Criticism of Alternative Medicine

Alternative medicine's critics do not mince words. Dr. Arnold Relman, editor in chief emeritus of The New England Journal of Medicine, wrote in July 1995, "There really is no such thing as alternative medicine--only medicine that has been proved to work and medicine that has not." Dr. Marcia Angell, executive editor of the same journal, one of the most respected and prestigious in medicine, dismisses alternative medicine just as harshly. "It's a new name for snake oil," she told the New York Times in June 1996, adding, "There's medicine that works and medicine that doesn't work." Leon Jaroff, the founder of Discover magazine, says that much of alternative medicine is "worthless and some of it even dangerous."

Jaroff argued in a New York Times opinion piece (October 6, 1997) that Congress should stop funding the OAM because none of its studies have yet either proven or disproved the effectiveness of alternative therapies. He and other scientists say that by creating the OAM and funding questionable research, Congress has given a stamp of legitimacy to therapies of dubious merit.

Dr. Barrie Cassileth, a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and a former member of the OAM's advisory council, was disappointed by the way the OAM awarded its most recent group of research grants. In the grant-review process, "program balance and geographic representation" were considered as well as scientific merit. Cassileth had hoped that the studies OAM approved would hold alternative therapies to stricter standards such as those used by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in testing the safety and efficacy of drugs developed by mainstream pharmaceutical companies. "If the [research grant] reviews had been conducted strictly by scientists, probably nothing would have been funded," she told the New York Times in June 1996.

Medical treatments that are said to be proven are those that have been subjected to clinical trials, studies in which one group of people receives the treatment being studied while another group, called a control group, does not. The trials must show conclusively that members of the group that received treatment had better results that those in the control group. To date, most alternative therapies have not been subjected to large-scale clinical trials.

Some in the alternative medicine camp say that it is unfair for critics to complain of the lack of studies backing up alternative therapies on the one hand, while at the same time calling for research to be stopped because it is not worthwhile. They argue that the OAM, now in its fifth year, has not had enough time to gather the hard scientific evidence demanded by critics. Daniel Callahan, director of international programs at the Hastings Center, a group concerned with medical ethics, argued in a letter to the New York Times (October 9, 1997), "Many of us have never used alternative medicine, and it may turn out there is little to it. But it is an unbecoming form of know-nothingism and scientific dogmatism to want the only systematic study of it in the country scuttled."

Sources

Herman, Robin. "Therapies Outside the Mainstream." Washington Post (August 1, 1995): 10.

Jaroff, Leon. "Bee Pollen Bureaucracy." New York Times (October 6, 1997): A19.

Kolata, Gina. "In Quests Outside Mainstream, Medical Projects Rewrite Rules." New York Times (June 18, 1996): A1.

Kolata, Gina. "On Fringes of Health Care, Untested Therapies Thrive." New York Times (June 17, 1996): A1.

Langone, John. "Challenging the Mainstream." Time (Fall 1996): 40.

Lehrman, Sally. "Alternative Medicine: Insurers Cover New Ground." Harvard Health Letter (December 1996): 1.