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

It is time for those in responsible positions in universities to change priorities. Academic standards must not be sacrificed for financial considerations. A strategy that mainly aims at profit is shortsighted; it may be successful in the short term but in the long term it will undermine the integrity of our institutions of higher education.

4 Alternative gurus

It is strange that we live in an era when alternative practitioners are more famous than conventional practitioners. For example, the US health guru Deepak Chopra is a world-famous promoter of Ayurvedic medicine and other alternative therapies, and there is no conventional doctor who can match his global celebrity status.

Chopra and his fellow health gurus have been spreading the gospel of alternative medicine for well over a decade, achieving major press coverage, appearing on the most popular TV shows and lecturing to vast audiences. Their undeniable charisma, coupled with corporate professionalism, has meant that they have had a major impact on the public’s perception of alternative medicine. In general, they have simply added to the often exaggerated and misleading claims surrounding these therapies.

For example, Dr Andrew Weil is one of America’s most successful proponents of alternative medicine, having twice adorned the cover of Time magazine and regularly appearing on Oprah and Larry King Live. He labels himself ‘Your trusted health advisor’. He does have a background in medicine, so some of his advice is sensible, such as encouraging more exercise and less smoking. However, much of his advice is nonsense, and the problem for his legions of followers is that they may not be able to tell the difference between the sensible advice and the nonsense. In Natural Health, Natural Medicine, published in 2004, he actively discourages readers from using prescription drugs for treating rheumatoid arthritis, even though some drugs can indisputably alter the course of the disease and offer the chance of preventing crippling deformities.

While sometimes denigrating conventional medicines that do work, Weil seems to encourage alternative therapies that do not work, such as homeopathy. He even suggests to patients that they should experiment with a range of alternative therapies and find out what works for them, which particularly concerned the retired physician Harriet Hall, who reviewed his book in Skeptical Inquirer magazine: ‘The problem with this approach is many conditions are self-limited and others have variable courses. When your symptoms happen to subside, you will falsely attribute success to whatever remedy you happened to be trying at the time.’ Rather than encouraging patients to self-experiment and come to possibly unreliable conclusions, it would be better if Weil accurately publicized the conclusions from carefully and safely conducted clinical trials.

Dr Weil’s suck-it-and-see philosophy is shared by many of his fellow authors in the genre of alternative medicine. They readily throw every imaginable alternative treatment at their readers, as shown by Professor Ernst and his colleagues, who surveyed seven of the leading books on alternative medicine. Altogether, these books offered forty-seven different treatments for diabetes, of which only twelve appeared in more than one book. Five of these treatments (hypnotherapy, massage, meditation, relaxation and yoga) can help patients with their general wellbeing, but none of the other treatments for diabetes is backed by any evidence at all. There is a similar level of conflicting and misleading advice in relation to cancer — the seven books suggest a total of 133 different alternative treatments.

Kevin Trudeau is another high-profile guru — his book Natural Cures They Don’t Want You To Know About has sold 5 million copies and topped the New York Times bestseller list. This success is baffling, as Trudeau has no medical credentials. Instead, his Wikipedia entry describes him as ‘an American author, pocket billiards promoter (founder of the International Pool Tour), convicted felon, salesman, and alternative medicine advocate’. After serving two years in a federal prison for credit-card fraud, he worked in partnership with a company called Nutrition for Life. He soon fell foul of the law again, and was sued for essentially operating a pyramid-selling scheme. In his third incarnation, Trudeau started using TV infomercials to sell products, but over and over again he was accused of making false and un substantiated claims, so much so that in 2004 the Federal Trade Commission fined him $2 million and permanently banned him from ‘appearing in, producing, or disseminating future infomercials that advertise any type of product, service, or program to the public’.