Trick or Treatment—The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine (Electronic book text)

Even more impressively, the actor Richard E. Grant exposed a dangerous scam involving goat serum as a life-saving treatment for HIV/AIDS. Having been brought up in Swaziland, Grant was invited to endorse goat serum in Africa, but his reaction was not the sort of thing that the vendors of goat serum had been looking for: ‘Dead people are now Lazarused from the grave — Bullshit!’ Grant acted responsibly and notified journalists working for BBC Newsnight, who publicized the fact that goat serum is just snake oil.

2 Medical researchers

This category may surprise many of our readers. After all, throughout this book we have relied upon medical researchers to investigate alternative medicine. It is only thanks to their efforts that it has become apparent that so many of these treatments are ineffective. Not only have they conducted research into alternative medicine, they have also done their best to disseminate the disappointing truth about the various therapies. However, most medical researchers do not investigate alternative medicine, but rather they focus on developing conventional treatments — our criticism is reserved for them.

There has been a general tendency for researchers to focus on their own speciality, perhaps developing new antibiotics, vaccines or surgical techniques, while ignoring the fact that alternative practitioners are often undermining their work by scaremongering about conventional medicine and overhyping their own alternative treatments. In other words, too many medical researchers have stood by and silently watched the rise of alternative medicine and the crackpot theories behind them.

There have been only a few shining examples of academics who have gone out of their way to highlight the contradictions, exaggerated claims and falsehoods within much of alternative medicine, but in many cases the consequences have been quite remarkable. In 2006, a loose coalition of like-minded scientists wrote an open letter to chief executives of the National Health Service Trusts, who are ultimately responsible for allocating funds for healthcare. The signatories, who included only one specialist researcher in the area of alternative medicine (Edzard Ernst), simply argued that homeopathy and many other alternative therapies were unproven and that the NHS should reserve its funds for treatments that had been shown to work: ‘At a time when the NHS is under intense pressure, patients, the public and the NHS are best served by using the available funds for treatments that are based on solid evidence.’

The letter generated a front-page headline in The Times, which then led to radio and television coverage. For the first time, many members of the public were being informed about the false claims of homeopaths and were learning that their taxes were being wasted on bogus remedies. Moreover, the chief executives of the NHS Trusts seemed to pay some attention to the letter and reviewed their policies towards homeopathy — by mid-2007, 21 trusts continued their funding for homeopathy unabated and 40 trusts had not disclosed their spending on homeopathy, but 86 trusts had either stopped sending patients to the four homeopathic hospitals or were introducing measures to limit referrals strictly. Hilary Pickles, director of public health at Hillingdon Primary Care Trust, explained his view on funding homeopathy in The Times:

It isn’t just that there is no evidence base for homoeopathy; it is also a question of spending priorities. Every time you decide to spend NHS money on one thing, something else is losing out. It is completely inappropriate to spend money on homoeopathy that is unproven, as it means less money for other treatments that are known to be effective.

A group of vets embarked on a more satirical campaign against the use of homeopathy by forming the British Veterinary Voodoo Society in 2005. They were outraged when the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons decided to publish a list of vets who practised homeopathy, which would effectively promote and tacitly endorse the practice. These anti-homeopathy vets, whose main concern was that animals should receive the best available treatments, were arguing that homeopathy was on a par with voodoo when it came to evidence and efficacy. Their campaigning has helped to persuade veterinary societies to behave more responsibly, and the Federation of Veterinarians in Europe (FVE) now urges its members ‘to work only on the basis of scientifically proven and evidence-based methods and to stay away from non-evidence-based methods’.