SJA #30 - CAM & An Open Letter to Christians

CAM

Complementary medicine. Alternative medicine. CAM. These names have been floating around for a while now. What do they refer to?

Broadly, they refer to anything that calls itself medicine that isn’t medicine. Anything that has been demonstrated to have some actual effect on disease, illness, or injury is medicine. Anything that hasn’t been shown to work or has been shown not to work is not medicine. Doctors aren’t allowed to use or recommend things that haven’t been shown to work, or that have been shown not to work, because that’s what’s known as “medical malpractice”, which can get you sued for millions of dollars and cost you your medical career. Or get you a spot on Oprah then your own TV show.

Anyone who shills this sort of thing (ie. things that aren’t medicine) aren’t allowed to call it medicine or say that it cures or heals you (nevertheless, they very often do, until they get caught and go to prison). So they like to talk about “wellness” and “health” and “holistic” a lot, and they call themselves “alternative medicine”, or “complementary medicine”. That way they can pretend like they’re doing something real while maintaining enough distance that they might not get sued or go to prison.

In short, anyone selling complementary or alternative medicine (CAM) is a fraud, a quack, a piece of shit in a white coat pretending to be a doctor.

Now, that might be a little bit mean. Many people honestly do buy into the shit they’re selling. They really believe. Hell, I’ll go so far as to say that it’s the overwhelming majority. They honestly believe and think they’re helping people. This is true for CAM quacks as much as it is for fortune tellers, psychics, and so on. I’ve a friend who practices acupuncture, as well as cupping and burning roots and other pseudoscientific mystical nonsense. He’s not a bad person, but he has dedicated years of his life to a lie that he honestly believes. He really thinks he’s helping people.

But they’re not helping people. I want that to be absolutely clear. They are. Not. Helping.

CAM quacks sell things that either haven’t been shown to work (random ass injection of stem cells, or wierd herbal concoctions) or that have been shown not to work (acupuncture, chiropractic, reiki, basically anything with a name). The best you can hope for is that whatever nonsense they’re selling you will do absolutely nothing. Very likely, it will have an effect, and it won’t be good.

“Herbal” and “natural” are not synonymous with “healthy”. Tobacco is an entirely natural product; nicotine is a pesticide. Plants are full of chemical compounds, usually intended to keep other things from eating those plants. That those chemicals can, in rare cases, have positive medicinal uses doesn’t mean that all of them always do. Aspirin is based on the chemical salicylic acid, extracted from the bark of the willow tree. It can be used to soothe pain, but it’s also used to remove skin (it’s an acid).

People recommending CAM shams don’t necessarily have … Okay, they necessarily don’t have good education in biology and chemistry generally nor medicine specifically. If they did, they wouldn’t be quacks, not honestly anyway. Regardless, they cannot have a good education in this stuff, and thus can’t know if what they’re recommending will help you at all or if it’ll just ruin the lining of your stomach, or destroy your kidneys. They don’t know, and neither do you.

Of course, not every Cam quack gives you things to eat or drink, right? Acupuncture is strictly topical, and chiropractic, too, right?

Again, nothing would be the best you could hope for, there. Are the acupuncture needles clean? Is the chiropractor going to dislocate something? But more than that, quacks almost never limit themselves to one form of woowoo. An acupuncturist isn’t only going to offer to poke you with needles, but will also offer other things like burning herbs on your skin, or cupping. Chemicals can have effects without being ingested; ever had poison ivy? And cupping .... it comes in a lot of varieties, and they’re range from mildly bad to holy shit.

All your woowoo blends together; a psychic will also sell themself as a mystic, a medium, and a fortune teller, because why not? Your chiropractor will offer reflexology and kinesiology and aromatherapy and all sorts of shit. Anything to get you to part with a few more bucks, and all with a clean conscience because they honestly believe in the crap they’re selling (most of the time).

And sometimes things can go horribly wrong, even or especially if the quack is doing exactly what they were taught to do. There’s a new craze in acupuncture called apipuncture, where instead of poking you with needles they sting you with live bees. Yes. People have died. Chiropractic involves manipulating joints… beginning with the spine. Not only does the spine house the spinal cord, it also houses a number of incredibly important blood vessels. Again, people have died as a result of chiropractic manipulations.

Quacks will treat any damn thing, but they love to target cancer. It’s the disease everyone will get eventually, and it’s the hardest to treat. Britt Marie Hermes is an excellent resource; I recommend her site naturopathicdiaries.com. Naturopathy is a broad, deliberately non-specific brand of woowoo that, like chiropractic, can occasionally bill itself as actual medicine thanks to asshole politicians in Arizona and Oregon. Hermes was driven out because her cancer patients weren’t able to get their medicine because it had been seized by customs… because it’s illegal.

