CHINESE MEDICINE'S INEXPLICABLE ATTRACTION The eagerness Americans display to entrust their lives and their health to so-called "alternative" medicine is dismaying. Even some starchy mainstream health-care organizations have surrendered, electing to provide, or to insure, dubious or unproven treatments rather than lose patients and policyholders who demand them. People seem to be mesmerized by the exotic glamour of acupuncture and other remedies from Chinese traditional medicine. What's peculiar is that so many Americans are marching deliberately back to the prescientific past at the same time as the Chinese are desperately trying to escape it. Many popular books on traditional medicine describe Western medicine as scientific, implying that Eastern medicine is not, but that's not accurate, said Dr. Wallace Sampson in a lecture last month to the East Bay Skeptics Society. All cultures have medical traditions, and many of the philosophical theories that are part of the Chinese tradition are very similar to ideas common in Europe before medicine became a scientific discipline. "There's nothing unscientific about modern China," he said. Comparing traditional Chinese medicine to today's is like comparing Victorian medicine to what is practiced now. Sampson is a clinical professor of medicine at Stanford University, but he is also board chairman of the National Council Against Health Fraud and a fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. He was part of a CSICOP delegation that visited China in 1995 to study how traditional medicine is practiced there. The delegation's complete report was published in two parts in the CSICOP magazine "Skeptical Inquirer," and it's available on their Web site at csicop.org. The delegates visited two major hospitals in China devoted to traditional methods, but even at those most of the space was allocated to scientific wards. Officials told them that patients are referred to traditional practitioners if they request it, but only 15 to 20 percent of patients make that choice, Sampson said. The percentage may be higher in rural areas, where modern facilities are scarce. There's very little interaction between traditional and scientific medical people. Sampson and the other delegates had hoped to do some further investigation of the claims of qigong masters, following up a 1988 CSICOP visit that unmasked their supposed miracles as clumsy fakery. Traditional qigong is a discipline of mental and physical exercises, not unlike yoga. The new version, which claims to harness a mysterious (and scientifically undetectable) force, is usually called "external qigong." But apparently no one wanted a rematch and the delegation wasn't able to observe any demonstrations of "external qigong." Herbal medicine plays a big role in traditional Chinese medicine, and as the authors acknowledge, some of the herbs have yielded useful drugs and more will undoubtedly follow. But the likelihood of a Chinese patient's getting something useful based on the slapdash way the herbs are prescribed and administered seems to be slight. The impression Americans retain from Chinese propaganda during the Cultural Revolution is that surgery using acupuncture in place of other anesthetics is frequent, and successful. But those stories were long ago unmasked. The patients having the surgery were carefully selected -- acupuncture works best with the small fraction of the population that is highly suggestible -- and just to make sure, they were surreptitiously dosed with morphine. Nonetheless, Sampson said, he did change his mind about acupuncture while he was in China. It's not so bad as he thought, he said, because given the social circumstances it may be an effective analgesic. "There are 14 kinds of placebo and acupuncture has most of them," he said. A few of the 14 are: counterirritation, the tendency for awareness of one pain to be diminished by another that is more acute. You'll forget you have a headache if you hit your thumb with a hammer. Distraction and the diversion of attention diminish pain. Also, Sampson said, there is classical conditioning that is particularly effective when the patient and the therapist share social and political expectations. In pleasant surroundings, where the therapist's attention seems to reduce pain, patients come to expect that it will work and thus it does. "A reduction in symptoms, and better quality of life -- that's not bad," he said. But whether any traditional methods work to cure people when "Western" methods fail -- the skeptics are still skeptical about that. "In the end," the delegates write in their article, "we were left with the same sense of frustration we often felt after arguing with advocates of 'alternative medicine' at home. Both exhibit an essential vagueness when explaining the mechanisms presumed to underlie their treatments. Both are prone to assume that metaphors count as explanations and that anecdotal evidence can substitute for systematic verification of claims." Why such doubtful methods are gaining popularity in the United States is another matter. It may be a contrarian sentiment, Sampson said. "If you get the idea that regular medicine has failed you, you are angry and resentful." He didn't mention the surging interest in all kinds of unscientific and pseudoscientific nonsense, appealing to people who have studied little or no science in school or have had their science classes pre-empted by a variety of politically motivated lessons. Such people are eager to replace science with mysticism, and when they get sick, they are willing "to credit virtually any healing claims, provided they are ancient or hail from exotic places." I'd rather go see a doctor. Subj: Re: editorial about "alternative med" Date: 96-11-11 18:43:41 EST From: brbenne@ibm.net (B. Bennett) Reply-to: brbenne@ibm.net (B. Bennett) To: Valleytms@aol.com (Valleytms@aol.com) Hi Linda, welll.... I tried the hotcoc.com and it would sorta load when I used my aol web stuff. (didn't work, and it took a long time to do nothing, but that may have to do with aol) The csicop.org worked just fine. But I couldn't find your article. I will send the URL out to the list of hepatitis people. There are so many wanting to "believe" in something, other then proven medical (western) that the site should at least "kick" some in to the "at least try medication" idea. I should explain that I have (and a few million others) Hepatitis C. And that I'm a member of a couple of hepC groups/bbs's. There are many promoting "alternative" treatments that are potentially non-effective, and worse lets the users go too long and end up needing a liver transplant, when they could have avoided one. (geez what a run on sentence) If you would like more info about the "hidden plague", let me know. The Rocky Mountain News, runs your column occasionally, which is why I was so interested in finding a site for your originals. Bruce Bruce B. Dear Ms. Seebach, Daniel Sabsay sent me a copy of your article on the Wallace Sampson lecture for EBSS. I just wanted you to know how fine a job I thought you did with the article and that I greatly enjoyed reading it. I don't know how many papers ran the article, but I have noticed an increase in the numbe of hits on our web page recently. Thanks for that as well. Barry Karr Executive Director, CSICOP ----------------------- Headers -------------------------------- From SkeptInq@aol.com Wed Nov 20 17:41:39 1996 Return-Path: SkeptInq@aol.com Received: from emout16.mail.aol.com (emout16.mx.aol.com [198.81.11.42]) by emin07.mail.aol.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id RAA03596 for ; Wed, 20 Nov 1996 17:41:38 -0500 Received: by emout16.mail.aol.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) id RAA16677 for Valleytms@)aol.com; Wed, 20 Nov 1996 17:41:37 -0500 Date: Wed, 20 Nov 1996 17:41:37 -0500 From: SkeptInq@aol.com Message-ID: <961120174137_1950452862@emout16.mail.aol.com> To: Valleytms@aol.com Subject: Re: Sampson lecture