Alternative Medicine in America Meets the Rigor of Western Medicine

If half of the adults in a country approve of a certain kind of treatment philos

ophy, would you still call it "alternative"? That’s the way it is in America, a pl
ace where 80 million grown-ups every year turn to some kind of alternative treat
ment – herbs, megavitamins, yoga, acupuncture or anything else. Like George says
in Seinfeld, everyone wants to go “holistic” these days. As wonderful as the claims
are for alternative medicine, there isn’t any solid scientific evidence to back th
em up, at least not enough. Everyone loves to hate big Pharma, but next to the s
tudies that big Pharma organizes for its drugs, studies to do with alternative m
edicine can seem positively primitive, and unscientific in the way they are desi
gned and conducted. And yet there is hope.
The government, aware that half the country is madly in love with alternative me
dicine, is hard at work trying to bring to this kind of medicine the scientific
standards that mainstream medicine takes for granted. Pretty soon, the federal g
overnment hopes that there will be standards that separate the wheat from the ch
aff, the science from the snake oil. To someone coming from mainstream medical r
esearch, the standards in research used to study alternative medicine methods li
ke yoga can seem laughable. For instance, there was a Harvard study done six yea
rs ago on more than 100 existing research papers on yoga all of which claimed th
at yoga could treat everything from heart disease to cancer and psychiatric prob
lems. When they looked closely at these papers they realized that less than half
of them used the universal research standard of randomized controlled trials. I
n regular research, this standard is a mainstay – a way that makes certain (by usi
ng chance and randomness to assign a researcher to a patient)that no scientist i
nvolved in a study is able to bring his personal hopes and biases into play.
The government body, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medic
ine hopes to put an end to all this, armed with a budget of more than $100 milli
on. They plan to take up all the alternative medicine research themselves, to tr
y to bring some more rigor in these circles. One of the popular claims made for
alternative medicine these days is the one where they say that ginkgo biloba can
arrest Alzheimer’s. The National Center is now taking up a large-scale study of 3
000 patients to determine if this is correct. The Center is also involved in a l
arge-scale study to see if acupuncture can help with arthritis. That study is do
ne now, and they have found that acupuncture does indeed help with osteoarthriti
s of the knee.
As for the ginkgo study, they feel that the active ingredient in the plant isn’t a
lways found in enough concentration in direct extracts. They want to see if arti
ficially boosting its active ingredients can help. There has never been this kin
d of rigor in alternative medicine, and it is wonderful to see that the mainstre
am is embracing and recognizing the merits there are in alternative medicine. Th
ese studies can be very expensive, and the $100 million won’t go very far. If only
they could find the funding for this now, a panacea would not be far away.