘ole Confirmation Bias to reject any criticism.
I’m assuming the prevailing thought is that being too tied up in Trad medicine is a way of being “part of the world” and by using alternative or natural methods is way of recieving God’s loving kindness through the intrinsic value of Creation.
Ironically, I haven’t met a homeopathic practicioner yet who didn’t have a Capitalist streak in them, with the attendant line of Vitamins and concoctions that never saw the inside of an FDA lab.
Don’t even get me started in Iridology…