An Alternative Medicine, sometimes called a Traditional Medicine, Herbal Remedies, Holistic Remedy, Eastern Medicine, or CAM (Chinese Alternative Medicine) or is a product that claims to work like western medicine, but isn’t western medicine. Often this claim will come with a statement about Big Pharma, effectiveness and cost. This is a nuanced and complex issue. The summary, though, is no, they don’t work. Let’s dig in a bit.
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Alternative Medicines Mostly Don’t Work
Mostly alternative remedies don’t work as most people define “work”. Herbal remedies can include, in some cases, basic ingredients that when refined and increased in potency we would call medicine. That is where most of our modern medicine started. For a small thing like a mild headache, or temporary simple fatigue, or a temporary bit of ill ease, that herbal remedy might be enough. That is, you can take a product that we out performed a hundred years ago. Often just eating some food, having a rest or doing some exercise will do much better than the alternative medicine.
“By definition, alternative medicine, has either not been proved to work, or been proved not to work. Do you know what they call ‘alternative medicine’ that’s been proved to work? …. Medicine.”
Here, Tim Minchin breaks down the essence of the problem. Medicine is rigorously tested to ensure that it meets the claimed outcome, has little side effects, is more effective than the prior option and is safe to use or has known levels of risk. If the product has been tested and found not to work, then it is often sold as a supplement or alternative medicine, however its health claims are fictitious. If the product has not been tested, then we don’t know what it does or if it works, what it’s side effects are or risks.
I know that there is an argument that says “every year or so, an alternative medicine is shown to work”, but that is less than 1 in 2000 alternative medicines are shown to work after extensive testing. Even then, those rare ones that are shown to work often work worse than existing medicine, and often have worse side effects and or risk.
If Alternative Medicines were regulated like medicine (effectiveness, low risk and quality of product), most of them wouldn’t be sold. A dollar spent on medicine will work reliably for the condition prescribed accurately, or inform the practitioner of what else might be going on if it doesn’t, and the product has a known safety and is of a predictable standard. Alternative Medicine does not have any of these – it mostly doesn’t work, is of unknown risk and is of variable quality – that dollar is wasted.
Alternative Medicine is Harmful
Where is the harm?
There are two major harms from Alternative Medicine.
The Product Itself
The first is that you don’t know what you are taking, how that will interact with your particular metabolism and other medications, often prescribed by a person who doesn’t have a real medical degree.
The products in alternative medicines often are either not what is on the label (for example, garlic extract may actually have no garlic extract in it), or not at the strength of the label (found to be 1/5 th to 5 times the listed strength) because the Alternative Medicine is not regulated like Medicine is (where the tolerance is very tight with huge fines for failure). Often Alternative Medicines have unlisted actual medicine in them, which when examined, are on the list of medicines that a doctor would have prescribed, or now off the list due to risk, but in unregulated amounts and without consideration for consequences. In short, you just don’t know what you are getting.
Some Alternative Medicine “practitioners” know enough medicine to sound like they know what they are talking about, but don’t actually know enough to be a medical doctor. If they did, they’d be a medical doctor. This often puts them in the level of “knowing enough to be dangerous, but not enough to be safe”. While medical doctors can get things wrong, the odds of them doing so is significantly lower than for Alternative Medicine practitioners, with a level of system for fixing problems and consequences for those doctors who repeatedly get things wrong. While I would love to see that system be even better, no such system really exists for Alternative Medicine.
Either of these issues can cause you to become quite sick from taking a product that is either bad, or bad for you.
Deadly Delay in Effective Diagnosis and Treatment
The second problem is that even if you get a product that doesn’t harm you, it also doesn’t help you. That delays you seeking proper medical attention for an actual medical condition. This leads to worse results including death.
Only when you take a product that is ineffective for a condition that is temporary and not serious is their no real physical harm to you – just financial harm for paying for a product you don’t need that doesn’t work.
