One More Time - From The FT: NewAgers Are In Our Hospitals - They're Getting Legit - And You'd Better 'Get It' Before It's Too Late!!!*

[Rose Shapiro, author of "Suckers: How Alternative Medicine Makes Fools of Us All "] argues that the revival of alternative practitioners coincides with the questioning of authority of the youth culture of the 1960s. Hippie-inspired “holism” combined with a drive for individual responsibility in health promotion on the part of the government and others, and a generalised hunger for “extreme wellness”.

In addition, the pharmaceutical industry’s public reputation has suffered, whether from selective clinical trials, excessive marketing or safety scandals – including the effects of Thalidomide in the 1950s and Vioxx this decade. Rationalism, in other words, was undermined from within the industry as well as from without.

Shapiro, a popular science writer, reaches similar conclusions to those of academics Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst in their volume on the subject, Trick or Treatment? They catalogue an extraordinary array of unproven but often highly profitable alternative remedies that exploit faith in the natural world and scepticism about doctors, from colonic irrigation and ear candling to homeopathy and Bach flower remedies. Such practices are part of a global alternative medicine industry generating £40bn a year.

A significant minority persists in seeking unproven “natural” and “traditional” remedies that may seem harmless. Yet, as Singh and Ernst argue, they also take lives: through the directly negative effects of “treatments”; by interaction and intervention with drugs that would otherwise work; or by neglect of proven treatments, which may prolong pain and reduce the likelihood of survival of cancer or Aids patients.

-- Andrew Jack, making the same points we have - during an excellent roundup of current medical books (which everyone should be reading) - in The Financial Times.

*Taken from Karine Anne Brunck's direct quote to TMR, as she (and the homeopathalogical "Dr." Robert Wohlfahrt) went on to kill three people in France - including the extremely-painful death of her own mother - by using these methods and beliefs.