I’m going to start a website that shows that riding a surfboard while bending over backwards predisposes you to back pain, drowning, and death.
And cancer. Every bad thing has to cause cancer. Heart disease? Boring. Diabetes? That’s a little scarier. ALS? Too rare, so it isn’t scary enough. Cancer: it’s like the sweet spot of fear.
It’s got the ‘special knowledge’ and component that we see in the CT crowd, and it often includes some CT. It’s got the ‘natural is better’ component, not a bad idea per se, but a natural solution to a problem that doesn’t work isn’t better than the artificial solution that does.
Unlike some CT nuts who may otherwise appear to be rational productive people, the Alternative Medicine extremists are clearly not rational and their lives are a mess all around. They don’t hold jobs well, if at all. They are poor, their kids are messed up, and they seem to be shameless in asking others for money and assistance, and not to resolve the problems they’ve caused, but to continue them.
I have a small sample to make this assessment from, but I find it startling. And I should note that there may be plenty of people I’ve met who are true believers, but I wouldn’t know it because they wouldn’t even mention it to others any more than I would discuss my own medical treatment with every person I meet. But the people I’ve identified are those that don’t hesitate to bring up the subject at any opportunity.
Related to this, medicine has changed recommendations a number of times and it can confuse people, especially when the popular media gets involved. Like:
I’m not criticizing modern medicine (I do criticize pop media). Human health is extremely complex and science can’t just run easy binary tests to determine what works and what doesn’t, so it ends up being a slow process of advancement. People get fed up and turn to alternative medicine because it basically has one simplistic message: old, “natural” treatments are effective and good.
A local NPR show had an hour on this yesterday: http://onpoint.wbur.org/
“Repeat after me: pharma being shit does not mean magic beans cure cancer.”
When a relative told me this (explaining why “Chinese Medicine” was better) I asked whythe average life expectancy has doubled in the last 100 years.
This is a big part of it, IME. Another big part is that these zealots think that their knowledge of health and medicine trumps that of doctors. “I’m a high school dropout who can’t hold a job asking people if they want fries with that, but I know more than those doctors with all the letters after their names!” I don’t know how many times I’ve been told that doctors don’t know shit.
Yeah, doctors are human, not Medical Deities, they can certainly be ignorant about things, even medical things. Og knows that I’ve run into some doctors with some pretty scary theories. Having said that, I am still more confident in the average doctor’s opinion about what’s wrong with me and how to treat it than I am in the opinion of the local neighborhood busybody who promotes natural cures for everything.
Of course, Granny Weatherwax is better than any MD, but I can’t seem to get into contact with her, and I’m sort of scared as to what she might prescribe for me.
What they did was, breed potatoes that lay the things.
Such a great poem.
People tell each other this because there is a strong temptation to believe that there is a solution to your problems that is easy, cheap, and pain-free.
Media tell people this in order to sell advertising. And it is more dramatic to scream “CHEMOTHERAPY IS A FRAUD” than it is to say “Chemotherapy doesn’t always work as well the second time, in prostate cancer patients”.
Quacks tell people this in order to make money or get attention. And dead people don’t complain, and their families complain less if they were dying anyway.
Regards,
Shodan
You need some element of zealotry to actually bother with alternative medicine in the face of logic. I’d be generous and call them all zealots.
People are stupid. Most of them. Even the smart ones. I had a friend, college educated, professional, who posted this to her facebook today, saying, "Just in case it’s true . . . ":
. . . I mean, really? “Just in case it’s true”? It’s so obviously not true that I could fill a giant moon-landing-sound-stage with all the not true in that post.
As much as folks like to think of themselves as critical, all it takes is one person to claim authority (without anything to back it up other than their own say-so), and we bend over and take whatever that “authority” has to give us.
You don’t always need zealotry; gullibility or credulity will do, and are much more commonplace.
“‘Prospectus’ is Latin for ‘Open your mouth and close your eyes.’”
– Dogbert
I don’t know if I would write off all alternative medicine.
My mother in law drinks gingko tea to improve her memory and she claims it has made a difference
She also has a very sensitive stomach and she uses bamboo salt that she claims has cured her nervous stomach.
Where she goes off the rails is when she starts to treat bamboo salt like a panacea for almost every ailment.
You have a cold? Bamboo salt
You have cancer? Bamboo salt.
Just yesterday, I was walking with a Chinese friend to a restaurant for lunch. As we walked by the city’s traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) hospital, I asked her what she thought about it. Her response: “It’s a waste of money. Go to a real hospital.”
That got me to thinking of something I saw about a week ago. A teenage boy on a bicycle was in a collision with an automobile, approximately two blocks from the hospital I mentioned above. The TCM hospital’s ambulance crew saw the accident and rushed in their ambulance to the scene. The teen’s response: “Thank you. No. I’m calling a real hospital for their ambulance to come get me.”
Note: These are Chinese people in China who think that TCM is bunk.
Speaking of TCM, read the whole article and note carefully what’s said about both efficacy and the studies performed.
ETA: Be sure to watch Penn & Teller’s Bullshit show, Season 1, Episode 2, subject: alternative medicine.
This topic always irritates me. I have a friend who loves this stuff, and won’t shut up about it. We can’t talk about it anymore, cuz it just ends in a fight.
She has a child with sensory disorders, affecting his behavior and how he relates to people. Despite the fact that she constantly complains about not having enough money, she’s always buying the new thing to try and cure him. She spent a ton of money on camel’s milk recently, and it also convinced that honey can help him too. She complained about him misbehaving the other day, and instead of just acknowledging that 4 year olds sometimes misbehave, she blames the piece of candy her mother gave him cuz it had food dyes in it.
And yet, when his therapists help him she raves about them, how much better he’s gotten, etc. And at the same time she’ll say that modern medicine doesnt work and go on about homeopathy or something. It’s so frustrating.
Here’s a good link for showing people what alternative medicine can actually do:
What’s the Harm
I’m not sure if this is a woosh, but if not, have you heard of the placebo effect?
It’s 2013, we should realize that anecdotes do not count as data.
Fake medicine works great for fake illnesses–if you just decide that you need to “improve your memory” or make your stomach less “nervous” it’s real easy to convince yourself that voodoo cured it. When you have something real, less so.
This is a perfect example of what I’ve seen. This woman is not only choosing her own medical treatment, but her child’s as well, and I’m sure without reasonable consideration of the potential harm. This crosses a line many other nutty concepts won’t, it’s equivalent to relying on prayer instead of actual medical treatment as far as I’m concerned. You can throw the antivaxers who foist their disease carrying kids on the world into that mix as well.