Dr. Rahul Parikh
Why are alternative medicines so popular?
That’s the San Francisco pediatrician’s question Dr. Rahul Parikh reflects thoughtfully in his most recent PopRx column for the online magazine Living room.
As Parikh points out, alternative medicine is a topic on which the political left and right are equally likely to throw reason out the window:
If the left and the right almost never agree, neither wants the government to touch its medicine cabinet. The left has this anti-authority streak that attacks the medical community, while the right is viscerally opposed to any government regulation – in this case, the Food and Drug Administration.
In fact, Parikh says, “the history of the modern alternative medical movement began in the halls of Congress in the early 1990s” under the leadership of two senators from opposing parties, Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, and Orin Hatch , Republican. Utah.
Both men believed that bee pollen had cured their allergies. (Hatch also represents a state where many dietary supplement companies are headquartered. For a detailed overview of Hatch’s wholehearted support of the supplement industry, see Stephanie Mencimer’s paper. article from 2001 in the Washington Monthly.)
(Oh, and for the record: there is no proof that bee pollen cures allergies. In fact, the Food and Drug Administration has fined supplement companies for making such claims.)
But we can’t blame the rise of alternative medicine (now a $50 billion-a-year industry in the United States) on politicians alone. Parikh writes:
There are qualities in the American psyche that also favor alternative remedies. First, there is our natural tendency to keep fighting, no matter the odds (other cultures are certainly more fatalistic). Our positive attitude fuels the desire to explore all frontiers, whether it be the West, space or cutting-edge medicine.
Second, science, including medical science, is not what it used to be. …(A)s the Berlin Wall fell, our collective psyche lost this sense of scientific superiority, which coincided with a growing recognition of the limitations of medicine and the fact that we were spending a lot of money on health care. health with increasingly low yields. The reputation of medicine and doctors has declined as we have moved from treating acute illnesses – like infections with antibiotics and vaccines – to fighting the tyranny of chronic illnesses: heart disease, diabetes, cancer and others . These are complex illnesses and some, like chronic fatigue syndrome, are poorly understood. Nothing in medicine can cure most of these diseases, and their treatments typically involve lifelong doses of medication, tests, and hospitalizations, all of which come with side effects. Skepticism has crept in, and with it, room for alternative points of view.
You can read Parikh’s column here.