A weekend of research later and Hermes was devastated to realize her boss had been lying to her and she had been lying to her patients. She had spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars earning a degree that was completely worthless, and had dedicated two more years to helping kill desperate people. She now lives in Germany, studying evolutionary biology at the University of Kiel. She’ll never be able to pay off the loans that paid for her worthless degree, which means she’ll probably never be able to return to the United States. She, like her patients, was a victim of a system that in absolutely no way intended to help people.

CAM is not medicine. CAM is not science. CAM does not help people. CAM kills. The people who practice this shit usually have the best of intentions. They honestly believe that what they’re doing is for the best.

They’re wrong.

In many ways, CAM practitioners are like preachers. They’re caught in a terrible trap, one baited with their own good intentions. They thought they were on the path to making the world a better place, and now they’re stuck, with no knowledge or skills, with no path toward a new career. Their degrees are garbage, their skills are garbage, all they have is the ability to make people feel better without actually helping them. Like a preacher becoming an atheist, a quack learning they’re peddling bullshit and lies might not see any way out.

I feel for them. Honestly, I do. Being stuck in a situation like that? Terrible. Even the ones who still believe are trapped; their situation encourages them, forces them, to continue believing, to ignore evidence, to dig their heels in and keep going. The only way out is to abandon their identity, to walk away from their community. At least, unlike preachers, they probably won’t lose family. Maybe. Still, I imagine it’s a lot like contemplating suicide.

But as much sympathy as I have for the quacks, I have far more for the victims they make in the surrounding community. The quacks are making a living off their foolishness; their victims aren’t. Their victims are coming to them for help and receiving none. Worse, they’re going to them instead of real doctors. Worse still, the quacks might even hurt or kill them in their pig-ignorant foolishness.

So, just as I’ll always advocate against religion for the harm it causes, despite the earnest beliefs of the pastors trapped in the pulpit, so I’ll always advocate against CAM. So-called complementary or alternative medicines kill.


Links

• Skepdic entry on alternative health
• Brit Hermes site Naturopathic Diaries

Musical Interlude
Whiskey in the Jar


Letter to Christians
Dear Christian,

Your neighbors are afraid of you.

This may surprise and upset you. What could you possibly have done that someone might be afraid of you? You’re a good person, leading a good life, and you don’t want to hurt anyone.

But how would your neighbors know that?

What they know is what they can see, the things you choose to show the world and the things you can’t hide. They can see your haircut and your car, your clothes and whether you wave at them when you leave for work. And they can see your religion.

They can see it in the decorations you put up around the holidays, the cross you wear, and your habit of attending services once or twice a week. And that makes them afraid, because they can’t see beneath the surface.

They don’t know if you’re a quiet, gentle person who feeds the homeless, who builds houses for the poor, who visits lonely seniors. They don’t know if you’re a loud, angry person who screams at strangers for holding hands, who throws trash at girls for dressing “wrong”, who nods in approval at the man throwing the stiff-armed salute. They don’t know if you’re the very quiet, very angry person who mails bombs to strangers around the city, who fires a rifle from a van on the freeway, who shoots a doctor in a church on Sunday.

There are many kinds of Christians. You might want to say that those others aren’t real Christians, but they say they are. And how are we supposed to tell? You all look the same until the shooting starts.

Or until the voting starts.

Because in the end, it’s not just the openly violent Christians who kill people. The Christians who support bigoted bakers, who want to force trans people out of the military, who enact racist laws, who kidnap children from the “wrong sorts of parents”… those Christians kill people, too.

They kill people in small ways, by making life harder, by adding burden after burden, simple stress that steals a day of your life for every week you survive. Until every day begins with dread and ends with dull exhaustion.

They kill people in larger ways, by isolating them from friends and family, forcing them to live alone, unloved, afraid. They don’t get to have the same jobs, they don’t get to shop at the same stores, they don’t get the protection of the police, they don’t get to go to the hospital. Because the hospitals are run by churches, and the police have crosses on their necks, too. The shops, the bakeries, the businesses, those have religious beliefs now, too.

And they kill them in the big ways, by encouraging the “very fine people” who vandalize Jewish cemeteries, drive cars into crowds, mail bombs to strangers, or open fire in newspaper offices. By voting for people who assault journalists, who use slurs against Jews, Mexicans, or black folk, who promise to ban ethnic groups and minorities.

Is this Christianity? You say it’s not. They say it is. You each quote scripture and revelation to support you. How can we say what’s right?

How is anyone supposed to decide?

And, until you do figure it out, how can we tell the difference between you?

Your neighbor,

John the Atheist