Product Description

The scientists writing this book are not against complementary or alternative medicine (CAM), but they are very much for evidence-based medicine and single standards. They aim to counter-balance the many uncritical books on CAM and to stimulate intelligent, well-informed public debate. TOPICS INCLUDE: What is CAM? Why is it so popular? Patient choice; Reclaiming compassion; Teaching CAM at university; Research on CAM; CAM in court; Ethics and CAM; Politics and CAM; Homeopathy in context; Concepts of holism in medicine; Placebo, deceit and CAM; Healing but not curing; CAM and the media.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #383193 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 178 pages

Customer Reviews

Should be taught in schools
Vital and informative text that should be read by everyone alongside Ben Goldacre's 'Bad Science' and Singh and Ernt's 'Trick or Treatment'. Everyone should be able to made informed choices about the treatments that are peddled to the desperate and gullible. As Tim Minchin famously said 'What do you call Alternative Medicine that has been proved to work? . . . Medicine!'

If you are looking for a unbiased, well reasoned & researched book...pass on
A disappointing & unsettling book. I have an interest in homeopathy & was shocked to discover the many factual inaccuracies presented here. Mr Ernst also sees fit to use (and draw conclusions from) research that has been widely criticised in the scientific community as flawed. (Shang et als Meta-Analysis). This book is a piece of propaganda, nothing more.

I cannot comment on the other chapters, but I presume they are of the same level of scholarship.

I'm concerned that a supposedly reputable scientist would put his name to this piece of propaganda & I worry about the state of science in the UK.... has it ceased being about exploring our incredible world & merely become another wing of big-business?

Alan

hmmmmm....
currently evaluating. But really, before having to go any further I can already see the usual problems cropping up with this. It is not the debates over evidence that is the problem- it is the philosophical assumptions underpinning this whole kind of approach: in short a western-centric one where the materialist reductionist conception of reality (based on a Newtonian/Cartesian philosophy) is held as the benchmark to which all else is held accountable. Not all the authors but many. The reductionist approach breaks its observations down to the smallest possible parts looking to find the core operating principle there.

Unsurprisingly some of the methodologies in the 'alternative' health field do not hold up well under this attitude because it is the wrong filter with which to try and understand them. If you are a confirmed reductionist then that argument does not hold because the Newtonian reductionist philosophy is the ONLY filter through which to properly view reality- especially when concerned with health. The practitioner of Chinese medicine would differ in his opinion, his view being based as it is on several thousand years of Taoist and Buddhist philosophy which informs the scientific approach there (broadly a 'systems theory' approach which looks for the core operating principle in the inter-relations BETWEEN things). But for the western medical orthodox Taoism and Buddhism are nothing but further dark shadows for the light of western empiricism to pierce with quantative reductionist data. The same attitude is found with yoga and its allusions to 'chakras' and the like even as the phyiscal postures of Hatha/Ashtanga yoga etc are accepted as having a valid effect.

The Newtonian reductionist paradigm is also situated within the mythic story that is told by the 'rational enlightenment' beginning in earnest in the 16th century but having its deepest roots in Ptolemny and Aristotle of Ancient Greece. This story tells us that from the 16thc on we began finally freeing ourselves from the primitive metaphysical & superstitious dream and the western empirical method increasingly shone the light of reason upon the world. we could expect the hard 'quantative' results over and above soft 'qualitative' results now. Many of the writers in this work are, unsurprisingly singing from this hymn sheet and still believe in the story of the rational enlightenment as their guiding ethos....as indeed do all of us in the west to a degree. Therefore the incursion of 'alternative' philosophies and methodologies might pose a threat to this story: a return to 'dark primitivism' as Richard Dawkins has called it.

As one example we have P.H. Canter railing against the concept of a 'vital living force' 'magically' underlying 'physical' reality in healing because it has not been substantiated by orthodox materialist science. There are of course many hypotheses coming from the research of quantum scientists such as David Bohm and parapsychologists such as Dean Radin which DO suggest such an underlying strata or 'quanta'- and link up with eastern 'systems' approaches. Of course they are controversial and not yet accepted within the mainstream cannon (even as they are raved about in a dumbed-down fashion within some 'new age' circles). But the point here is really that 'vitalism' is classified by Canter as 'pseudoscience' and a 'Retreat from Science'. But in fact it is only a retreat from strict reductionist, Newtonian, quantative science where the sole efficacy of something must be determined under controlled laboratory conditions. Within the systems approach a conventional controlled laboratory is often NOT the appropriate way to test something. With Canter's view it is almost as if the most important thing is that someone who is healed does not end up believing in a 'vital force' and straying from the reductionist paradigm- ie THIS is more important that whether the person is healed.

In many ways the consternation over 'alternative' medicine by the orthodoxy mimics the dire warnings the Christian church issued about straying from its fold. In that case hell, witches and demons awaited the unfaithful and the heretic. Now a fall into dark 'irationalism' and snake oil salesmen is what awaits the individual who ventures away into unsubstantiated 'alternative' practices. The orthodoxy is 'only trying to protect you'. In both cases there is a power issue at play. And just like the Christian church ,parts of the medical orthodoxy are starting loose their hold on the imagination of the public. The biomedical model, so successful in dealing with infections and body malfunctions, is rapidly coming un-stuck over 'mental' and 'emotional' health problems that are blighting the west.

Its not that the warning of 'snake oil' healing is baseless. On the contrary it is rife; but charlatanism/ bad practice is unfortunately in evidence across the orthodox and 'alternative' spectrum. Consider the case with areas such as ADHD where a child is sometimes given an orthodoxy approved drug to 'cure' them of their disorder rather than looking at the child's behaviour problems in context. It is done because it is easier for all concerned to pop a pill than to look into the whole complex of issues surrounding that child. We often don't have time for that in the busy west. This is not an anti-psychiatry statement - merely an example of the problems of focusing on 'parts' without considering their 'interactions'.

Viewed in the most positive light what is happening now could be described as a necessary fusion between the eastern systems which studied the inter-relation of things with the reductionist approach which studies the things themselves. This is a simplification of the picture but at the leading edge this is generally what has been happening. Much of this book, however, seems to wrapped up in furrowing of brows over the disintegration of the hegemony of biomedicalism (accompanied, as any disintegration is, by parasites and vultures). Which is why I keep putting 'alternative' in ironic quotation marks because its already not really 'alternative'so much as increasingly 'parallel'.