Who Needs a Bunch of Hippy Therapies When We Have Drugs and Radiation to Smash Every Illness that Comes Along?!
Complementary or alternative therapies are under attack in the UK again it seems. As a consequence of the establishment of the NHS (National Health Service) Directory - which allows patients access via a referral from a GP (General Practitioner) to complementary treatments - all of us involved in CAM are under fire once more.
The blinkered medical establishment are widening their remit however and starting to attack areas of which they have not the slightest knowledge at all. The rise of another manifestation of the hippy culture in the public's enthusiasm for organic food is given a good kicking also now. If it is not bad enough that we have the astonishing bias of the Food Standards Agency in regard to organic food to contend with, we now have the likes of Professor Waxman pontificating on the subject too. Not much chance of catching him in a pair of open-toed sandals is there? Presumably this attack on organic food is because it can usefully be seen as another manifestation of the influence on normal people by those weird hippy subversives and thus can be used to bolster a ridiculous argument for the pre-eminence of chemicalized everything in our lives.
Chemicalization of our whole world has of course nothing to do with making a profit at all but is just the normal and natural way of the world - the way things should be. Thus: natural food/therapies = bad. Chemicalized/toxic food/therapies = good. What an utterly astonishing world we live in.
Ignoring the issue of organic food for a moment, let's get back to CAM (Complementary &/or Alternative Medicine). The image posted here is the article by Professor Waxman from the BMJ. It is also worth reading the side-bar piece on this page by a GP from Gloucestershire, Kevin Barraclough.
Here is a piece I received via email this week in relation to this article:
For those of you unfortunate enough to read any articles or see any television reports featuring Professor Jonathan Waxman, a natural products-hating oncologist from Imperial College, London, indulge yourself in some soothing words from ANH’s (Alliance for Natural Health) Medical Director, Dr Damien Downing.
On seeing Professor Waxman’s ‘personal view’ issued in the pages of the British Medical Journal yesterday (BMJ 2006; 333:1129., Damien immediately responded via the BMJ’s Rapid Response pages and posted the following response:
Professor Waxman employs and perpetuates a crucial medical myth — that, in contrast to complementary therapies, conventional therapies are all evidence-based, on sound science. But the BMJ’s website Clinical Evidence reports that, of the 2404 treatments they have surveyed, only 15% are rated as beneficial, while 47% are of unknown effectiveness1. In his own speciality, indeed, chemotherapy for cancer was found in a 2004 systematic review of studies in the USA and Australia2 to improve overall 5-year survival chances by less than 2.5%. Interestingly, the review of dietary interventions he cites3 derived an odds ratio for the effect of a healthy diet, with or without dietary supplements, of 0.90 — which appears to make them probably 4 times as effective as chemotherapy. Different end-points, granted, and a big confidence interval, but nevertheless “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.
Talk of “vile and cynical exploitation” could with equal justification be applied to the cancer industry, into which billions has been poured in recent decades, to very little effect. Surely Professor Waxman should be careful not to become, as discussed in the same issue of BMJ, “a lapdog to drug firms”?
1 http://www.clinicalevidence.com/ceweb/about/knowledge.jsp2 Morgan G, Ward R, Barton M. The contribution of cytotoxic chemotherapy to5-year survival in adult malignancies. Clin Oncol (R Coll Radiol), 2004; 16(8):549-60.3 Davies AA, Davey Smith G, et al.. Nutritional interventions and outcome in patients with cancer or preinvasive lesions: systematic review. J Natl CancerInst 2006; 14: 961-73.
It’s clear from Professor Waxman’s response that a threat is perceived not only from dietary/food supplements used by millions to support their health, he has also taken a sideswipe at organic food, produced by a branch of agriculture supported by increasing numbers of consumers that is threatening Big Food and agri-business. The irony, of course, is that those most interested in reducing the burden on the healthcare system and spending time in doctor’s waiting rooms are those that will be more likely to consume both organic foods and high quality food supplements. Market research has demonstrated that most users of food supplements do not use these products to counter poor diet, but rather use them to add nutrients that they believe are missing as a result of modern agriculture and food products.
The increasingly vocal hatred expressed by key opinion leaders within the orthodox medical community has to be an expression of the threat that they perceive from the millions of people around the world who continue to use products derived from nature as key components of their healthcare regime.
You’ll appreciate that this is no time for anyone to put their head in the sand!
Please feel free to forward this as widely as you can to anyone who you feel may be interested.
In health,
The ANH Team
It is worth reflecting to some degree on what Waxman is saying and the distorted thinking that goes into this sort of opinion. People of course die all the time following intervention with chemotherapy or radiation or after following a regime of drug use, yet there is not, to use Waxman's basis for the assessment of efficacy, an acknowledgment that these medical interventions are directly implicated in the deaths. Yet, if someone dies following an application of Reiki for instance, then it must according to the Waxman approach, be due in part to the inneffectiveness per se of the treatment and nothing at all to do with the simple fact that we are all going to die at some point.
There are many medical interventions that have been developed since the rise of the Cartesian model that have been a disaster for many, many people. People are not machines and the model of intervention that assumes that they are is not only redundant, it was never any good in the first place.
