There is only medicine.

Updated 10.21.2014; reformatted 9.19.2015
There is only medicine, additional descriptors such as complementary, integrative, functional, allopathic, naturopathic or alternative should be unnecessary. This piece is a continuation of sorts of my previous meanderings about integrative or functional medicine. Medicine is supported by science, or it is not medicine. In science, a hypothesis can be tested and shown to be more effective than a placebo. Anything else is faith and woo.

Now having established that as the thesis for this essay, in order to differentiate between doctors who practice medicine and those who either don't or who practice a hybrid of science and woo (a la Katz). So in this essay, science based medical practitioners will be called doctors (if they have an MD, if they do not then whatever proper title they do have) and practitioners who use non-science based methods (even if they incorporate some science based medicine too) will be called functional doctors or function practitioners. I realize that some may think that too respectful of woo practitioners, but functional medicine can be abbreviated to FM. So what? Well, back before I realized what a bogus term allopathic is, I was looking to title my research AM vs FM— a dumb joke, but I thought it would be a clever headline.

How wrong I was

Most of the previous article linked above concerned David Katz because I'd read a number of his nutrition based articles and had recognized him a member of Team CICO (which for the record actually does not exist, but I think people who accept the realities of the energy balance should be recognized.) So I had my epiphany and chose to publicly (to the extent that a barely notice website can be so considered) my error. This piece will cover some of what I found when researching the topic.

My Biases

I am trained as an engineer, not a scientist, but am still have a science based view. I want my medicine and medical techniques to be science based, meaning that they are not based on faith. I understand that the placebo effect is important to many medical outcomes, but placebo is not science. The placebo effect is faith.

Crossing the Streams?

When I began my research, one of my questions was what the main objection of medical doctors to functional medicine. Was the complaint primarily that FM doctors "cross the streams" without care, or is it that they are willing to attempt unproven hypotheses? Every new idea initially is unproven. Now, when an idea is proved wrong and FM types continue, now I'm on board, and always have been and always will be. But I'm a bit hesitant to say that any new idea is assumed to be wrong.

But here I ran into the homeopathy and reiki woo issues. There are others: rolfing (which I think is a type of massage, but involves aligning with the earth's energy), reflexology (another type of massage), anything that involves changes the frequency of vibrations of any atoms anywhere; there are likely more), which are pure hokum. As I've noted repeatedly now, the nutrition and exercise stuff resonates with me and likely others. Doctors don't usually spend a lot of time on nutrition in my experience, and so that's a ripe target for FM practitioners to use as a lure. Here's a good post on the way conventional medicine loses the public relations battle. The author has cystic fibrosis, so knows a thing or two about being in the belly of the beast.

The bottom line is once you move beyond nutrition and exercise, there is NO science behind ANY of the FM treatments. And it isn't because efforts and money haven't been expended to try and establish that science.

My tax dollars support Naturopathy?

The answer appears to be yes, The National Center for Complimentary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) is part National Institute of Health (NIH). Tom Harkin (Democratic Senator from Iowa) is one driving force behind the effort to prove FM or CAM treatments have scientific validity. To the NIH's credit, most of the research I saw disproved the CAM treatment, which means the attempts are honest. This inconvenient fact apparently irks Harkin. Of course, the mere existence of the center irks science based doctors who can't get funding for their projects.

At least part of the problem is that CAM and FM treatments have been shown repeatedly to be no better than placebo, but that's makes no difference to practitioners or their clients. Here is a 2003 article, written by Kimball Atwood, MD. He begins with a listing of how over time EVERY time people look to confirm what naturopathy promises... there's nothing there.

The review is quite thorough, and for me it was an introduction to new types of woo that I didn't know existed. I also learned what vitalism means, another new term. Vitalism means biological processes do not conform to physics and chemical principles, which is pure nonsense. The world and everything in it is governed by physics and chemistry.

After reading Atwood's article, I concluded that naturopaths prey on people's fear of uncertainty. Science doesn't offer certainty, it offers data and evidence and probable outcomes. Uncertainty unhinges too many people and makes them easier to fool. The recent hysteria over Ebola is a case study in the people being unhinged by uncertainty, but that's a topic for another day. Atwood ends by noting that if the medical mainstream ignores the pseudoscience, it will continue to make inroads. Which it has. One example is that CVS (a US pharmacy chain with stores across the nation) sells homeopathic remedies next to actual over the counter drugs.

A More Viral Approach

Rather than a lengthy treatise on why homeopathy doesn't work, the Sci Babe, aka Yvette d'Entremont, a former forensic chemist in Southern California, demonstrates the uselessness of homeopathic sleep remedies. I learned of the Science Babe (who's nom de plume is a play on the wootastic Food Babe) through Dr. David Gorski's blog. As a rule I never "like" any groups on Facebook because of the way Facebook collects data on its users. However, as part of my "penance" for not doing adequate due diligence regarding Katz, I "liked" both the Science Babe and the Chow Babe's pages on Facebook. Added 9.19.2015: I am no longer a part of either page. I quit Chow Babe first because there was very little value there, and quit the Sci Babe page because that became a snarky, repetitive echo chamber.

Below is the YouTube video the Science Babe made, with the goal of getting CVS to stop selling homeopathic phony remedies.


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