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September 5 - September 5, 2013
“All those canes, braces, and crutches,” he wrote, “and not a single glass eye, wooden leg, or toupee.”)
Milton Bass, a lawyer proficient in the doublespeak of his industry, said, “The Proxmire bill is designed for one purpose. It is designed to permit the customer to buy a safe food product honestly labeled.” Bass failed to explain how defeating legislation requiring proof of safety made products safer.
Waxman and Kessler were concerned that salespeople in health food stores were advising customers to treat high blood pressure, infections, and cancer with vitamins, supplements, minerals, and herbs. “Unsubstantiated claims are becoming more exaggerated,” said Kessler. “We are back at the turn of the century, when snake oil salesmen could hawk their potions with promises that couldn’t be kept. If you walk into a health food store, you have to recognize that we have not approved the safety of these products nor substantiated their claims.”
Between 1983 and 2004, poison-control centers in the United States received 1.3 million reports of adverse reactions to vitamins, minerals, and dietary supplements, of which 175,268 required treatment in hospitals and 139 resulted in death. In 2012, the FDA estimated that approximately 50,000 adverse reactions to supplements occurred every year.
A Harris poll found that 68 percent believe that the government requires herbal manufacturers to report side effects, 58 percent believe that the FDA must approve herbal products before sale, and 55 percent believe that manufacturers of vitamins, minerals, and dietary supplements cannot make claims about safety or effectiveness without scientific evidence. All these beliefs couldn’t be further from the truth. Serious problems caused by dietary supplements are the industry’s dirty little secret. Because of the Supplement Act, they’ll remain a secret.
There cannot be two kinds of medicine. There is only medicine that has been adequately tested and medicine that has not. —Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine
a clinical trial shows that a therapy works, it’s not an alternative. And if it doesn’t work, it’s also not an alternative. In a sense, there’s no such thing as alternative medicine.
“Herbal remedies are not really alternative,” writes Steven Novella, a Yale neurologist. “They have been part of scientific medicine for decades, if not centuries. Herbs are drugs and they can be studied as drugs. My problem is with the regulation and marketing of specific herbal products, because they often make claims that are not backed by evidence.”
More than 3,000 elderly adults were randomly assigned to receive ginkgo or a placebo (a sugar pill). Decline in memory and onset of dementia were the same in both groups. In 2012, a study of more than 2,800 adults found that ginkgo didn’t ward off Alzheimer’s disease.
Another example is St. John’s wort. Every year, ten million people suffer major depression in the United States, and every year 35,000 people kill themselves. For each successful suicide, eleven more have tried. Depression is a serious illness; to treat it, scientists have developed medicines that alter brain chemicals such as serotonin. Called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), these drugs are licensed by the FDA. Because they’ve been shown to help with severe depression, doctors recommend them. Practitioners of alternative medicine, however, have a better idea—a more natural,
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“None of the forms of garlic used in this study … had statistically or clinically significant effects on low-density lipoprotein cholesterol or other plasma lipid concentrations in adults with moderate hypercholesterolemia.”
“Now we know that even very high doses of saw palmetto make absolutely no difference,” said study author Gerald Andriole, chief of urologic surgery at the school. “Men should not spend their money on this herbal supplement as a way to reduce symptoms of an enlarged prostate because it clearly does not work any better than a sugar pill.” A choice to believe the hype about saw palmetto was a choice to risk the occasionally severe complications of prostate enlargement. Again, natural wasn’t better. It was worse.
“There’s a name for alternative medicines that work,” says Joe Schwarcz, professor of chemistry and the director of the Office for Science and Society at McGill University. “It’s called medicine.”
The most amazing part of the secretin story was what happened next. When parents were told that responses to secretin and salt water were indistinguishable, 69 percent still wanted to use the drug—still wanted to pay thousands of dollars and travel hundreds of miles to get something they now knew didn’t work. That’s how desperate they were. Because mainstream medicine didn’t have anything better to offer—didn’t have medicines that could make autism melt away—parents mortgaged houses and cashed in retirement accounts to find anyone who could promise hope, even if it was false hope. And even
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Cashing in on desperate parents. The snake oil salesmen
“One time I took Jodie to a chiropractor,” she said. “He told me he could cure Jodie by rearranging the ions in her brain with a giant electromagnet placed under her mattress at night. And, ‘oh, by the way,’ he sells the magnets for two hundred dollars. So I went home and I talked to my husband about it. At this point, I had stopped being a smart person. And he just looked at me and said, ‘Listen to yourself. Do you hear what you’re saying?’ It was that moment when I realized how far I’d gone. This was my grief, not my brain. And you can’t think with your grief.”
Desperation's a powerful thing
On January 18, 1897, Indiana state representative Taylor I. Record argued in favor of changing the value of pi. Pi, which can be rounded to 3.14159, is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Tyler believed that the number was inconveniently long; in House Bill 246, he asked that it be rounded up to 3.2. The bill passed the House but was defeated in the Senate when the chairman of Purdue University’s math department successfully pleaded that it would make Indiana a national laughingstock. The value of pi in Indiana remains the same as in every other state.
In May 1999, a thirty-year-old woman entered the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, with jaundice and confusion. Despite aggressive attempts at resuscitation, she died soon after. Her diagnosis: a fatal blood clot that had lodged in her heart, a consequence of an indwelling intravenous catheter. Lyme Literate doctors had tested her urine, blood, and spinal fluid for the presence of Lyme bacteria and Lyme antibodies. Every test had been negative. They treated her anyway. At the time of her death, she had received intravenous antibiotics for more than two years.
Alternate therapy? No thanks!
The shark cartilage fad took its toll, contributing to the possible extinction of the spiny dogfish shark and the blue shark, both of which are now at risk. Sadly, some people used shark cartilage instead of conventional therapies that would have saved their lives, most notably a nine-year-old Canadian girl with a brain tumor. After the tumor had been removed, doctors recommended a course of radiation and chemotherapy that offered a good chance of survival. Her parents opted for shark cartilage instead. She was dead in four months.
If you needed help and you came to me, you would get better. Thousands of people have. Because, in the end, it isn’t really about the needles. It’s about the man.” “The doctor who fails to have a placebo effect on his patients,” wrote J. N. Blau, “should become a pathologist.”
In a sense, everyone uses the placebo effect, no one more than parents. “I have a four-year-old son,” writes John Diamond in Snake Oil and Other Preoccupations, “who, as is the way with four-year-old sons, climbs on things and then falls off them, losing chunks of skin and blood on the way down to the ground. And whenever this happens—about four times a week on average—and he runs to me crying and pointing to the latest graze, I apply strictly alternative remedies. I don’t give him strong drugs to kill the pain or stanch the flow of blood but I clean the tiny wound, ask him what happened,
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(Researchers have also shown that pain relief from acupuncture can be blocked by naloxone.)
