Medical dopers, do you think this is safe for my child?

Factual Questions
1

I live in Japan, and my first grader has very bad atopic eczema and asthma, which usually involves his eyes being red and infected as he scratches his itchies and then his hands go to his eyes. It is pitiful to watch, and the family all suffer for him. He is being seen by a good pediatric allergist here, and takes a variety of medications which help but don’t of course fix the condition, which is fairly unfixable.

My elderly, uneducated Japanese Mother In Law is obsessed with finding a “cure” for him, and regularly buys quack powders for immense amounts of money for him. I chuck them immediately as I refuse to give my kid something with unknown ingredients. I keep trying to point out to her that if the stuff worked, the hospitals would be prescribing it…

The situation has now escalated, and for the past few visits to their home, she has put my boy onto an electric mat and passed a current through his body. I can’t fully explain this (amounts of electricity etc ) because making too much of a fuss is taboo. They bought the machiine for their aches and pains, and it consists of a large box, and a mat attatched to it. I have tried it, when you sit on the mat you can feel a warmth from the current (I assume!) and a slight tingling. You cannot touch anyone else or you both get quite a big shock. They claim that it “cleans the blood” and the two old ones swear by it for joint pain and other ailments.

Against my objections she has stuck my kid on this thing for a couple of hours at a time, three or four times. I am very skeptical as to the value of this treatment BUT the next morning (she does it while we are all asleep) he has woken up with measurably clearer eyes and skin. Is this electricity REALLY having an effect? And if it is indeed having such an effect, are there any dangers to this? I have heard about electrical fields possibly causing cancer, and he is young, growing, cells dividing etc.

I would really rather this did not happen to him but… his skin and eyes definitely did get better. And my position as daughter in law means my social standing is somewhat lower than the family dog. That is not to say that I don’t make a fuss and get my own way when I need to, but I need to be sure of my facts before I start yelling.

So this is a very long way of asking any of you medical dopers (or anyone else!) if you have ever heard of such machines in the US or Europe, and if you think they are safe? Or really effective?

Thanks in advance for your help.

2

Difficult. It sounds like a galvanic diathermy device: these cause local warming by electrical resistance, and I think they genuinely help with arthritic pains and such like, but I’ve never heard of them doing anything for asthma or eczema. One thing you might consider is that the observed overnight improvement could be nothing to do with the device. For instance, could it be that there’s an allergen in your home/diet that is not present at your in-laws’ house?

However, I think this is mainly a cultural/personal problem rather than a medical one. It doesn’t require much medical knowledge to come to a conclusion that I’m sure you’ve already reached. Of course you don’t want untrained uneducated people - family or not - using an unproven electrical device on your child without your permission. How to make this stick, though…

What’s your husband’s view? Could you get the paediatrician and/or family doctor to advise?

3

I have no medical background, but because of my technical background a friend of my mother’s once asked me for advice about a similar device. The brochure was full of diagrams and technical buzzwords and looked very impressive, but it showed telltale signs of a scam:
[ul]
[li]The high price (over $1000)[/li][li]Mention of high voltages, and warnings about possible electrical shocks[/li][li]Lack of any medical trial results supporting their claim of effectiveness[/li][li]Lots of anecdotes about successes[/li][li]Patent numbers prominently displayed[/li][/ul]
Maybe “scam” is too strong a word, but my opinion based on these facts was that the device is useless.

If you’ve been in Japan for a while and been paying attention to the news, you probably know that regulation of non-Western medicine is extremely lax and often rsults in fatalities. I’m sorry to hear you have to put up with some of these negative aspects of Japanese culture. My mother keeps wasting money on “nutritional supplements” too and I haven’t been able to do anything about it.

4

My young nephew is asthmatic and has pretty bad eczema. The only thing that really helped it at all was an ointment called clobetasol.

5

I too strongly suspect scamminess in all this - my mother in law believes implicitly that expensive things are good quality and worth having, the more money she has to shell out, the better. The amount of stuff she shows me, that “a lovely young man” came to sell her. Sigh…

What is very sad is that despite periodic blow-ups with her about her giving my kid medicine, putting cream or whatever on him, giving him sweets and other bad stuff, she will only back off so long and so far, then it all starts again… The only effective method of protecting him from her is to not visit. Then both of them lose out.

