Medical belief systems: “Would you bet your life on it?”
by XXXX XXXXXX, L.Ac.
Making a decision regarding what type of healthcare service to use reveals the deepest belief systems a person has. The saying “would you bet your life on it?” is not an exaggeration when it comes to important medical decisions. There are numerous belief systems floating around the alternative medicine world, and many of them are not only unsupported by quality research, but have been discredited and found to cause more harm than good. As an acupuncturist/herbalist, I find it constantly necessary to sort through what I’ve been taught and what my patients tell me about what they believe. I’ve studied enough hypnosis and salesmanship that I could create many more “lifetime patients” than I do. But I’ve also studied enough scientific medicine to know that in many cases that would be unethical or even harmful. By sharing some of my discoveries and conclusions with you, I hope to help you sort through your own beliefs so you can make more informed decisions regarding your healthcare.
As a practitioner of Chinese Medicine, I’m clearly not one who waits for the AMA and FDA to give their full stamp of approval before using an alternative therapy. However, that doesn’t mean that I believe in every alternative therapy, or even agree with other acupuncturists about what diseases it’s appropriate to treat with acupuncture. When you’re dealing with a new medical practitioner, especially an alternative practitioner, you not only have to evaluate the efficacy of their therapeutic modalities, but their personality and motives. When I was in acupuncture school, I set a personal goal to have my main source of income be something other than acupuncture, so I wouldn’t be tempted to over-prescribe acupuncture to pay my bills. I have attained this goal through my online herbal pharmacy, and I find that it allows me to be more relaxed and feel more ethics-driven than money-driven in my practice. I have seen other practitioners of alternative medicine get themselves into financial situations which led them to make all sorts of incredible claims in efforts to recruit and keep new patients, in order to make car and house payments, etc.
We all have to draw our lines somewhere. What are some things that are beyond your line? Perhaps you like crystals. You may say you “believe” in crystal healing. But many people who “believe” in crystal healing may draw their lines in different places. Some may believe that relaxing with crystals on their charkas for stress relief is the extent of crystal healing’s power, while others may believe that wearing crystals can cure cancer. If you were recommended a particular crystal for a disease you had, what would your limits be? Would they involve the cost of the crystal, research you could find about the crystal, or the reputation of the crystal store from your friends? If you saw a book on crystals which said that a particular crystal was good for a particular disease you had, would you look for supporting references, or would you believe it just because it was in print and “felt” good?
Part of the reason I feel it important to directly address these ideas is that in the past I have invested belief in people and theories which didn’t warrant my time and trust. I’m sure it happens to others, as well.
One such example is iridology. Bernard Jensen, one of the main promoters of iridology, reportedly took part in a controlled study along with several other prominent iridologists. Given a series of slides of healthy people’s eyes and pictures of the irises of those with kidney failure, Jensen couldn’t tell the difference in any significant way. Results weren’t even consistent among the other iridologists. This is despite the fact that iridology should be a simple visual comparison of the slide with one of the maps of iridology. Of course, I had hoped that iridology was valid—there is no shame in that. However, I wonder how many people have accepted the diagnosis of an iridologist and missed discovering the true cause of their disease or wasted thousands of dollars on useless therapies.
Chinese pulse diagnosis is another diagnostic method that requires a balanced and cautious approach. In the context of traditional Chinese diagnostics, pulse diagnosis is one of four methods. The four are: looking, listening, asking, and touching. Pulse diagnosis should not be used as the only diagnostic method, but should be combined with a thorough verbal intake including medical history, current symptoms, etc.
Perhaps some of you believe in breatharianism. Please contemplate the saying: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” One supposed breatharian (the owner of breatharian.com!) was reportedly caught hiding in a hotel with a chicken pot pie. According to my understanding of many metaphysical theories, to become a spiritual breatharian, one must have the highest intentions for all beings, especially humans, as one’s main goal—there can be no room for ego, selfishness, or fear. In that case, wouldn’t a true breatharian want to undergo evaluation under controlled conditions so as to allow people with conventional consciousness to learn that breatharianism is a true possibility, not a myth? After all, there is currently a million dollar prize from the James Randi Educational Foundation (
www.randi.org) to anyone who can prove any paranormal ability under controlled conditions. That money could be donated to spiritual/social causes (such as getting clean water to kids in Africa or cleaning up depleted uranium in Iraq), so the argument that only ego wants money doesn’t fly with me. I’m working hard to try to find some way to develop and verify a paranormal healing power so I can win the million dollars and thus encourage all of the doubters of the world to take up energy healing and meditation. Unfortunately, when I meditate and enter into an altered state of consciousness that is blissful to me, I think it’s explainable through William Burroughs’ statement, “Consciousness is chemical in nature and changes as its chemistry changes.” I’m fairly certain Qi Gong meditation on the third eye point alters pineal secretions of serotonin, other neurotransmitters, and endorphins. However, a well-designed study to show significant evidence of the ability to reliably transmit energy to affect another person over any distance has yet to be done, from what I’ve been able to find. If you know of one, please send it to me. Unfortunately, it seems that many of the claims of paranormal abilities, from Transcendental Meditation’s “crime-lowering” statistics, to Sai Baba’s “manifestations” of ash and jewelry, are faked.
