Dangers Ahead for Alternative Medicine

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Some Thoughts on the New Year 2004
© By Peter B. Chowka

(January 1, 2004) Occasionally I'm asked why a recurring theme in my reporting and writing in recent months and years has been socialized medicine and concerns about the ever expanding role of government in both conventional and alternative medicine.

First, it should be noted that I have bona fides as a participant in the field, and not only as a critic or a curmudgeon. During more than two decades of involvement with alternative medicine (primarily as an investigative journalist), I have volunteered or have been invited to participate in a variety of official government inquiries, commissions, and panels investigating, writing reports on, or otherwise exploring the field of alt med (and more recently, its latest incarnation, the officially sanctioned "complementary alternative medicine"). In all of these efforts, including my contributions to the Office of Technology Assessment's 1990 study Unconventional Cancer Treatments and my significant contributions as a member of two of the first program advisory panels of the then new NIH Office of Alternative Medicine (in 1992-93), I approached the work in good faith and with my usual openness, seriousness, and enthusiasm.

Meanwhile, many of the articles I was writing documented the negative role that governments (federal, state, and local) were playing in terms of disfavoring and sometimes outright suppressing innovative alternative medicine options and their proponents. It was, alas, the experience over several decades of participating in the myriad government projects that deepened my suspicion of the government's role in the field.

Along the way, I devoted considerable time to investigating and blowing the whistle on developments like the Clintons' ambitious plans a decade ago for "national health care reform." Many people working in the field of alt med naively championed the Clintons' and other politicians' efforts to nationalize American health care, assuming that because these people came of age during the Sixties, they would "get" the need for and the importance of alternative medicine. Think again.

Today, as I look around, and the start of a New Year always seems a good time to take stock, most of the signs are worrisome if not ominous. Among the concerns:

1. All nine candidates for the Democratic Party's nomination for president support some form of centralized, compulsory national health care with no freedom to opt out.

2. For the first time, in 2003, the Republican Party, following the lead of President George W. Bush, promoted a significant (in fact, the most significant ever) expansion of Medicare, a mandatory federal program (a classic example of statist socialism, really) for American seniors' health care.

3. The federal role in alt med via burgeoning agencies like the NIH's NCCAM (National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine) and the National Cancer Institute's OCCAM (Office of Cancer Complementary and Alternative Medicine) is expanding exponentially with results that, at best, seem questionable.

4. Governments are encouraging the licensing and regulating of alt med professions, particularly naturopaths. Independent observers, however, point to increased costs, watering down of core natural healing principles, over regulation of therapies and their practitioners, requirements that naturopaths work as less than equals with MDs, and other negative results that inevitably accompany such actions. Last summer, a naturopath with a half century of experience told me that, essentially, in light of the developments at hand, naturopathic medicine as we knew it "is dead."

5. The Food and Drug Administration's December, 2003 ban of ephedra in nutritional supplements, notwithstanding any substantive issues with that particular substance, represents the opening salvo in a new campaign to revise the 1994 DSHEA (Dietary Supplements Health and Education Act) and give greatly expanded powers to the government to re regulate all nutritional and herbal supplements, taking decision-making and freedom to choose out of the hands of consumers.

6. Hand in hand with expanding government involvement in medical care is a rapid diminution of personal privacy and the monitoring and permanent, centralized electronic databasing of everyone's most personal and private information, including one's cradle to grave medical history, collected by the government by law now from birth.

7. Conventional medicine, notwithstanding that it allows the "integration" of some lightweight and essentially non-threatening "CAM" modalities, constantly entrenches its psychological and physical hold and monopoly on the American public (think of last year's SARS hysteria, last month's flu hysteria and the hyper-promotion of questionable vaccinations, and the ultimate institutionalization of the HIV-causes-AIDS myth/hypothesis).

Among the questions that should be asked about each of the above developments are: Does it empower individuals to make well-informed decisions, free of outside influence, propaganda, and intimidation, about their own personal choices for the prevention and treatment of illness? And then to act on those decisions? Does it expand or threaten medical pluralism and autonomy? And does it encourage and allow a level playing field and a free marketplace of ideas for competing, credible alternative and innovative - if officially unapproved - therapy options?

Close attention to the facts involved in points 1-6 above confirms that the answers are an unequivocal "No."

Alternative (both truly traditional and new wave innovative) medicine has achieved its current status and popularity within the constraints of a partial, or regulated, free market, and while constantly having to play a cat and mouse game with the government powers that be like the FDA, an often hostile mainstream media, and a historically adversarial and unbelievably powerful and influential medical Establishment.

Starting in the early 1980s, with momentum accelerating a decade later, the powers that be began accommodating alternative med or, more accurately, certain self-selected leaders of alt med were being co-opted. The Establishment could no longer overlook the enormous commercial potential that alt med was starting to demonstrate.

A classic strategy of Establishments is to bring all of their resources to bear and to switch tactics virtually overnight - a previous adversary, in this case alt med, is suddenly welcomed into the official club (sort of), while the Establishment retools itself to embrace the adversary - but in reality co opting, watering down, renaming (to "CAM"), and ultimately diminishing if not outright destroying the alternative. Today, in fact, there is actually an alt med Establishment, approved of by the official conventional medical Establishment. In many ways, the alt med Establishment has come to mimick its much bigger brother.

Today, we see scores of leading allopathic hospitals (including one in particular - a leading conventional cancer facility in New York City) and a majority of medical schools establishing with much PR fanfare departments of alternative or "integrative medicine." Does anyone think that American cancer patients today are really getting access to primary alternative medical options via such programs?

Meanwhile, promising non-toxic cancer treatments like 714X languish in the federal medical bureaucracy. At one time, for example back in the 1970s, the Establishment would simply have suppressed outright something like 714X. These days, in light of alt med's visibility and popularity, a more sophisticated and subtle response is called for. In the spring of 2001, the alt med department at the National Cancer Institute promised to study 714X (or, at least preliminarily, patients who used it), purportedly in order to start the process of answering once and for all the question of does 714X have any value. Three years, and 2 million American cancer deaths, later now, an NCI panel, after repeated delays, has still not even been able to come to "consensus" on what to think of and how to evaluate the records of a small handful of patients who used 714X - the first step in an arduously long process of possibly studying 714X in a future prospective clinical trial (don't hold your breath waiting for that to ever happen).

As journalist Linda Ellerbee used to say, "And so it goes." Another cliche might be, "The more things change, the more they remain the same." Keep them in mind the next time you see the avuncular gaze of alt med gurus like Dr. Andrew Weil or Dr. Deepak Chopra staring out at you from the cover of Time magazine.

And also, please remain skeptical as the avalanche of conventional medical and medical-political stories that are sure to happen this year begin to hit the news cycles. Expect to see at least some of them reported on, and factually deconstructed, here in the months ahead. It's a thankless job, but somebody has to do it.

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