In Offense Against Witch Doctors and Alternative Medicine or Why Yonatan Zunger is Almost Completely Wrong and Naive on This One
Let me preface my argument here by saying that Yonatan Zunger is one of my favorite people on G+, and I always learn a lot from his posts. However, on this one, I think he’s about 98% wrong.
The 2% that he’s right? Well, that’s the part where he talks about the need for people to have emotional support systems while going through medical treatments. Yup, that’s important and I completely agree with him.
Bear in mind, too, that he didn’t write the linked article, but he shared it, and given how many followers he has and how big his reach is, it upsets me that he shared it with so little critique of the article, but basically he shared it with minimal commentary that described the weaknesses or problems with the article.
Disclaimer: I Am a Dentist, Trained in Science and Western-Style Medicine. I also Train in Shaolin Kung Fu and Universal Yoga at a very traditional martial arts school where they talk about chi, chakras. I Ignore That Part
The essential claims in the article are:
1) Even though Western medicine is highly effective, it is too depersonalized and people need something else to provide emotional support.
2) Alternative medicine of various kinds provides better emotional support than Western medicine, even if their actual treatments aren’t effective.
3) If CAM (“Complementary” and Alternative Medicine) provides the emotional support to help you get through Western Medicine treatment, it should be ok to have both and the Western Medicine doctors should be “OK” with it as long as the CAM practitioners don’t interfere with the Western Medicine.
So let’s look at each of these in turn.
Is Western Medicine REALLY That Depersonalized?
This is a frequent claim that is assumed to be true by pretty much everyone, but quite frankly, I’m not sure how true it is. There’s never a source given; it’s just one of those unquestioned truths. But let’s assume for the moment that it is. Does that justify either the second or third claim?
Do CAM Providers REALLY Provide Better Emotional Support?
Again, this is an oft-stated claim, but quite frankly, I’ve never seen any actual studies supporting it. Of course, I’ve never seen any studies refuting it, either. Maybe there are, but again, for the moment, let’s just assume that it’s true. Does that justify the 3rd claim, that regular physicians and CAM providers should work together?
Simple answer: Hell no.
Here’s the Problem: Few CAM Providers Actively Support Western Medicine. If they did, they wouldn’t really be CAM Providers.
As a general rule, CAM providers (chiropractors, naturopaths, homeopaths, acupuncturists, etc) are CAM providers precisely because they reject Westernized Medicine in favor of their chosen modality or set of modalities. IOW, if people truly believe in Westernized medicine, they don’t choose CAM options. They become physicians!
Therefore, CAM providers usually do exactly what Yonatan says they shouldn’t do: they shouldn’t interfere with the medical care being recommended and carried out by conventional medical doctors. The whole point of most CAM treatment is that they are pushing themselves as a genuine alternative to Westernized, conventional medicine, and that’s why people go to them. People don’t choose CAM providers because they want emotional support; they choose them because they don’t like the answers or treatments recommended by the real physicians. CAM providers don’t recommend treatments usually offered by conventional providers because they don’t believe in them! Nor do CAM providers accept patients/clients just to provide “emotional support.” That’s why psychologists and therapists do.
Look, I get what he’s trying to say. I just think it’s totally naive, disingenuous, and it ignores the basic reality of the split between conventional medicine and CAM.
Yes, emotional support is important. Yes, I agree that Westernized medicine has issues with being perceived as emotionally supportive, especially during difficult treatments such as chemotherapy (whether the perception is reality, I’m not sure). I’ll even tentatively agree that CAM providers are perceived as more caring. But what that SHOULD mean is that we need to work on better ways of providing emotional support WITHIN the conventional medical system, or that people need other sources of emotional support together with their conventional medical treatment.
But given that the whole point of CAM is usually to promote their quackery and ineffective, disproven, and generally useless pretend “cures” as the alternative to conventional medicine, I am absolutely, completely, totally convinced that Westernized medicine needs to have not one goddamned thing to do with CAM.
Sorry Yonatan: you’re wrong on this one. Completely. (Except for the 2%)
For a related article that addresses the topic from a slightly different angle, I suggest this recent article by Dr. Steven Novella: The Ethics of Prescribing Worthless Treatments https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-ethics-of-prescribing-worthless-treatments/
Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger
This is a short defense of the value of witch doctors, alternative medicine, and the like, which raises a reasonable point: the medical establishment in the Western world is on the whole terrible at making you feel like something useful is being done, i.e. the psychological aspects of medicine, and as the psychosomatic system is actually a fairly important one and has very real effects on the body, its neglect of that can cause real physical harm.
Phrased another way, separate from the “expert mechanic of the body” aspect of medicine is giving people a way to conceptualize their condition and deal with it. This can be very important, and people’s needs in this regard vary widely, from the religious, to the new age, to sitting down with a pile of textbooks on medicine. (This is distinct from sitting down with the same pile of textbooks in order to understand the condition so that you can treat it more effectively: that same pile can have a second, separate virtue, which is to help one understand and conceptualize even what one can do nothing about. That is to say, for some people – myself included – this satisfies the same emotional need that a houngan satisfies for others.)
All of which is to say, so long as you aren’t going to a witch doctor instead of to an actual doctor, and as long as the witch doctor (or the actual doctor, for that matter) is neither scamming you nor harming you, the combination can actually be fairly beneficial.
I suspect that, like with any situation where multiple professionals are treating the same condition, things work best when they view one another as colleagues working on different ends of a problem, and worst when they view one another as competitors. The crystal healer who urges you to eschew chemotherapy is not doing you any favors, but neither is the oncologist who urges you away from your emotional support.
Via Andrew Hunter.