Is Alternative Medicine Dead?

Reporting and Commentary © By Peter Barry Chowka
March 1, 2005 Article originally appeared on http://www.naturalhealthline.com/

In April 1966, Time magazine, in a provocative Easter week cover story, asked the question, "Is God Dead?"  In 2005, a similar question might be applied to an entirely different area: "Is Alternative Medicine Dead?"

In the 1960s, the adjective "alternative" started to be applied to "medicine" to distinguish more natural therapies and approaches to healing, many of them quite traditional and very long standing, that by the middle of the twentieth century had become, in the face of conventional allopathic medicine's dominance, truly an alternative model. From the 1960s through approximately the late 1980s, alternative, or as it was sometimes called, "holistic," medicine, including clinical nutrition, herbs, homeopathy, chiropractic, naturopathy, acupuncture, and a number of other mostly non-toxic approaches, gained increasing popularity. By the early 1990s, there were reports that one third or more of all Americans were using some form of alternative medicine. In a highly influential 1993 medical journal article, David Eisenberg, M.D. of Harvard University and his colleagues asserted that unconventional therapies were in extremely widespread use. Their study also included the mind-boggling finding that Americans were making more visits annually to alternative or unconventional care providers than they were to conventional "primary care physicians."

Growing political potency and public pressure, arising primarily from alt med's expanding economic power base, led to interest in alternative medicine on the part of what had been the field's historic adversaries - mainstream academia and the government. (In previous decades, the entire U.S. conventional medical-industrial complex, including medical schools and the federal government, had consistently ignored or actively denigrated alternative healing approaches.) Of particular note was the creation in 1991-'92 of a permanent home for alt med at the National Institutes of Health, the result of bipartisan Congressional legislation. The Office of Alternative Medicine at the NIH (originally called the Office of Unconventional Medical Practices) was expanded to an NIH center and given a new name in 1998, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. With the help of government and academia, "CAM" (Complementary Alternative Medicine) quickly became the new buzzword. CAM was intended to legitimize (some of) alternative medicine. Between 1992 and 2004, the federal budget for CAM increased an astounding 10,000 percent!

The large amounts of money, matched or exceeded by investments on the part of mainstream academic medical schools and the private sector (the so-called natural products industry), resulted in the fast tracking of the "integration" of alt med into the conventional allopathic medical model - the largely bankrupt paradigm that continues to dominate health care in the United States to this day (CAM notwithstanding). A vast majority of the thousands of CAM studies funded by the NIH involve the use of mostly lightweight "natural" modalities but not as primary alternative therapies, rather as watered down complements or adjuncts to conventional medical practices - modalities like meditating while undergoing cytotoxic cancer chemotherapy in order to presumably better tolerate the chemotherapy. This integration is hardly balanced as the conventional therapies remain dominant.

Twenty, or even ten, years ago, hundreds of holistic medical conferences, periodicals, and books regularly explored the potential of primary alternative medicine, including nontoxic and innovative approaches to cancer. The names of primary alt med clinical and research pioneers like Pauling, Kelley, Contreras, Burton, and Hoxsey were widely known and helped to define the field. With the government's and academia's entry into the alt med landscape in the 1990s, however, the new CAM model took over, quickly displacing alt med, and within a decade alt med and its original pioneers had become a rather quaint and archaic vestige of an earlier era. Alternative medicine, once perceived as threatening to the hegemony of allopathy, had been redefined as "CAM" and had been recast as something predictable, controllable, safe, and marketable.

In 1999, according to a study on CAM use in cancer published in the Journal of Surgical Oncology , "The popularity of complementary/alternative medicine (CAM) is an international phenomenon. The prevalence of CAM use is estimated at 25% among residents of the United Kingdom, 50% among German, French, and Australian populations, and 42% to 69% among residents of the United States." The same study found that "Overall, 99.3% of the participants [cancer patients in the study] had heard of CAM, and 83.3% had used at least one CAM therapy."

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