There is no evidence that complementary medicine works

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Lobby

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"Complementary" - it really means they don't work.
 
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Re: Turning house into complementary centre

Just wondered what dictionary Lobby consulted to check the meaning of complementary or is Lobby expressing a personal opinion.

My teenager 14 years of age has great back ache due to sudden growth burst. While initially I took him to a physio [who lives 26 miles from us]. She prescribed various stretches, said there was no injury as such. I supplement the stretches with daily massage treatment myself [I am a certified massage therapist and fitness instructor]to give relief, as it is not viable to travel 52 mile round trip to physio especially as my son is doing Junior Cert at the moment.

I enjoy reading Dr. Maurice Gueret's Rude Health column in the Sunday Indo.Life magazine even though he expresses complete contempt and cynicism for alternative therapies. At least I know he is expressing an opinion and that one should not jump on the justification bandwagon as long as opinion and fact are not confused. I also know of other parents who have children who are very tall and have had similiar back problems. They have got great relief from the Alexendar Technique.

Is one to suggest you should avail of prescription medicines to cure Being Tall or that GP's have a magic formula? Obviously if one is very ill one is vulnerable. Alternative treatments may not be the answer. I was recently contacted by University College hospital cancer treatment section Galway who were compiling a list of alternative therapists who could provide additional treatments to help ease these patients discomfort.T hese patients were not able to travel to Galway daily for treatment and would benefit from alternative treatment without having to make long journies by car.

Love to hear other opinions .
 
Re: Turning house into complementary centre

Lobby is not incorrect if s/he means that there is no independent, scientific/clinical evidence supporting claims that many of these "alternative/complementary" therapies work. In some cases such therapies might not only not work but may even be dangerous. It's pretty pointless to accuse those who draw attention to this fact of having some sort of blind faith in conventional therapies/drugs as some sort of panacea when this is obviously a facile argument.
 
Haille
As someone who has had low back pain since I was a teenager/ Young adult, my sympathy is with your son. I found Robin McKenzie's ideas very useful. His book is worth a read. .

There's a very wide range of complementary/alternative therapies and some have actually been studied. With regard to back pain here's a study looking at the effectiveness of spinal manipulation for chronic low back pain in the elderly.
http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct/show/NCT00475787;jsessionid=BC9EA965D8C17FAF0C47D47B8E724A76?order=31
The other point to make is that there's also scant evidence to support many mainstream therapies. Again sticking with back pain there is no evidence to show that the longterm outcome (5 years) of surgical management of a herniated disc is any better than conservative management and yet a huge amount of back surgery is done!
Regards
 
Splitting this thread has lost some of the context. For clarity some of the complementary therapies mentioned in the original thread were:
Craniosacral therapy, reflexology, yoga, reiki etc
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If anybody can provide any independent, scientific/clinical evidence supporting claims of theraputic efficacy for these practices and a sound scientific basis for the concepts that underpin them then that would be very interesting. Anecdotal evidence does not count - sorry.
 
Et cetera means "and the others" so a very wide range of therapies are covered by the term Complementary/Alternative therapies. Here is a useful summary of the evidence based trials in a number of therapies( including, just for you Clubman, prayer!) by a mainstream medical university.

[broken link removed]

Regards
 
Haille on the news the other night, the pain associated with many cancer sufferers were not alleviated by modern meds, many of the patients wished for death rather indure the pain any longer, the only ease they got from pain was through alternative therapists. Only those who suffer know.
 
davfran said:
Only those who suffer know.
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Why? Does a Doctor who studied cancer for 30 years know less about it than a 10 year old who has it? I think that logic should be applied when reviewing comments before posting.
 
It's certainly an emotive issue.

I do believe though that a distinction should be made between the practitioner and the practice. It appears to be accepted by psychologists/behavioural analysts etc that e.g. aroma and colour can significantly alter emotions/mood etc and by extension, either enhance or diminish well being - if you accept that e.g. calmer, happier people are generally healthier.

However, to trust a self appointed 'expert' aromatherapist to provide health benefits is another issue. There are plenty of charlatans or simply misguided megalomaniacs in all trades and walks of life - but it doesn't mean that there isn't scientific basis to the concept of what they practice.
 
Caveat said:
It's certainly an emotive issue.

I do believe though that a distinction should be made between the practitioner and the practice. It appears to be accepted by psychologists/behavioural analysts etc that e.g. aroma and colour can significantly alter emotions/mood etc and by extension, either enhance or diminish well being - if you accept that e.g. calmer, happier people are generally healthier.

However, to trust a self appointed 'expert' aromatherapist to provide health benefits is another issue. There are plenty of charlatans or simply misguided megalomaniacs in all trades and walks of life - but it doesn't mean that there isn't scientific basis to the concept of what they practice.
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All well and good but to suggest that any of these, often dubious, therapies is comparable to mainstream medicine is just not tenable. If an alternative medicine is subjected to empirical testing and is passed fit then it becomes part of non-alternative, or mainstream, medicine.
I accept that acupuncture MAY have real benefits but the trouble is that it is lumped in with utter rubbish like crystal therapy and Auras etc. If that line of crazy takes you in then you have bigger problems than those you seek to cure.
 
Purple said:
I accept that acupuncture MAY have real benefits but the trouble is that it is lumped in with utter rubbish like crystal therapy and Auras etc.
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...and that's the trouble with all this. I would hardly include yoga in the same breath as something like reiki for instance. Whilst it has spiritual foundations, yoga is practised in the west as primarily a form of exercise having literally millions of devotees. I can't vouch for specific health benefits but I've certainly never heard of any ill effects from yoga and wouldn't everyone agree that all yoga practitioners they've seen appear fit and healthy?