Alternative Medicine isn’t Cheaper
Another claim made by people trying to scam you for money is that pharmaceutical companies are just trying to rip you off, by charging you big bucks for medicines. There is a nugget of truth to this claim. The companies are trying to make a profit. To find and test medicine costs lots of money. The company would like their money back, plus some extra. That is the economic system that the world has landed on. Sometimes, that means that a product is not released because its patent will expire soon and the company can’t get their money back on it, and sometimes a company will cheat on its results to try to make the product look better. The fact that we know they cheated is evidence that the process of safety works – they were caught because their claims failed under real world scrutiny. The vast majority of products released perform about as well as tested, in both effectiveness and side effects / risks.
Another angle to look at is that alternative medicines cost to purchase. They are often made by Big Pharma as a side product. For the potential products that failed medical testing, the company can recoup some costs by selling these products as a supplement or other non-medical item while skirting the law on how much they imply that this product is medicine without quite stating that it is. For those products yet to be proven to be medicine, selling them as non-medicines is much cheaper than the medication as it doesn’t require extensive research and testing to prove efficacy and safety, as they aren’t technically medicine.
Many countries offset the cost of medicine, but not the cost of non-medicine. This means that you pay the full cost of the Alternative Medicine, plus the practitioner who prescribed them, for a product that generally doesn’t work. While the product may, in some instances, be cheaper, the thing doesn’t work, so it is an inherent waste of money. That is like me saying that I purchased a blow up hammer at a fraction of the cost of a real hammer, which is lovely if all I want is something that looks vaguely like a hammer. It was a waste of money when I go to use the blow up hammer for any task where you need a real hammer.
Boycotting Big Pharma is a Fiction
Some “practitioners” of Alternative Medicine claim that they make up their own remedies. In a few rare instances this is true. They purchase particular foods, grow particular plants, dry and then compound substances and sell those as medicine. Most of the time, though, even people who claim to make their own remedies do so from bulk purchasing “raw” ingredients from pharmaceutical companies, or from wholesalers who purchased it in bulk from pharmaceutical companies. The idea of not giving your money to Big Pharma is mostly a fiction.
What keeps Big Pharma mostly honest is a combination of competition between pharmaceutical companies and government regulation. When governments fail to regulate the industry properly, the quality of the medicine goes down, and that is bad. Even if government regulation declines, Alternative Medicines are already far worse.
I sometimes hear people stating “it is in Big Pharma’s interest to not discover a cure for cancer”. While this is laughable, but let us take a serious look at this. Cancer is an umbrella term for about 1000 different conditions where cells multiply uncontrollably and don’t respond to the apoptosis signal (the bodies instruction to self-destruct). Each type of cancer is significantly different and may be caused by many different things. Big Pharma sounds like it is a single company. It isn’t. There are many large super pharmaceutical companies competing with each other. Beyond government regulations, any decision that gives their own company a bigger market share over the others is a sound financial company move, and not doing so is often against the shareholders which can lead to a toppling of the CEO and other key people.
Let us say that AlphaNem Pharmacy (a made up major pharmacy) created a product that cured breast cancer. Selling it for the next 20 years of its patent would make a huge profit that no other pharmaceutical company could compete with. Why on earth wouldn’t AlphaNem make that profit, especially when suppressing this product could lead to the shareholders firing the executive?
That’s a nice hypothetical, but what about the real world? When we look at products that have done this, such as the HPV Vaccine, the pharmaceutical companies didn’t suppress it. The HPV Vaccine prevents a number of cancers, including cervical cancer, anal cancer, vaginal cancer, vulvar cancer, oropharyngeal cancers and more. The HPV Vaccine isn’t the only product that has effectively prevented, treated or “cured” cancers.
Conclusion
So, if you want the thing you are taking to actually work for an actual medical issue, medicine is your … um, medicine.
If you want to spend your money on something that has either been proven not to work, or has zero good evidence that it does, take alternative medicine. Be aware, not only does it financially harm you, but you open yourself up to potential serious risk – from bad products to a delay in real treatment for serious medical conditions.