Alternative medicine for minor conditions - why?
One thing I have found very puzzling about all these people who use alternative medicine is why they bother with it for minor conditions. Okay, if you’ve got cancer or AIDS or some other serious or even terminal illness, or you are in chronic pain, I can understand why you might try alternative treatments if all the mainstream treatments have failed. I can understand, and I can definitely feel empathy - even though I think the treatments are wrong and mostly worse than useless. If I had a serious illness that was potentially life-threatening, I’d want to spend as much time as possible with my friends and family: having gotten a diagnosis for a potentially terminal illness, every moment counts. Carpe diem applies doubly so when the days left are limited. Wasting precious time which you could be spending saying goodbye and enjoying life with ineffective bullshit treatment is almost criminal, and the people who profit from selling bunkum to people who are seriously ill are truly vile.
But think about minor conditions. Those are the things alternative medicine is supposedly good for. I was just looking for a good way to reduce the pain from boils. Yes, I know, yucky. Oversharing. Yeah yeah. I don’t believe in all that stuff. I have a biological imperfection. I have many, in fact. I’m human, humans are yucky, I shouldn’t talk about it. I get it. So, as I was saying, I was looking for what the most effective way is to reduce boil pain. I have a nasty boil on my back. I don’t really want to lance the thing because it is in about the most impractical place to lance a boil. Plus, you know, they go away in a few days in a way that infection from using an unsterilised lancing needle doesn’t. While looking around, I came across an article that recommended both “detox dieting” and homeopathy as a way to reduce boil pain. Of course, the best way is to use a hot compress. Five minutes in the bathroom with a nice warm flannel reduced the pain pretty well. I’ve got a proper sports hot compress thing downstairs but that means using the microwave and, well, it’s 1am and I don’t want to disturb people.
Why would you order a special homeopathic boil reducer? I just don’t get it. If you’ve got a boil, you either lance it at home, wait it out and use a compress, or go to your doctor and have it lanced by a trained medical professional. I could call my GP tomorrow and book up an appointment with the nurse. Could probably be in and out in ten minutes. Even if the homeopathy was effective, why bother when the real medicine is so bloody simple that a frickin’ humanities graduate like me can understand it?
I saw this a while back with ear candling. The alternative people like to buy special candles, insert them into their ears and set light to them in the misguided belief that it extracts cerumen (ear wax) from their ear canal. Does it work? About as well as homeopathy. Unlike homeopathy, ear candling is actually potentially dangerous. I mean, let’s not beat around the bush: sticking lit candles in your ear is not a smart move. The wax burnt off the top of the candle can drip down into your frickin’ ear canal, or elsewhere on your face. Getting candle wax and cerumen out of your ears - “now you have two problems” as programmers like to say of regex, XML and anything else they don’t take much of a fancy to. Also, you are playing with fire. Fire burns things. Skin is one of those things. And bed sheets. Really, sticking lit candles in your ear is quite a stupid thing to do if it doesn’t actually have any payoff.
Now, for some reason, I suffer from quite cerumen buildups. Must be the shape of my ear canal or something. About once a year, I go to the nurse and have it removed. It is a tremendously simple process. For about five days before hand, you pour oil into your ears - the stuff they sell specially for ear wax removal is peanut oil, but you can use any cooking oil like sesame oil or sunflower oil or olive oil. You put a few drops in your ear while your head is tilted, leave it there for a few minutes. Do that for a few days, then go see the nurse who will pump the wax out of your ears with a machine. Again, ten minutes in the surgery. And it works great. You feel wonderful aftwards: you go outside, walk down the street and you can hear all the birds singing and the cars driving by sound much louder than before. Then you pop your headphones in and hear music properly.
In both of these cases, the alternative medicine is worse than the mainstream medicine in all ways. It is more expensive (I mean, unless you are in the USA and have a healthcare system that is as pleasurable to deal with as a car insurance company), it is riskier (in the case of ear candling), and more time consuming. I just don’t understand why anyone would bother with alternative treatments for such minor conditions when the mainstream medicine is so straightforward and simple. Seems like a very strange economic calculation that the alties are making.
It seems that alternative medicine is in a strange place: the more moderate proponents of alternative medicine are doing their best not to claim that it is useful for really serious conditions - because, you know, as a society, we get quite pissy about people selling phony cancer drugs in a way that we don’t with people selling phony boil reduction creams (consider the Cancer Act in the UK, for instance). So, the major stuff is out. But why bother with the minor stuff? If we had a vaccine for cancer (let’s pretend: it isn’t actually very likely that one could be developed, or so various cancer researchers say), then there would be no need for an alternative medicine for it. Just as there isn’t much need for alternative methods for treating smallpox. Once you find a decent cure or even better a decent prevention for the disease, it stops being quite so scary and requiring labels like “major” and “terminal”. But why does alternative medicine flourish for the easily treatable? Why on earth would someone use this rubbish when the real stuff is so much simpler and less open to cognitive bias. I mean, if you go and have your ear wax removed, it isn’t that there is going to be much causal mix-up. You go in with blocked ears, nurse blasts out all the wax (and you can see this yucky water-wax mixture that has flown straight out from your ears), you go out with unblocked ears. There’s no placebo effect involved, no positive-thinking-makes-it-all-better, no taking one drug and taking another and then mixing up which one cured you, no way of pointing to lifestyle or dietary changes - you go in, nurse performs procedure, you walk out better. I don’t see how the delusions in that process can arise like they could in a long and complicated battle with, say, cancer.
Comments welcome, but not from the stupid brigade. If you are part of the stupid brigade, feel free to dilute your idiocy down to 30C and then send me one of the samples without the active ingredient in. Thanks.
