Pseudo Science Medicine
So many people are interested in alternative medicine nowadays. While I accept that western medicine does not have all the answers, I do get annoyed by some types. Mainly those that rely on a very rough form of science, and those that rely on psuedo science.
An example of rough science would be Chinese herbal medicine. While I accept that many plants are indeed medicinal, and will not dispute that the chinese herbs could, suitably used do some good, I do not accept it when I am told that they are better than western medicine. Why? Quite simply because western medicine already uses these, but refines them. Through testing the benefits and side effects are known (this is in common with herbal medicine). However, western medicine extracts the active ingredients, and refines them. Wintergreen oil has been developed the yield aspirin and parecetemol. All this development leads to more powerful drugs relative to the caused side effects (although, alas, still not eliminating them completley).
Now, even more annoying, is Homeopathy. The extreme dilution of a substance till the original component is not detectable. Various mechanisms have been suggested, but really this is just pseudo science. This is well expressed in this letter to New Scientist.
So, for alternative medicine to be meaningful, what must it do? Well, I would suggest that it must stop trying to be a poor imitation of what is done best by western medicine. Homeopathy may be a non-starter, but something else might just be real...
posted by Martin at 23:49
6 Comments:
For alternative medicine to be meaningful, what must it do? Well, first off, it needs to work! Ideally, it would be nice to know how it works, and to be able to demonstrate that it works better than doing nothing :)
I suspect that alternative (quack) therapies work best in the kinds of ill-defined maladies where western medicine struggles to identify a single root cause. I also suspect that most of the effect is the combination of actually listening to the patient and getting to know them, and a placebo effect (scientifically proven, if not entirely explained, but nonetheless valid). But if it works, I won't knock it.
I wonder if anyone's looked at using "alternative" medicine to treat "Gulf War Syndrome"?
Scientists frequently do experiments with "alternative therapies". If an alternative therapies seems to work then they ask why, develop a scientific theory explaining, refine the therapy to make it work even better... to whit, they turn it into science. 'Cos if it works, there'll be a scientific explanation for it. This has happened with a lot of herbal remedies already.
Other things - such as acupuncture - do not appear to work reliably when tested scientifically, so no science develops out of it. The jury is out on homeopathy currently - sometimes it does appear to work but often it doesn't. There's currently no scientific explanation for why it might work, but recent studies have shown that the chemical structure of water may be able to retain a "memory" of what has been in them (it was in New Scientist recently, I forget which issue). This may mean that a science could develop out of homeopathy. For now, though, it is unreliable, unscientific and not worth wasting your money on. Even less worth wasting tax-payers money on - which is what Prince Charles is in favour of.
Scientific scrutiny is the only reliable test for a medical therapy. So, for alternative medicine to be meaningful, what must it do? Simple - be subject to scientific scrutiny and pass.
I think if you reject everything which doesn't stand up to scientific scrutiny then there's a risk that you will be getting rid of some things which could be quite useful / effective.
Science looks at the world in a particular way and places particular blinkers on it as a result. It assumes, essentially, that everything is repeatable and follows a basic set of rules. Unrepeatable stuff happens. People aren't like that. Unrepeatable stuff happens. Scientifically, if a cure works once and only once, that means nothing. To the individual, that means everything.
Just a thought ...
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The problem is, by definition you can't predict when an unrepeatable thing is going to happen. So there's no justification for doing it. And certainly no justification for funding it with public money.
Something might have happened once, but if you've no reason to suppose that it will happen again, it's a waste of time and money trying it.
If a cure works once, it may mean "everything to the patient" but it means absolutely nothing to the second patient - on who it fails.
If there's no reason to suppose a cure will carry on working, there's no reason to spend taxpayers money on it.
If you take the view that "anything could work once so is worth trying" then that's justification for spending money on any old wacky idea that any old quack dreams up. Which would be horribly wasteful. I just hope politicians, hospital managers and civil servants realise this....
By the way, science doesn't "look at the world in a particular way". It constantly changes the way it looks at the world based on evidence from the world. That's what research scientists do. The whole point of research is to remove blinkers and look at things in a new way.
Science looks at quantitative evidence. In the case of examining the effectiveness of medicine, this would be statistics.
The anecdotal evidence, that a certain person has been cured by an alternative therapy is qualitative, and this is not easily put into a scientific context.
It would be wonderful if these two types of evidence were easy to compare, but unfortunately they are not.
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