The Great DBH Rant

“Nothing that is worth having in this world comes easy”

How great would it be if everything came with the click of a finger? But it doesn’t. The same goes for your health. It is something definitely worth having, so it doesn’t come easy. You need to work at it, somedays harder than others. When things get really bad, you might have to go through painful procedures, agonising pain for family and friends alike. And to cap it all off, sometimes, it just doesn’t work, and people die. Doctors cannot say why a particular procedure did not work, sometimes things are just incurable. He or she has got 30 other patients to see, so he or she moves on. This is where I think alternative medicine has the upper edge and why many patients claim it “works” when we all know they are taking nothing but sugar. It is because the patients “believe”. Consultation sessions in CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicine) clinics are a lot more personal, a lot more lengthy, and a lot more patient (Hell because they do not have the patient load that real doctors have). That makes the patients genuinely believe that the practitioner cares for them. It’s comforting, it reduces stress, and coupled with that placebo pill, suddenly things appear to be so much more rosy. Almost like a “super placebo” effect (I hope this catches on). Then – check – another statistic that homeopathy can “cure” diseases.

But why are patients turning to CAMs in the first place? Watching a particular episode of Scrubs last night gave me a bang up idea. Conventional medicine is not “magical” anymore. It is simply not amazing anymore. The reason? Anyone can get all the information in bite size chunks on the internet. Everything from symptoms, to diagnosis, and to management of every disease imaginable is on the internet. When a doctor tells you so and so about what you have, you are not surprised anymore, because you already knew. All you wanted is that drug. If you could get it without prescription, you probably wouldn’t even have bothered to go see a doctor in the first place!

The respect and awe that patients have for doctors is gone!

And then there is the blame, when shit hits the fan (pardon my French), you can bet your bottom penny the finger is going to be pointed at doctors, and the media machine will go up in arms about it. But when things go well, no one gives them a pat on the back and admires what they had just done – they just saved a life, for God’s sake, give the guy a hug, or thumbs up! But no, instead, things “should” go well, because otherwise why are they paid to do their jobs?

Back to CAMs. People cannot get a lot of information on the stuff. Afterall there is not much real information on the stuff. Scientists are struggling themselves to find information and evidence of the stuff. So bang, it suddenly becomes mystical, it becomes interesting. Now couple this with the knowledge that your “friend’s wife’s mother’s sister’s husband’s” – high school mate was just cured of his cancer with, say, homeopathy. No surgery, no incision, no painful poison pumped into veins (chemotherapy), no going bald. Just pills, and a few chats. It’s magic! Now couple this further with the news that celebrities like David and Victoria Beckham, Bill Clinton, and even Her Majesty the Queen uses homeopathy. Well if they use it, it must really work! Because these people really know their science and medicine, don’t they? See where I am going with this? We can bitch and bitch all we want about the science and the evidence and the fact that these hocus pocus treatments are really in fact, bull-crap! But in the patients’ minds, is medicine evidence based? I don’t think so.

They need to have the respect and awe back for real doctors! I suggest this. Let’s clear out the internet and keep conventional medicine in the dark for the lay person. Let’s not tell the patients that drug X could have 15 side effects but only tell them – “Take this magic pill, it will make everything go away”. Is that what is required? A massive dumbing down of medicine? Because it seems like the more they know, the more they get diverted to “magic”, i.e., things they don’t know. The general public needs to shape up and start facing facts – Because nothing in life that is worth having comes easy. There is no easy way out when it comes to health and wellbeing. You need to put in the work, you need to keep disease at bay. There is no “magic” pill that will get rid of that lung cancer because you smoke 40 a day. It’s painful chemotherapy, surgery, hair loss, etc etc etc. There is no “magic” pill to rid that diabetes once and for all, you need to work extra hard, to keep on top of things.

Because let’s face it, when something sounds too good to be true, it most likely is not.

