There are a number of rational — or at least seemingly rational — reasons why a person might come to distrust traditional scientific medicines and seek something else. One is that, obviously, many serious diseases do not currently have cures. When people are without much or any hope, it’s to be expected that they will go to where they are given some.
One of the most understandable reasons why people seek alternative treatments is wholly personal: namely, the personal treatment they receive. Many traditional practitioners treat diseases first and people secondly — this is perceived, justifiably, as being too technocratic and bureaucratic.
Alternative practitioners, on the other hand, claim to be “holistic” — that is to say, they aim to treat the mind, body and soul of their patient. This is unsurprisingly appealing to most people. Considering the fact that any treatment does better when the patient feels a personal connection with their physician and feels that someone actually cares about them, this should be a wake-up call to traditional medicine. In particular, it should be a wake-up call to HMO’s which seek to limit how much time patients can spend with their doctors.
Assuming for the sake of argument that at worst, most alternative treatments do not in and of themselves cause any direct harm, is it ethical to recommend them? This is not the sort of question usually asked, since most people focus simply on whether or not the alternative treatments are effective. Yet it is an exceedingly important question.
If recommending alternative treatments is unethical even when they are relatively harmless, then the case against them is much stronger. Many claim that when you weigh the possible benefits of alternative medicines (curing an illness) against the possible harms (usually, nothing direct), then there is a sound ethical and medical case for recommending and using them.
However, Lewis Vaughn in his article makes a convincing counter-argument to this. According to him, you can’t simply rely upon the magnitude of harm or benefit — instead, you have to take into account the probabilities of harm and benefit:
- Even if an unproven treatment has considerable possible benefits, is harmless, and costs little, it may be no bargain. In general, given the realistic probabilities, the most likely prospect is that the treatment will be ineffective. So, in fact, the odds are excellent that people who buy the treatment will waste their time and money.
In another article, Lawrence Schneiderman makes a case for the idea that even calling alternative treatments “medicine” is ethically shaky. They might do a lot to satisfy emotional and psychological needs of people, but medicine isn’t supposed to fulfill every human need — medicine is supposed to cure physical illnesses.
This, of course, is the crucial point which must be repeated: alternative medicines cannot be validated by anecdotal evidence, by unverifiable claims from those who think they have been helped, or by metaphysical belief systems which stand at odds with everything we know about the world.
Alternative treatments can only be validated and considered “medicine” if and when rigorous, scientific testing demonstrates: first, that they do no harm; second, that their use proves effective; and third, that this effectiveness is better than a placebo or no treatment at all. Refusal to hold alternative treatments to these standards is either condescending towards them or simply a tacit admission that they cannot meet those standards, and hence should not be in the same category as real medicine.
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