Blackburn, a few more quotes from the Atlantic

A month ago, I posted some discussion from the Atlantic Magazine (here) about Alternative Medicine. I didn't excerpt this particular section at the time, but will now since it's pertinent to yesterday's post (here) about telomeres and Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn. She is quoted below. (I would only take slight issue with the claim that she has "no skin in the game," since she now has a for profit company offering telomere testing, but that's small potatoes compared to Big Pharma and the Medical Device industry.) (For more information about my practice please click here.)

You might think the weight of the clinical evidence would close the case on alternative medicine, at least in the eyes of mainstream physicians and scientists who aren’t in a position to make a buck on it. Yet many extremely well-credentialed scientists and physicians with no skin in the game take issue with the black-and-white view espoused by Salzberg and other critics. And on balance, the medical community seems to be growing more open to alternative medicine’s possibilities, not less.

That’s in large part because mainstream medicine itself is failing. “Modern medicine was formed around successes in fighting infectious disease,” says Elizabeth Blackburn, a biologist at the University of California at San Francisco and a Nobel laureate. “Infectious agents were the big sources of disease and mortality, up until the last century. We could find out what the agent was in a sick patient and attack the agent medically.” To a large degree, the medical infrastructure we have today was designed with infectious agents in mind. Physician training and practices, hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, and health insurance all were built around the model of running tests on sick patients to determine which drug or surgical procedure would best deal with some discrete offending agent. The system works very well for that original purpose, against even the most challenging of these agents—as the taming of the AIDS virus attests.

But medicine’s triumph over infectious disease brought to the fore the so-called chronic, complex diseases—heart disease, cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and other illnesses without a clear causal agent. Now that we live longer, these typically late-developing diseases have become by far our biggest killers. Heart disease, prostate cancer, breast cancer, diabetes, obesity, and other chronic diseases now account for three-quarters of our health-care spending. “We face an entirely different set of big medical challenges today,” says Blackburn. “But we haven’t rethought the way we fight illness.” That is, the medical establishment still waits for us to develop some sign of one of these illnesses, then seeks to treat us with drugs and surgery. ...
The medical community knows perfectly well what sort of patient-care model would work better against complex diseases than the infectious-disease-inspired approach we’ve inherited. That would be one that doesn’t wait for diseases to take firm hold and then vainly try to manage them with drugs, but that rather focuses on lowering the risk that these diseases will take hold in the first place. “We need to prevent and slow the onset of these diseases,” says Blackburn. “And we know there are ways to do that.” Aside from getting people to stop smoking, the three most effective ways, according to almost any doctor you’d care to speak with, are the promotion of a healthy diet, encouragement of more exercise, and measures to reduce stress.

Acupuncture has been shown in countless studies to reduce stress. So beyond the principle "First Do No Harm," I would add, "Get your acupuncture!" And, yes, in full disclosure, I also have "skin in the game."

Another Alternative Medicine Critic Speaks

Here is the link to an article by David Colquhoun from Britain. It's called "America, the land of the Health Hucksters." I am not familiar with him, and he doesn't seem to be an MD, but he has very staunch opposition to alternative medicine practitioners. His criticisms seem to break down as follows.
1. Traditional Medicine can't cure everything, but that's no reason to adopt fairy tales. We need more research, not alternative medicine.
2. Big Pharma made mistakes and concealed negative data, but hey, no biggie.(Let's ignore those needless heart attacks from Vioxx, and teen suicides from Prozac, for example.) But it was scientists who discovered the bad studies, so no need to distrust the science or Big Pharma.
3. This paragraph, I simply must copy in its entirety because is so appalling, that I don't know where to start.
"I write from the perspective of someone who lives in a country that achieves health care for all its citizens at half the cost of the U.S. system, and gets better outcomes in life expectancy and infant mortality. The view from outside is that U.S. medicine rather resembles U.S. religion. It has been taken over by fundamentalists who are becoming very rich by persuading a gullible public to believe things that aren't true."
The U.S. is unique among developed nations in that we have for profit health care, that excludes many because of the cost. A majority of bankruptcies in this country are due to healthcare costs, and half of those actually had health insurance. So the religion in question is certainly not alternative medical practitioners, if there is a religion. The religion is for-profit-market-driven health care.
4. Placebo, placebo, placebo.
5. $2billion of taxpayer money for alternative medicine and not one useful treatment. Hookay. I thought he was all about research and the scientific method, and yet when a relatively tiny amount of money is appropriated to explore the bases of alternative practices, it is money ill spent. Does he have any idea how much money is spent on R and D in the pharmaceutical industry to produce drugs that don't work? Or drugs that make it to the market and then harm instead of help. Please.
6. "This is all very sad for a country that realized quite early that the interests of patients were best served by using treatments that had been shown to work." His own country's NICE now pays for acupuncture over other treatments for back pain because it has been shown to work.
7. Alternative Medicine is leading America down, like the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Or are as bad as the torture allowed by Dick Cheney. (No. I'm not making these up. These are his arguments.) And why are we destroying America? Because of the vast amounts of money! Wow. Just wow. Hyperbole much?

So, in apologies for this long post I will limit my questions to Mr.Colquhoun, PhD. , er DR. Colquhoun, with just three questions.
1. Does he realize that just because alternative medicine is a Billion dollar business, that doesn't mean that individual practitioners make anything close to a billion dollars. Does he have any idea of the individual salary of an acupuncturist or chiropractor?
2. Is he even familiar with the NICE findings and their acceptance of acupuncture cited above?
3. What is in his mouth in the photo?? Is that really a cigarette?? I'll just leave it there...

(for more info on my practice link here...)