To be an effective healer - and in this definition I would include the medical profession - it takes a great deal of wisdom. This wisdom needs to take into account the needs of the individual; the emotional state of the person and how this human being feels about the condition from which they are suffering. There is a need to be mindful of the deep need of the patient to not only be well, but to be loved in the process of becoming well. Illness, particularly severe illness is often characterized by a great sense of insecurity and fear. Medical science has no remedy for this.
Perhaps 'love' is not a word that we would necessarily recognise as being proferred by most complementary therapists when a client comes to see them, but generally speaking what clients get is a sense that someone actually cares one way or the other whether they get well or not. This is a much better starting point for the application of a therapeutic method than what is being offered by most medical practitioners today.
Fortunately for the public and for us in the CAM community, there are those far-sighted enough within the NHS and within Government to have instigated the establishment of the NHS Directory. The public want CAM as a part of the NHS and no-one has the right to deny them a method of therapeutic intervention the efficacy of which has been demonstrated time and time again over many years.
Like the global experiment that is going on with chemicalized food, more and more people are now starting to opt out of the global experiment with chemicalized medical care. Let's not pretend that the chemical intervention in our health or our food is somehow normal - it may be the modern norm (in the West at least), but it is very, very far from being normal. These approaches in both fields are modern blips in the natural order of things. It is too soon to adequately assess the damage that these approaches will have done to the long term health of the population, but the sooner more people stand up to ridiculous, blinkered and arrogant views on what is good for us and that would condemn us all for the sake of the chemical industries profits, the better we shall all be.
There is one issue however that does need addressing within the NHS Directory itself. If you go to the Directory and this can be found here, and search out the definition of Reiki you get this lot of nonsense:
Reiki
Reiki (pronounced ray-key) is a Japanese form of healing developed in the early part of the twentieth century that has become popular worldwide. Reiki incorporates elements of other alternative healing practices such as spiritual healing, aromatherapy, auras, crystals, chakra balancing, homeopathy, meditation and naturopathy. It involves the transfer of energy from practitioner to patient to enhance the body’s natural ability to heal itself through the balancing of energy. Reiki uses specific techniques for restoring and balancing the natural life force energy within the body. Reiki therapy has several basic effects: it brings about deep relaxation, destroys energy blockages, detoxifies the system, provides new vitality in the form of healing life energy, and increases the vibrational frequency of the body. Reiki can be used for many ailments such as reducing anxiety and stress, relieving pain, headaches, stomach upsets, back problems, respiratory problems, PMT, menstrual problems and sinus problems.
There are three grades of Reiki practitioner; levels 1, 2 and 3. Level 1 practitioners have learnt to a level where they can treat themselves, level 2 practitioners are able to give treatments to patients, and level 3 (a Reiki master) can teach Reiki.
When I read this I simply could not believe that, given the supposedly high professional standards of the UK's National Health Service, that they could get this sort of basic information wrong. Maybe it is a simple mistake, or does the fact that no body bothered to check this out properly indicate a much wider laisez fair approach to the whole issue of CAM within the NHS?
I wrote to the NHS Directory on 28th July 2006 to point out the problems with the entry under 'Reiki':
Dear Sir/Madam,
I have recently joined the NHS Directory as a practitioner of Reiki. I am really quite appalled at the erroneous description of Reiki (at least in part) on the website. I know of no practitioner of this discipline that would recognise what they do from the description given here. This bit is totally wrong:
Reiki incorporates elements of other alternative healing practices such as spiritual healing, aromatherapy, auras, crystals, chakra balancing, homeopathy, meditation and naturopathy.
The hands on healing practice of Reiki has no elements of spiritual healing outside of its own definition of this practice. It has no elements of aromatherapy or crystals or homeopathy or naturopathy at all. It does incorporate within its practice aura work and chakra balancing and as a separate self development practice, as opposed to Reiki as a therapy it incorporates meditation.
Please, please change this awful description. I wouldn't go looking for a practitioner if I was a member of the public searching for an alternative to Western medical intervention and thought that Reiki was some sort of made-up mixture of all sorts of rubbish, which is what it appears to be from this entry.
Regards,
Steve
I got this response on 7th August 2006:
Dear Mr Gooch,
Thank you for drawing our attention to the description of Reiki.
I have asked our sub editor to revisit this description with a view to addressing the issues you have raised.
Yours sincerely
D Selwyn MRSM
Honorary Secretary, NHSTA
So, we are now at the end of November 2006 and nothing has changed. The NHS Directory still has it's ridiculous description for Reiki extant on its website. Do other therapies also suffer from this lack of accuracy or care also I wonder? Anyway, after waiting all this time, I sent another email to the NHS via Mr Selwyn on the 26th November:
Dear Mr Selwyn,
Further to your email to me of the 7th August, I have recently checked the NHS Directory description for Reiki and see that it has not changed. This description is wrong. It does not describe Reiki and is very misleading to the public. I wonder if you could let me know when it is likely that this erroneous description will change? I am a member of the NHS Directory but see little point in continuing to have my name associated with a practice described in such a ridiculous fashion.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Kind regards,
Steve Gooch
I guess it is just a case of wait and see what happens, but if Reiki is described incorrectly and perhaps other therapies too, then perhaps Professor Waxman should not be too readily condemned. If he referred to the NHS Directory in the first instance to find out what all of these therapies were about, he likely didn't find much more than a hotch-potch of nonsense and very badly researched half-fact, half-supposition on which to base a judgment.
Blessings,
Steve
