While I'll get some flack for cultural insensitivity, this approach didn't work very well, especially when smallpox got imported into the US. While Native Americans were dying of this disease, seeking spiritual redemption, Europeans were pursuing a different approach - science. They were developing vaccines. At first you might say that the comparison is unfair, because Europeans had microscopes and things, but this didn't really help the development of vaccines for smallpox, because it's a virus, and too small to see. In fact, the process of vaccinating people for smallpox may go back even farther than the 1800's. Some papers suggest people were making crude vaccines from the scabs of infected patients centuries earlier.
The things that differentiates science from magic is the controlled study. When I bring this up to New Agers, I hear moans and complaints, but let's not forget that science was the first form of consumer protection against medical quackery instituted in modern society. You don't need high-tech to do science. For example, doctors believed that bleeding people was a good idea for centuries, and they performed this process (and charged patients for it), without ever verifying that it would work. With animals getting sick on farms all the time, it would have been a simple matter to "bleed" half the animals, and leave the other half be, and see if it really cured disease.
Magic isn't about controlled trials - it's about believing. And this, unfortunately, has captured the imagination of the American populace in the last 10 years, to the point that new infectious diseases like Blastocystis are being addressed almost entirely with unproven treatments - the equivalent of spells and potions.
The fault isn't entirely with the patients, since the scientific establishment has also broken its own rules, or more accurately, let loud-mouthed physicians run rampant. Science has two aspects - first, you discount things that are disproven by experiment. Second, you advocate things that can be proven by experiments. In the case of Blastocystis, scientists - real scientists who work at the NIH - had done careful experiments that showed Blastocystis was causing disease by the early 1990's. But these experiments conflicted with a small number of "observational studies" written by doctors at a health maintenance organization in California. Rather than defending the scientists at the NIH, NIH management chose to shut down all US research in the 1990's, and to begin telling scientists not to apply for grants to study the disease. In the 1990's, the prevalence of Blastocystis in many states in the US took off, rising from 2.5% in the 1980's to over 22% by 2000.
The NIH's refusal to participate in any kind of research may be forgivable, if it weren't for the dozen countries outside the US that now have research groups publishing large numbers of studies on the disease. At some point, the NIH should have realized its mistake. Hence, they broke a cardinal rule of science - repeatability. Mainly, the laws of science apply everywhere, so when you have a large number of scientists from different areas of the world reporting the same thing, there is probably something going on.
Nature Abhors a Vacuum
So you now have a large portion of the population developing chronic gastrointestinal illness in Oregon, California, and elsewhere. Their regular doctors, informed by the CDC and NIH, knew nothing about the disease. In fact, based on the studies the CDC has been advocating, patients should told that they have 'irritable bowel syndrome' and kicked out of their office for taking up the physicians time. There is actually an entire line of research now being funded at the NIH that seeks to "prove" that such patients just go to the doctor because they like attention.
So what did newly infected patients in Oregon, California, and elsewhere do? They looked for potions and spells. Based on what I hear from patients, the Blastocystis epidemic on the West Coast has been a key factor in driving the demand for alternative medicine.
In the US, the market for AM has exploded. One study indicated that 62% of US adults use some kind of AM (Med Ad News, October 2005). The CDC states that 74.6% of Americans have used CAM, and that the average American spent $60 on various remedies in 2005.
It's remarkable that in an age where science is delivering most of our advancements, such as cell phones and computers, medicine is turning back the clock. People in scientific fields should take note of this. Science isn't just about ignoring things which are disproven. It's about acting on things that are proven with scientific methods. By refusing to speak up for the scientists who were attacked by loud-mouthed doctors, science has lost a major battle for the public's trust. The most prevalent chronic gastrointestinal infection in the US today is being addressed using philosophies from the Middle Ages because of this.
A study from Australia, published in Melbourne Age, highlighted the issue. Authored byAlastair MacLennan, from Adelaide University's Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, the paper reported that:
"Australians now spend four times as much on unproven therapies as on prescribed pharmaceuticals. While a few alternative medicines and therapies are proven to help some patients, what concerns me is the increased usage of unproven alternative therapies, many of which are costing the public more and more each year."
The study was conducted on 3000 Australians, and it compared the use of alternative therapies in 2000 and 1993. Over that time, allowing for inflation, the cost of alternative therapies had increased over 120%. The paper estimated that Australians spend $2.3 billion a year on such therapies. In the US, a similar trend exists, and it won't be long before spending on alternative unproven therapies exceeds US investment in scientific research.
Trick or Treatment?
References:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/32851838/Alternative-Medicine-A-Free-Market-Example-of-Health-Care-by-Barry-Krakov-MD
0 comments:
Post a Comment