I will ask her again not to do it, but I know for sure that she will ignore me. I have told her about the risk of cancer, and she just pooh poohs it. It is a deeply frustrating situation.

If there are any Japanese scientists/kanji readers who have come across these machines, I would love to know your opinions on them. I can’t read enough Japanese to fully understand the claims, and don’t have enough knowledge of electricity etc to understand the bits I can read.

6

scr4 is actually a scientist and, IIRC, has some hardware experience (so if you’re looking to put up a space-based telescope, he’s your man :D). You might also try QuackWatch.

I’m not sure that facts will help you with this situation, though. If it’s just for your own peace of mind, well enough, but as you say, you don’t have much status with your in-laws and your opinion isn’t likely to count for much with them. :frowning:

7

I should have previewed my post, on re-reading it I thought I had not paid scr4 enough respect - sorry! I meant , if there were any OTHER scientists out there…

And indeed, this probably comes down to another “nothing to be done about it” situations that I come up against so frequently here.

I guess I was hoping that some doper would either say “YES, it’s horrifically dangerous, cite, cite” or that another one would say, "There’s nothing to it, let her get on with it. "

There is a great cultural difference between us so that while we get on very well most times, the way we view our families causes friction. As far as I am concerned, my kid is my kid, but she sees him as the eldest son of the eldest son, and as she is the wife of the head of the family, she has a perfect right to do with him as she sees fit. This is a VERY old fashioned attitude, but she has been brought up in the country, and cosmopolitan life passed her by. She is a good person but she is dangerous (I caught her giving him adult extra-strength cold mecidine containing aspirin, iboprufen and ephedrine at five months old - he could have been killed if I hadn’t stopped her in time. The row that followed that caused her to back off for about a year before it all started again.)

The problem is that being ignorant, she thinks that the more medicine or treatment, whatever, the better. Because I do not take my boy to the hospital every day or so, and do not give him more than the prescribed amount of drugs or creams etc, then she feels that I am “cold” and am "neglecting him. " She feels desperate and says, “Well if his own mother won’t help him, it is left to me to act.”

I understand her upset over his illnesses - it breaks my heart too, to see my beautiful boy all scabby and wheezy, and if there was a cure I’d pay anything for it. But this weird electric machine aint it!

8

I have no practical advice for you … I wish I had … but my thoughts are:

How does your husband feel about this treatment? If he feels the same way as you, wouldn’t his objection carry more weight with his mother?

Otherwise … hard as it may seem, I feel you have no choice but to respect, and abide by, the culture you willingly married into, and your son was born into. :frowning:

Julie

9

Hokkaido Brit, a lot of how you respond depends on your husband.

Does he agree with you that this is bad for his son ? Is he willing to tell his mother to stop or suffer consequences ?

10

Husband does agree with me, but tends to be passive, so he does the “she is an old lady, we will never change her way of thinking” bit more often than not. However you should have seen him when she tried to give him the cold medicine as a baby. Mother was so frightened she cried.

This is one of the reasons I asked for information - if I ask husband to support me, he will do it but sometimes rather brutally! So I tend to pick my fights. If this is not a big deal then I will just put up with it. If it is dangerous I will call in the big guns.

I also try hard not to get into a tale-telling mode with him stuck between his mother and me. I would like him to like and respect us both! When has mattered (marriage, childbirth, major illnesses, deaths in the family and religion) he has always supported me.

11

I looked up this topic for you but without the name of the machine there’s nothing specific I can find for you.
Most electrical healing stuff was under alternative medicine and claimed to heal everything from AIDS to depression. any news article I found on it claimed it was bogus. Only because it didn’t work. Nothing was said about ill effects.

Here is one article from a very nonscientific site:

http://www.rense.com/politics5/mag.htm

which talks about how it is being used to promote bone growth. Why I am including this is that there is a list of references that you might want to follow up on. Perhaps you can get some hard facts from further research.

I think you should inspect the mat always before he uses it to make sure that there are no rips or tears in the protective cover.

If you perceive a difference after he uses it, maybe the electrical mat is helping because it is providing warmth.

