Science can find little evidence for alternative therapies

Patients might feel better, cures elusive

Friday, Feb. 19, 2010

While they might be popular, many alternative therapies have no evidence to support them, according to Dr. Val Jones, a physical medicine and rehabilitation doctor in Vienna, Va., and owner of www.getbetterhealth.com, a group of medical blogs.

For instance, Jones attributes any purported successes of "energy therapies," which seek to balance or enhance energy flow in a person's body, to the power of suggestion.

"I'm honestly not aware of any scientific evidence that supports anything beyond the placebo effect with the energy healing modalities, including Reiki," Jones said.

"There is nothing we can measure that suggests there is a special force that needs to be balanced. That's not a measurable phenomenon, but I'm certain people say they feel better after experiencing these modalities."

She added that success stories are anecdotal and can generally be accounted for by a person getting better from something like an infection on his own.

Patients tend to report success from energy work more often for subjective ailments, especially pain and emotional problems, she said.

"An infection is not something you can fake or modify by doing some magical spell, but with pain it's amazing how much different[ly] pain can be perceived based on the power of suggestion," Jones said. "These alternative approaches are most successful for treating things that could be modified by the power of suggestion."

Jones sees two reasons for these therapies' ubiquity: a dysfunctional health care system and the universal fear of death.

About a fifth of patients are misdiagnosed, Jones said, and the proportion is so high in part because doctors have less time to speak with patients than they used to. This leaves patients frustrated, anxious and longing to talk with someone who will listen to their problems.

"They start thinking, ‘I want to go to someone who cares,'" Jones said, "and outside the medical system they're cash-based. They say, ‘Sure, I can talk to you for hours, you paid for it.' And they really do listen." Also, there are limits to what even the best medical care can do, and those facing catastrophe are then impelled to try anything they hear might work.

"It's a mix of, we are all going to get sick at some point, we are all going to die, and people don't really like that, and I don't blame them. We wish we could be immediately healthy and fine. Medicine can do a lot but it can't cure everything. People are always going to be looking for something that might; it's our inability to live forever," Jones said.

Therapies like acupuncture and Reiki are fossils from an earlier time when people did not understand disease but felt compelled to do something about it, Jones said, adding that now that we have modern medicine, these ancient modalities are best left behind.

"We wanted to do something about these diseases so we imagined if we could apply pressure to a portion of the foot [as in reflexology], that could impact our stomach. We came up with these magical ways to try to control our destinies. Disease makes us feel … out of control and we don't like that," Jones said.

"Now that we understand it's not because someone stuck a pin in a doll in Haiti that you have an inflamed leg, the answer is not sticking pins in people [as in acupuncture]. Let's give you an antibiotic to kill the bacteria," she said. "Now we know what works, so I don't really see why we're going backwards, using these old-fashioned methods for treating people that we created when we didn't understand the [origin] of disease."

Yoga and Pilates, physical disciplines which aim to strengthen the body, are helpful when combined with medical care, mainly because they are a form of exercise, she said.

"Any type of exercise, tai chi or bowling, quite frankly, anything that gets you out of the house is good for your body," she said.

Jones opposes unattested therapies' inclusion in hospitals.

"I think it's misleading to the patients, because they're going to a hospital, they're trusting the hospital will offer them treatments that have proof that they work and they don't realize that these nurses are offering nonscientific therapies," Jones said.

"I would rather that the nurses be given time to sit and talk to patients, go into the room and say, ‘Mrs. Smith, I'm sure you feel completely stressed out right now, and I don't blame you.' That would be more effective than concocting this pseudoscientific excuse for having nurses lay hands on people when really the patient needs a listening ear and a compassionate soul to talk to."

emitrano@somdnews.com