Why I'm not complimentary about complementary medicine

I thought that it might be a good idea to explain to people why I'm always moaning about alternative medicine lately, especially on Twitter.

I never used to really worry about alternative medicine. I've been exposed to it, because my mother-in-law is a registered practitioner in several alternative fields and will happily seek alternative methods and encourage others to do the same. She will also talk, at great length if you want her to, about how evidence-based medicine is evil and has many side effects that your "doctor doesn't tell you" about.

My viewpoint has always been one of indignation to some of the claims made by the believers of alternative therapists, but at the same time I couldn't see what harm it could possibly cause. Just an expensive way to waste money, that's all.

And then I had a son. Once, our young baby son wasn't sleeping very well. He had bronchiolitis and his cough kept waking him up. My wife at the time was working in a local health shop. She had just come off maternity leave and the shop was a convenient walking distance from the house. It was the type of shop that sells herbal supplements and also offered alternative therapies, and I believe that she was comfortable with the role because of her mother's background. And I pretty much ignored it, after all, if people wanted to spend money on such things that is their choice, although I did show annoyance when I learnt of some of her employer's viewpoints on medicine.

One day she came home from work with a random bottle of pills. It turned out that her boss had heard about our son's sleeping problems, picked the bottle off of the shelf and said “give him two of these” to help him relax and sleep. This was without seeing him, without knowing his medical history and without medical training. What's more, I looked at the label and realised that her recommended dosage was actually the adult dose. And this was an infant that was only a couple of months old.

And since his birth, whenever he has been under the weather my mother-in-law has tried to push us towards homeopathy, something which when you learn the theory behind it you realise is utterly ridiculous. If you don't already know, basically a supposed 'cure' is diluted to a point where it is way beyond containing any active ingredient and the probability of finding a molecule of the original 'cure' are so low that I probably have more chance of finding that I am the reincarnation of Elvis Presley and actually quite a good dancer after all.

Why is it diluted so much? Because supposedly water has a memory and diluting the active ingredient actually makes the solution stronger. As many have pointed out, the water manages to conveniently forget all the shit that it has contained over the centuries, and for an excellent video showing how homeopathic cures are created, watch Crispian Jago's excellent video entitled "If homeopathy works... I'll drink my own piss".

My mother-in-law also hates the idea of many vaccines, especially the MMR vaccine (and lets not forget that all the kerfuffle about there being a link between the jab and autism has been proven time and time again to not exist - if you look beyond most of the mainstream media, that is). When she realised that we definitely wanted him to have the vaccine, she offered as an alternative to pay for separate vaccinations. This is despite these vaccines being unlicensed, the child is unprotected between jabs, it greatly puts other children with leukaemia and similar conditions at risk (as the illnesses more widely circulates within the community and they cannot receive the MMR vaccine), and puts pregnant women at great risk of a rubella infection. See this PDF on the dangers of the single jabs, and do an internet search for herd immunity if you want to see what happens when a substantial number of the population don't get immunised from an infectious disease, or read what happened to Toni and David McCaffery's one month old daughter Dana. This will only happen more if we allow myths about vaccinations to persist and we lose herd immunity from deadly diseases which science can actually protect us from.

Here's a challenge for you. Go to a so-called health shop and tell them that you're travelling to a country where you have a high chance of catching malaria. Ask them if they can make any suggestions. People have done this time after time and discovered that they are often discouraged from receiving the essential vaccinations and taking non-proven alternative medicines instead. That is scary stuff.

Google about Matthias Rath and his libel action against Ben Goldacre, who wrote about how Rath was taking out adverts out in South Africa to promote taking vitamin pills to combat AIDS, and even got the South African government on his side.

Sometimes, we need to see that alternative medicine isn't always harmless. Hell, on a university homeopathy course they used to teach that it could treat cancer (in case you didn't know, it's illegal to claim that you can cure cancer unless you can actually prove it).

That's why I'm supporting the 10:23 campaign and will be taking part in an event where I, along with other campaigners, will overdose  (a whole bottle in case you were wondering) on homeopathic sleeping pills to show that they are nothing but sugar pills. This is partly to protest against Boots selling homeopathic remedies in their stores. I've wrestled with whether this goes against free choice of the consumer. However, you go to a pharmacist for professional medical advice, and even the professional standards director for Boots admits that they only stock them because they sell, not because they work.

However, it is not just about Boots, but also to show consumers that they are nothing but sugar pills, challenging the common misconception that they are a form of herbal remedy. Which they're not. And practically every double-blind clinical trial that is out there shows that they act no better than a placebo. Despite all these trials, the publicly-funded NHS still pumps money into homeopathic hospitals, when most other forms of treatment have to be rigorously checked for efficacy.

There are so many myths around about evidence-based medicine that I feel that it really is time to fight back and start shouting just as loud to dispel them. It is time that we as a population regained our trust in the scientific method and evidence-based medicine.

This doesn't meant that I'm always "pro-big pharma". You only need to read Ben Goldacre's amazingly excellent Bad Science blog to see that he will attack quacks, pharmaceuticals and other scientists without hesitation if he feels that they are promoting bad science. But I trust that peer reviewed trials will treat me better than purely anecdotal faith-based medicine if I am ill.

We are currently on a move backwards, back to a couple of hundred years ago before modern medicine, when doctors practised blood-letting because it "appeared to work" and because they had been taught to do it by their mentors. When we purchased lucky charms to ward off evil spirits. It is time to reclaim medicine and promote the stuff that has proven efficacy.