Prescriptions from the land of make-believe healthcare - Brief Article

If President Bush were to appoint Enron executives to a White House commission on executives selling shares of their own company's stock, it would be a scandal. Americans would be appalled at such a blatant conflict of interest. They would suspect that commissioners would offer self-serving recommendations.

It's time for Americans to be appalled by the self-serving legislative and administrative recommendations offered in March by a commission established by President Clinton in the closing days of his administration. The members of Clinton's White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy (WHCCAMP) included magnates and ideological leaders from the never-never land of healthcare, euphemistically described as "complementary" and "alternative."

It's a land where practitioners resist pressures from regulators and consumer advocates to refrain from making promotional claims for their methods in the absence of truly supportive scientific evidence. It's a land where promoters of gimmicks, gadgets, and nostrums, no matter how preposterous, no matter how poorly tested (if tested at all), and no matter how hazardous, receive not just acceptance, but glorification--and lucrative speaking engagements and other business opportunities.

Inhabitants of this never-never land include promoters of such dubious healthcare as:

* potions containing no molecules of a supposedly active ingredient (homeopathy)

* healing by manipulating chimerical energies of clients, sometimes via telephone (e.g., qi gong)

* lifelong regimens of spinal "adjustments" (as promoted by many chiropactors) to improve the flow of "innate intelligence" throughout the body

* muscle testing as the basis for recommending dietary supplements (applied kinesiology)

* manipulation of skull bones--which are actually fused--to treat jawjoint and other symptoms (cranial osteopathy)

* audiotapes to help people use mental imagery to "replace eroded bone and joint tissue," "help calm overactive, misguided immune cells," "encourage insulin sensitiviry at the cellular level," and, for cancer, "help mobilize a fighting response from immune cells" (which don't normally attack cancer cells)

* a treatment for various psychological disorders in which clients are guided in mental imagery and visual tracking of back-and-forth movements of a therapists' finger in sets of twelve to twenty-four strokes (eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing)

Within the world of so-called complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) these methods are mainstream. Among their promoters are many of the WHCCAMP commissioners.

The commission never defined complementary and alternative medicine. It failed to acknowledge that CAM is marketing doublespeak used to conceal from consumers the shortcomings of irrational and scientifically invalidated methods. Instead the commission refers to CAM as if it is a genuine field of medicine needing special regulation, oversight, and, most ominously, integration into our healthcare and medical education system.

The commission called for the president to establish an office at the "highest possible level" within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. It recommended increased funding for research on "CAM practice and products" without even considering the prospects for any particular practices or products to be shown to help consumers more than harm them.

Buried in an appendix of the report is a dissenting statement by two of the commissioners-Joseph J. Fins, M.D., director of medical ethics at the Cornell campus of New York Presbyterian Hospital, and Tieraona Low Dog, M.D., who develops continuing medical education programs on botanical medicine. "While dogmatic disbelief of everything that is not currently explainable is foolish, and indeed unscientific," they wrote, "it seems equally foolish to ask the taxpayer to bear the enormous expense of sorting out those areas that are plausible from those that are improbable."

A painstakingly prepared, point-by-point critique of WHCCAMP's report appears on the Quackwatch Web site. Quackwatch notes that the report "falsely assumes that many safe and effective 'CAM' practices and products exist and need special federal promotion to gain recognition."

Last year, in testimony at WHCCAMP hearings, I emphasized the importance of identifying health fraud masquerading as CAM and recommending policies to oust bogus treatments from healthcare. Instead, the commission recommended inadequate safeguards for consumers and developed a blueprint for a costly bureaucracy to support the CAM industry's efforts to boost business as they bamboozle consumers.

President Clinton should never have established WHCCAMP. President Bush should reject its recommendations and, instead, seek rational alternatives to promote health, prevent disease, and improve healthcare.

William M. London is a CSICOP consultant and the program director of The National council Against Health Fraud, Inc. (www.ncahf.org) a private nonprofit consumer advocacy agency.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group