It's always amazed me how much the Catholic Church waffles on about the importance of "truth", all the while having the ultimate veto on truth - if the Holy See determines that the truth is no longer convenient, they simply rescind it and bring out Truth 2.0. 
But once Truth 2.0 comes out, Truth 1.0 just evaporates. It never happened. Truth 2.0 is how it's always been. If Truth 2.0 states that two and two makes five, then it is, has been and always will be.
And so it is with that thought that we should turn to the new Popes - the waffling journalists like one Madeline Bunting. Her new pronouncement has arrived! Let's dig in and see what happened.
The scientists who pronounced from on high on the dangers of complementary medicine are all extremely distinguished in their fields, I'm sure, but I fear that they are failing to grasp why this field of medicine is growing so fast in popularity.
The article which Ms. Bunting links to spends a good long time waffling about personalities about how this nasty, nasty elite is being told off by this doctor who is a member of Prince Charles' gang of holists and happy-clappies. Of course, none of this actually answers the question: is alternative medicine for real or not? If it isn't, why should we be funding it? Either it's real or it's bullshit. Either/or. Either/or. Either/or. It can't be real and bullshit. Either it works or it doesn't. No amount of mystical nonsense changes that.
There was something of the traditional elitism about these giants of the medical establishment - one of the most rigid of elites - lecturing the country from their august heights. In sweeping terms, they lumped all kinds of complementary therapies together. Yet some of those, such as osteopathy and acupuncture, now have a good evidence base; others, such as massage, clearly have palliative benefits for many kinds of chronic pain.
Indeed. There are, as Richard Dawkins (one of the demons Bunting is always trying to exorcise) states, only two types of alternative medicine - the stuff that works and the stuff that doesn't. Nobody really objects to having the alternative medicine that does work available on the NHS. What they object to is having the stuff that doesn't work on the NHS.
It is actually the alties who lump things together though. Science says, quite simply, "do these things do anything?", while the alternative medicine lump together all sorts of rubbish together simply because it's not currently medicine. The scientific categorisation of alternative medicine is simple: it's stuff that doesn't work, because non-alternative medicine is stuff that does work. The alternative categorisation of alternative medicine is based on whether the person is part of the alternative health clan, whether they hang out at mind/body/spirit fairs, whether they wear crystals or not, how many silly beady things they wear around their neck, how often they hang around with sympathetic journalists and how much they waffle on about holism.
If I'm feeling a bit woozy, but I don't know that there's an actual condition, I'll make myself some hot chocolate, have a bath, take a nap or try and go for a walk. Are these "alternative" medicines? Yeah, sort of. I don't have to go to a doctor or pharmacist to get them. They seem to work pretty well though. But they aren't really alternative because I don't have to go along to see the alternative elite - the army of phony-qualified nutters in whatever is the current cultural version of priestly vestments and pay £50 for a bottle of sugar pills that have been wafted somewhere close to something while the moon was in the latter part of waxing and all the curtains on the south-side of the building were open.
But in this letter, and the way it was reported, all such therapies were dismissed and the repeated failure of one of them, homeopathy, to demonstrate evidence of effectiveness in clinical trials was emphasised.
No they weren't. The letter said quite sensible things like: "Treatments covered by this definition include some which have not been tested as pharmaceutical products, but which are known to cause adverse effects, and others that have no demonstrable benefits. While medical practice must remain open to new discoveries for which there is convincing evidence, including any branded as alternative¹, it would be highly irresponsible to embrace any medicine as though it were a matter of principle."
Bunting then waffles on about some psychological shit which is interesting, but doesn't actually have any relevance to the argument. Yes, we should try and understand the psychological and cultural underpinnings of medical treatment as these things can help us produce better cures and refine treatments and make them better. But that doesn't justify spending money on crystal-gazing while people die of diseases like AIDS for which retrovirals work a lot better than magic.
But then there's this little shocker:
If the NHS were to be bullied into cutting back on complementary therapies, the people who would lose out are those with the limited financial and personal resources; the well off will continue to flock to their complementary therapists, and are prepared to pay for the benefits they experience in improved wellbeing.
How exactly would they suffer? The rich people are being conned on their own coin, but we want the poor people to be socially subsidised for being taken advantage of by hucksters. What a smashing idea: equal-opportunity deception. Quick, this lady's too good for journalism - someone get a job at the god-damn IPPR or something.
Only a horrible person would think of something like that. People with money are being conned, so let's pay for poor people to get conned too. That's what this boils down to. Let's take the money from real doctors and give it to people - like homeopaths - who have had two centuries to prove some scrap of merit to their ideas but who have failed miserably.
Of course, what Bunting fails to take in to account is that this isn't just a bunch of elitist doctors producing a propaganda document - it's signed be people such as Professor Ernst of Exeter. He's a professor of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and has led numerous scientific and clinical studies in to the efficacy and scientific basis of the medicines.
As The Guardian reported back in 2003, when Prof. Ernst took the chair of CAM at Exeter, CAM practitioners "were appalled when the post was given to a conventional scientist who declared his intention was to put therapies and treatments from acupuncture to herbs to reflexology under rigorous scrutiny, to find out what worked and what did not" and, as he states, "I didn't realise that there are between 20,000 and 40,000 CAM practitioners in the UK and that most of them would be opposed to what I was planning to do".
This whole thing seems to me quite simple. On the one hand, you've got scientists, doctors and sensible people saying: "Let's test this crap and see whether it works. If it works, fine; if not, let's chuck it out".
But that pesky other hand always says "But we can't test it," followed by some irrational and obscuritanist reason, "you're all a bunch of elitist fascist something-or-others!" then usually wanders off in to a frothy mess comprising a scant reading of Thomas Kuhn and New Age nonsense.
As for the talk of elitists, I would like to say the following. I am not a member of the elite. I am a lowly undergraduate philosophy student. I agree wholeheartedly with the letter written by Baum et al. because it is sensible and rational. Of course, that's never the way to win as a columnist - obscuritanist and contrarian is far easier.
We have no need of elites - I mean, who wants people who are trained experts in a subject, when a bunch of hippies and journalists can do the job of, you know, treating complex diseases like cancer far better than cancer specialists. Perhaps if someone finds a homeopathic drug that makes journalists a little more circumspect and honest, they should send some to "Madeline Bunting, c/o The Guardian Equal-Opportunity Scam Dept.". Of course, it might be an idea to test them and make sure they don't do the opposite. I know homeopathy tends to do that - the opposite of zero is zero, remember.
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