12

As I said I have no formal medical training, but if you have any more information on this device I’d be happy to take a look and perhaps translate parts of it to pass on to other dopers. If you only have printed material, e-mail me and I can give you my fax number.

For what it’s worth, it sounds fairly benign and safe as long as you use it properly. And since your family already owns the device it’s not costing you anything. If it makes your grandmother happy, I don’t know if it’s worth making a fuss over. Or maybe you can find another alternative medicine that’s even less likely to be harmful, like negative ion generators or homeopathy.

13

For me, it would come down to this-
This lady endangers your child. She has proven time and again that not only is she unaware of basic child safety measures but is also unconcerned with how you feel about them. This particular mat thing seems harmless, but it may not be the only thing that she’s doing, or has done, to/for him without your permission that could harm him.
As the mother of the eldest son’s eldest son, you do have some leverage- you can tell her that if she ever does anything like this without your permission, or gives him any medicine at all without prescription, you will never let her see him again. It’s harsh. It will cause irrevocable tension in the family. It may also protect your son’s life. You’re his mom. That’s your ultimate job. Nothing else matters in the end.
You could take a middle path and never let him be at her house unsupervised. It will be more of a pain but may allow you to keep him safe without causing overt difficulties.
It’s a bad situation. I wish you the best of luck.
HennaDancer

14

scr4, thank you for your offer! If I can get hold of the papers next time we go to MILs house, then I will certainly ask you for help. Getting the papers might be hard in that house full of everything ever bought for the past 20 years!

Henna Dancer, believe me, mother in law gets no access to my kids without me there. She has proved too often that she cannot keep them safe. Luckily up till now we have lived five hours drive or more away, so she has never had the opportunity to have the kids alone. The problem will be next spring when we move to their neighbourhood to begin the eldest son’s duty of keeping an eye on them. Luckily by then my kids will be 7 and 4 and capable of refusing strange stuff and also telling tales!! They will also beth be in school/kindergarten so available time to be at Granma’s will not be great.

I think that I have been reassured that the device is not overtly dangerous, and if it makes MIL happy to feel she is doing something for her grandkid, I think this is something that is not worth making a fuss about. I’ll save that for the really dangerous stuff.

Thanks dopers for putting my mind at rest, and also for replying so sensitively to the cultural aspects of the situation.

15

I doubt that the device is dangerous.

I’d be curious to know if it works as well when it unplugged as it does when it’s plugged in.

16

This would infuriate me if I were in your position. It really doesn’t matter if the machine is doing any harm or not. The point should be that you and your husband do not want the device used, yet she is still using it. The issue goes much deeper than your son’s eczema. You say you pick and choose your battles, but I don’t understand where you would draw the line on these quack therapies if not here. She is running electricity through your sons body for no proven reason. I’d be worried it would cause seizures, neuropathy and a whole host of other problems and would NOT let her continue to do this. Even more worrisome is that if you let her do this, she will only push further with her next “experimental” treatment. This can lead to a very dangerous situation for your son. And this has nothing to do with culture if your husband is in agreement with you. This has to do with who is in charge of raising your son.

    I hate this double standard that exists between prescription, doctor driven Western Medicine and the "alternative" therapies.  There tends to be this view that just because something is sold over the counter, is described as a supplement or is allowed to be sold legally with some quack pseudo-scientist claiming a benefit that it must be safe and has no side effects.  This is a dagerous assumption to make.  As the herbal/supplement market has exploded in the last 10 years, more and more of these products are becoming known to be just as dangerous as some prescription meds.  "Natural" does not mean safe, despite what many in the market would have you believe.  Everyone should demand just as much proof of efficacy and freedom from side effects for these items as any prescription medicine or procedure that a doctor would recommend.  Any substance you put in your body is a drug and potentially harmful.  Too much water can be fatal.  Any "miracle" cure that sounds too good to be true probably won't work.  And any time you start buying into the whole arguement that the product isn't used by doctors because they have some secret agenda  with the drug companies to only use their products, you have taken the first step into a dangerous area where the supplement industry can then lead you down any path they want by the nose because they have sold you on a basically unprovable and indefensable gimick.