Proof positive
Dr. Wright is always the first to admit that there's typically not a lot of "hard-and-fast" scientific research behind the alternative therapies he and his colleagues use at the Tahoma Clinic. It's one of the factors that the mainstream loves to point out when making their case for patented drugs. For instance, a New York Times article I read recently titled "Applying Science to Alternative Medicine" sends a two-page mixed message about natural medicine. After reading it several times, I'm relatively certain that the reporter thought he was delivering a piece of good news—that studies on alternative therapies are on the upswing in terms of both funding and design. But in the process he still managed to paint a disturbing—and distorted—picture of natural medicine. Consider the second sentence of the article, which read "But while sweeping claims are made for these treatments, the scientific evidence for them often lags far behind: studies and clinical trials, when they exist at all, can be shoddy in design and too small to yield reliable insights." But, rest assured. According to the very next sentence "the federal government is working hard to raise the standards of evidence, seeking to distinguish between what is effective, useless and harmful or even dangerous." In a matter of two sentences, the article makes alternative medicine out to be a dishonest, exaggerated field and los Federales out to be our collective knight in shining armor, here to save us from the wiles of snake-oil-salesmen everywhere. It certainly casts a shadow over the rest of the article, which talks about very positive advances in natural medicine—proven by those gold-standard double-blind studies the reporter previously claimed are few and far between. The fact is, studies about the effectiveness of alternative medicine are fewer, shorter, and smaller in design than drug studies because there's simply not enough money to pay for anything else. Drug companies can afford to invest millions of dollars in research because they can recoup that investment—and much, much more—when their drugs are granted patents and sold at exorbitant prices. Vitamins, herbs, minerals, and other natural remedies, on the other hand, can't be patented. So no one stands to make a profit on them that would even begin to cover the cost of a large-scale study. But all politics aside, the lack of double-blind, placebo-controlled results on alternative therapies can't erase the overwhelming experiential evidence behind them. These remedies and techniques have been used effectively by people all over the world for hundreds (in some cases even thousands) of years. And if that's not proof I don't know what is. Source:
"Applying Science to Alternative Medicien," The New York Times (www.nytimes.com), 9/30/08 | 