If I told you that I could perform a medical procedure on you which would prevent almost every disease, had been around for decades, had thousands of practitioners, several schools and professional organizations, but would cost you $31,200 for 20 years of prevention, what would your response be? Would you simply want to hear more about the philosophy, would you do your own research on the techniques, or would you get suspicious quickly? Well, if you got an average of 1 chiropractic adjustment per week at $30 an adjustment for 20 years, that’s what it would cost you. Since there are so many chiropractors and chiropractic colleges, you’d think that by now they would have solid evidence that regular maintenance adjustments would prevent the diseases they claim arise as a result of vertebral misalignment. Even when trying to find research on chiropractic for chronic neck pain (which even a conservative investigator may believe chiropractic is good for), I found little evidence that chiropractic adjustments alone had a significant long-term result. In fact, on one of the main chiropractic websites, chiro.org, one of the most thorough studies they present on neck pain and chiropractic found that exercise made a bigger difference in chronic neck pain than neck manipulations. The fabulous public resource, pubmed.com (the National Library of Medicine) lets anyone search through a massive number of research abstracts. I’ve been looking through them for quite a while now, and it seems that chiropractic doesn’t appear very useful for things such as asthma and infantile colic, but may be useful for back pain. That sounds reasonable to me. Acupuncture has also been shown to have little, if any, effect on chronic asthma. It didn’t help my belief in chiropractic theory when I read that D. D. Palmer, the founder of chiropractic, stated that 95 percent of disease is caused by spinal misalignment and the other 5 percent is caused by other joints out of place. This concept implies that a person with a perfectly aligned spine should be able to eat week old sushi, have unprotected sex with a Hep C carrying prostitute, get exposed to SARS and Anthrax spores and yet be unaffected. If you believe that, let me know and I’ll mail you some sushi.
There is a lot of talk in the various schools of alternative medicine about ‘treating the cause’ of a disease. The causes of disease depend on your theories. Chiropractors from the Palmer school may believe that all disease is caused by joints out of place. Some puritanical religious sects still believe that disease comes from sinful thoughts. Hulda Clark believed that all disease came from a combination of parasites, heavy metals, and industrial solvents. You may have the impression that Chinese Medicine’s concept is that all disease is caused by imbalanced Qi. Traditional Chinese Medicine actually teaches that there are numerous causes of disease: internal causes such as excess emotions, external causes such as wind-cold, damp, and heat (which line up nicely in symptoms and treatments with viral common colds, mold/yeast allergies, and bacterial infections), trauma, poor nutrition, and parasites, to name a few. Instead of being opposed to modern medical theories, Chinese Medicine uses them to confirm its traditional theories, understand the treatments, and move forward into more complete understanding. Hundreds of years ago, Chinese doctors figured out that goiter (a rather shocking enlargement of the thyroid gland in the neck) happened more in people who lived inland and didn’t eat much fish or seaweed. They shipped dried fish and seaweed to these people and cured the goiter. This type of discovery is only enriched by the modern understanding that iodine in seafood is necessary for proper thyroid function. D. D. Palmer would have been doing daily neck adjustments to help the vital force get to the thyroid and Hulda Clark would have been insisting on a parasite cleanse.
Homeopathy is another discipline that merits some rational investigation when it comes to fixing the cause of a disease. There is a hint of evidence that homeopathic medicines are different than placebos, but there is very little evidence that they do what homeopathic theory claims. Homeopathic theory is that if you give a substance in high doses, it will cause certain symptoms and in infinitesimal doses, will treat those same symptoms. For example, if you have a Vitamin D and calcium deficiency, your bones will weaken. According to homeopathic theory, since bones can be weakened by vinegar, a pill made with the diluted energetic preparation of vinegar should be able to treat weakened bones. While many homeopaths claim to treat the underlying cause of a disease, this example goes to show that the theories of homeopathy clearly are working to suppress the symptoms of disease, not to address the causes. Nutrition is a science and is well documented with good quality research. Homeopathy is a theory, and has some deep contradictions at its core. Homeopathic practitioners often spend a lot of time with their patients, getting to know many details about their life and personality. This alone can feel very therapeutic, but it also can cause the emotional bonds between practitioner and patient to outweigh the rationality of the therapy.
Applied Kinesiology is another technique that deserves mention. I’ve had several experiences with alternative practitioners who used variations of “AK” to prescribe nutrients. Generally, they have a patient hold a few different bottles of supplements and then they test their muscle strength by pressing their arm down against resistance to determine which bottle the patient should buy. Any practitioners which do this should be invited to participate in a test where they will drink the vial they select using kinesiology when one vial contains water and one contains poison. If they can get the right vial 10 out of 10 times, they can contact James Randi for the million dollar paranormal challenge.
There is a study, to be fair, which seems to show that if a person allergic to a food actually tastes that food, their muscle testing response will be weaker. That makes some degree of sense. When I eat a rancid walnut or pine nut, my tongue will swell almost immediately. We’ve all heard by now of people with severe peanut allergies having reactions to smelling peanuts or being in the room with peanuts. However that does not justify prescribing medicines by having a patient hold the sealed bottle or, as some veterinarians do, diagnosing allergies in a pet by testing the owner. On the other hand, one study did show that making positive or negative statements about one’s self did change the muscle strength. I’m not arguing that the mind doesn’t affect the body—it certainly does. However, expanding that to a sales technique for supplements before it’s been fully researched is unethical.
There certainly discoveries yet to be made in the medical field. Improvements to treatment methods should be encouraged both in mainstream medicine and alternative medicine. Consumers of any type of medicine now have at their access much more information than ever before, given the vast informational resources of the internet. Practitioners, such as myself, should accept the responsibility of continuing education, which includes re-evaluating their assumptions and methods from the ground up given the new information that’s available.
Ultimately, I’m recommending that you become responsible for your healthcare decisions through thorough research, rational thinking, and responsible experimentation. Read about your condition, consult with mainstream and alternative practitioners, evaluate their theories and proposals based upon documented research and logic, budget the time and money you’re willing to spend on experimental or alternative therapies, and don’t be afraid to get a second, third, or fourth opinion if things don’t improve in a reasonable period of time.
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