An article in Arts and Letters Daily, one of my favorite sites, inferred that middle-aged, middle-class women are the biggest consumers of alternative medicine, from homeopathy to massage to aromatherapy to vitamin therapy. Says Rose Shapiro in Suckers: How Alternative Medicine Makes Fools Of Us All, such women are “educated enough to know what they’re paying for and if they prefer to spend money on an aromatherapist than a stiff gin, it’s hard to cry too many tears for them.”
Shapiro is, as the title of the book indicates, a scoffer.
Did you know [says reviewer Natalie Haynes] that traditional Chinese medicine, described so often as dating back thousands of years, was actually a rag-bag of ideas put together under Chairman Mao to try to fill in the gaps left by a shortage of “the superior new medicine”? Me neither.
Shapiro reserves her real fury for the snake-oil merchants who knowingly prey on the weak: terminal cancer is a favourite. After all, the dying will often believe anything. She reveals case after case where someone has been talked out of chemotherapy or palliative care by a quack with a big bank balance.
I’m a pharmacist’s kid, so I grew up on pills. Pills, in our house, are good, but I also have friends and relatives who pride themselves on taking no medication of any kind, which I find a bit extreme. Most of my friends who have turned to alternative medicine have done so because they weren’t getting the results they wanted from traditional medicine or because they wanted to explores more “natural” rather than chemical ways to health.
I became a convert to vitamins when I read an article about a group of geriatric specialists who couldn’t agree about much of anything when it came to theories about and causes of aging — but who all took multivitamins religiously. A chiropractor has helped me overcome some serious sciatic pain. I’ve also found that, for me, massage and light exercise are among the best treatments for chronic pain, stress and fatigue. But I haven’t ventured into alternative medicine much further than that.
With costs for pharmaceuticals increasing and most insurance co-pays shrinking, I suspect we may look for more low-cost, low-impact and local ways to maintain our physical quality of life. But how do we separate the effective and sensible treatments from the snake oil?
April 25, 2008 at 10:56 am
This is really a thought-provoker. It would be a good post for midlifebloggers.com