With thanks to Harald Walach Research Professor in Psychology, University of Northampton:
Does the campaign against CAM indicate that powerful factions feel threatened?
Many patients do not experience the benefits promised by biomedicine.
Many medications do not work for a lot of people, and in those for whom they do work, deeply unpleasant side effects are the price paid.
Often treatments are short term, getting rid of one problem only to produce another one in its wake.
Patients are not stupid.
They often realise these problems sooner than doctors too enamoured of their own theories to see the situation as it is.
But even the push given by these obvious deficiencies in the mainstream system and its narratives are not enough to explain the rise of CAM.
There are also many pull factors.
Patients have adopted a more holistic view of the world themselves, incorporating spirituality, ecology, body mind connections and so on, and are seeking treatments that respect, reflect and ideally work with such a background model.
In such a situation, it is easy to create a veritable counter culture.
It is then ‘them’, the stupid, reductionists of the mainstream culture, against ‘us’, the truly enlightened, insightful, holistic, patient centred ‘complex systems’ therapists.…
…. Although most pharmaceutical interventions have gone through rigorous RCTs and survived (otherwise they would not be on the market), many don’t stand the test of time or of real life: patients don’t like them because of their side effects; doctors don’t like them because they are unpredictable in their efficacy for individual patients; the public purse does not like them because their efficacy is too small compared to their costs (and the danger of the side effects).
The latter has been the reason why NICE refused to take any of the newly developed anti dementia drugs on to the books for public reimbursement.…
…. So I have come to the conclusion that big pharma is scared, and I would argue that the current witch hunt to weed out allegedly non evidence based practices is the consequence of twin developments.
On the one hand the favour CAM has found with the public, and on the other the increasing pressure that the pharmaceutical companies have come under.
So big pharma is doing the only sensible thing it can by attacking where it knows its enemy is weakest…..
…. I have a suspicion that whoever rides into battle for big pharma does so because they are well protected and well paid….
So have we asked the pertinent questions about conflicts of interest in research; have we investigated where the money is coming from that supports the anti CAM campaigners; have we found out enough about the funding structures that keep those groups afloat, and the dinners and cocktail parties where promises and nice ideas are exchanged?
It is time for a counter campaign; for some critical analysis, some investigative journalism, some discourse and social analysis to uncover the background that supports the campaign against CAM?
I also suggest we start collecting the sort of data whose absence allowed the campaign to begin in the first place: data about CAM’s real world outcomes and effectiveness.
And I think it would be wise to demonstrate to our colleagues struggling with the realities of conventional medical practice just how short sighted and silly the current concept of evidence really is, since it is only modelled along the lines of pharmacological research.…