Reiki on the other hand is a pseudo-mystical ritual which by it's very nature seems 'unknowable'; any would be benefactors seemingly relying on the 'gifts' possessed by the self appointed 'healer'.

Yoga is very much a mainstream activity these days which in the west, at an everyday level is largely free of any real religious dimension.
 
tyoung said:
Et cetera means "and the others" so a very wide range of therapies are covered by the term Complementary/Alternative therapies. Here is a useful summary of the evidence based trials in a number of therapies( including, just for you Clubman, prayer!) by a mainstream medical university.

[broken link removed]

Regards
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Doesn't seem to be enough information to know what to make of these results (e.g. were they all randomised double blind clinical trials or what?). But a lot of the results are either inconclusive or simply show no evidence that the "treatment" in question is efficacious.
 
Ok clubman

But does something like yoga involve any more risk than a lot of other physical activities - martial arts? cycling? running even?

Non adherence to guidelines or recommended levels of activity, or a misguided belief in one's own abilities shouldn't demonise something like yoga.

(I've no particular reason to defend yoga by the way! I just think it's misleading and unfair to group it together with reiki & the like)
 
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"If an alternative medicine is subjected to empirical testing and is passed fit then it becomes part of non-alternative, or mainstream, medicine"

Unfortunately, mainstream medicine brings its own inbuilt biases to bear, and it cannot be assumed that an 'alternative' therapy will be admitted to mainstream medicine even if the therapy is effective and even if it can be shown to be effective. There is simply insufficient objectivity about the selection of therapies for admission to empirical testing and ultimate admission to "mainstream" medicine. Two obvious examples come to mind: -, Buteyko therapy (for asthma), and phage\bacteriophage treatment (for various acute ailments) both of which remain virtually ignored by western mainstream medicine (certainly, their progress into the mainstream is achingly slow).

I am not in the camp (and I have no doubt that such a camp exists) which prefers one of those therapies labelled as 'alternative' simply because it is so labelled. But nor am I by any means persuaded that failure to be admitted to 'mainstream' medicine is of itself sufficient cause to ignore\dismiss a therapy.
 
If you google Evidence Based Medicine, you 'll turn up a lot of info on this subject! RCTs (randomised Controlled Trials) take a long while to set up and to analyse and there isn't always funding to do the trialls you'd like to do, which means that it can be slow to investigate areas. If most of the money for RCTs comes from pharmaceutical companies, what makes you think they'd investigate non-pharmaceutical products? And if most money for RCTs comes from pharma companies, does this say somehting about our society & lack of funding for independant research?
 
Purple said:
Why should the state fund commercial research?
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I'd also question whether any funding provided by the state would really be independent in any case. One of the reasons the Chinese government put a lot of effort into reviving traditional Chinese medicines is because they figured it would be cheaper than the Western equivalent.
 
"Why should the state fund commercial research?"

Hi Purple. Your question pre-supposes that medical research is by definition commercial research. This is perhaps an ideological issue. In any event it is beyond the scope of this discussion.

In the developed\Western economies it is indeed the case that medical research is almost wholly funded by commercial interests. If you accept that medical research in the western world is indeed directed by commercial interests, the inevitable corollary is that when areas of research are chosen, the criteria will not be dictated by a wish to search for the most effective therapy, but rather by a wish to search for the most effective patentable therapy.

A consumer has no easy way of objectively measuring the most effective proven drug therapy against the most effective alternative therapy. It seems foolish to me to dismiss a non-pharma therapy only because it has it has not gone through 'conventional' clinical trials. Such trials are only ever economically justifiable for patentable pharma therapies. It is the equivalent of dismissing bicycles as a mode of transport because they have not gone through the extensive crash testing mandated for cars. Sometimes, a bicycle is exactly what you need.........
 
MOB said:
"Why should the state fund commercial research?"

Hi Purple. Your question pre-supposes that medical research is by definition commercial research. This is perhaps an ideological issue. In any event it is beyond the scope of this discussion.

In the developed\Western economies it is indeed the case that medical research is almost wholly funded by commercial interests. If you accept that medical research in the western world is indeed directed by commercial interests, the inevitable corollary is that when areas of research are chosen, the criteria will not be dictated by a wish to search for the most effective therapy, but rather by a wish to search for the most effective patentable therapy.

A consumer has no easy way of objectively measuring the most effective proven drug therapy against the most effective alternative therapy. It seems foolish to me to dismiss a non-pharma therapy only because it has it has not gone through 'conventional' clinical trials. Such trials are only ever economically justifiable for patentable pharma therapies. It is the equivalent of dismissing bicycles as a mode of transport because they have not gone through the extensive crash testing mandated for cars. Sometimes, a bicycle is exactly what you need.........
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The tests that pharma companies carry out are set out by the US FDA (Food and Drug Administration); an organisation set up by the great Richard Nixon. The product will then be tested to UL standard (Underwriting Labs), another US organisation. No pharma company can sell a product that has not been licensed, by the FDA in the US and CPMP (Proprietary and medicinal Products) in the EU. They have to submit their own tests and trials which will have been carried out under the supervision of said regulatory bodies, there will then be more tests and trials to confirm results and only then will the product be passed. Even with all that there are still products that have to be recalled and/or prescribing guidelines have to be changed. It is a long and incredibly expensive process that is funded by both the private sector and the public sector (in the form of the oversight body).
I have yet to see any system that controls or regulates alternative therapies.
In the absence of such empirical evidence I cannot accept that so called alternative medicine should be held in the same, or even close to the same, regard as scientific based medicine.
 
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