Having got quite interested in the subject of homeopathy and its crack-pot view of medicine, I did a simple search to look at the state of matters in and around my hometown, Macau and Hong Kong (both ex-European colonies). Did not take me long to find pro-quackery (in particular homeopathy) posts littered everywhere, and the most shocking thing is, no-one is making a stand! Doctors and scientists are keeping quiet. All post replies on these blogs of practicing homeopaths were of astonishment and awe at the magical wonder that is homeopathy. Sensing a niche (and also the argumentative side of me was getting antsy), I set up shop and proceeded to gently lay on a few truths about homeopathy. The “pseudoscience can kill” blog is here. I borrowed one of Professor Colquhoun’s figures (the distance from earth to sun figure) to make a point, hope he doesn’t mind. Mind though, it was properly referenced. One of the things which immediately got my back up was the outrageous claims from blog authors (which are either trainee or practicing homeopaths), and also the Hong Kong Association of Homeopathy (HKAH) website as well as the Macau Association of Homeopathy (MAH) website that homeopathy is superior to western medicine. They have their usual mumbo-jumbo of how it works, like cures like, succussion and potentisation, etc… but also the following phrase, which I find highly disturbing (the thing was in Chinese so I had to translate it; and in the interests of good scientific practice I have to hold my hand up and say now that this translation by yours truly may have some experimental bias in it and should be translated again in a controlled environment by several neutral people):

“…from the homeopathic point of view, the correct method of medical treatment should involve non-invasive procedures, and toxicity free remedies, to restore imbalances in the body, to strengthen the body, to strengthen the immune system, so as to minimise the negative effects that symptoms have on the body, but must not counteract the symptoms, and suppress the body’s self protection powers, for instance through the use of drugs to control coughing, emesis, inflammation and pain etc, doing so will inevitably lead to serious and dire consequences.”

I apologise for the excessive use of the comma, but that’s how Chinese is written. To minimise bias, I feel it is necessary to include all the commas. This seems to be a swipe at western medicine to promote their hocus-pocus beliefs and frankly I found that out of order. A closer read at blog posts by practicing homeopaths reveals even more shocking statements. How the future of medicine should be left with homeopaths, western medicine should be an obsolete method of treatment, that patients should stop using western medicine. The final straw was when I found a post hailing “success” that homeopathy is now “mainstream” medicine in Macau (they held a large conference apparently), and how Hong Kong should follow suit to avoid being seen as “backwards” and “closed off”. So I proceeded to poke the bear with a wee stick with this reply to his post:

“Hi. I am originally from Macau, but I am not sharing your delight in the “success” homeopathy is enjoying in Macau. It is scary that while homeopathy is not evidence based medicine, that practicing homeopaths like yourself will come out and say that homeopathy is better than conventional, evidence based medicine.

May I point out that homeopathy, at this moment in time, is at best only a fancy and expensive form of placebo treatment. At worst, it is life threatening, because of delays in seeking medical advice and diagnosis from trained medical professionals.

Finally, the only selling point of homeopathy – the lack of side effects, is simply because of the extreme dilutions in homeopathic remedies, where I am sure even you would agree with me, there is no active substance in the remedy really, isn’t there? This aspect of succussion and potentisation of homeopathy remains a laughing point among scientists and medical professionals who believe that medicine should be evidence based.

I apologise for the stinging attack on homeopathy (and please do not take this personally). I am sure that homeopaths are good people. Afterall, you are doing this for the noble reason of curing patients. But please exercise common sense when advertising your beliefs in homeopathy. While there is no concrete, well conducted experiments that show homeopathy actually provides significant effects, homeopathy can only be considered as a complementary form of treatment, not main stream. It would be irresponsible and dangerous to think otherwise.”

Note that I said “please do not take this personally”. I have read somewhere that trying to reason with a homeopath will always incur the wrath of the said homeopath (because someone who has the answers will try and debate with you). I got a reply to my (I must say fairly level headed) comment with what can only be described as “verbal diarrhoea” (you think homeopathy could cure that?). The guy went berserk and as if one reply was not enough, he came back on two other occasions to add to his emotional outburst. Obviously I hit a nerve there! His response was simply a whole list of questions to me and I was pretty sure he was crying while composing the said outburst. I could feel the emotion in the reply. There were font changes, colour changes, highlighting going on. This guy was properly pissed! I am still in the process of digesting all the Chinese thrown at me (I can read but not fast or fluent) and will formulate a level headed response to it soon. You’d think that a professional would at least try to reason and debate instead of throwing a hissy fit when queried and doubted? All I wanted to do was to induce some intelligent scientific debate, and this was what I got? Handbags?!