Candace

Talmadge

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July 31, 2009

Complementary and Alternative Medicine: A Radical Rx for Real Health Care Competition

While Capitol Hill delays the vote over so-called health care reform until fall, Americans are voting with their pocketbooks.

In steadily increasing numbers, they are bypassing the Western allopathic medical model in favor of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). CAM includes treatments like acupuncture, chiropractic, deep breathing, herbs, homeopathy, massage, yoga and more esoteric approaches like energy therapy.

Americans spent $33.7 billion on CAM in 2007, according to a study just released by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine and the National Center for Health Statistics.

While CAM spending amounts to only 1.5 percent of the $2.2 trillion that this country shells out for health care, it is still significant. Payments for CAM come primarily from consumers’ own pockets, since private insurance still does not pay for a lot of CAM, although acupuncture, chiropractic and massage have made coverage inroads.

Spending on CAM comprises 11.2 percent of total out-of-pocket health care costs in this country, according to Richard L. Nahin, Ph.D., MPH, lead author of the CAM cost analysis and acting director of NCCAM’s Division of Extramural Research.

Translation: Those who use CAM are highly motivated to do so. I know. I’m one of them. In my wild fantasies, I imagine CAM giving Western medicine a hefty dose of what it doesn’t face right now – real competition.

By that, I mean a true contest between entirely different concepts of illness and healing. Although there are a few cracks in the edifice, Western medical practitioners still regard the body as some sort of biological machine that goes haywire for various reasons, and can be “cured” through drugs, surgery or both.

Some CAM treatments fit into this approach, but many others offer an entirely different perspective. In this viewpoint, the physical body reflects the state of the mind, heart and spirit, and possesses its own wisdom. Instead of disrespecting the body by cutting into it or filling it with often toxic drugs, CAM practitioners encourage the body’s innate healing capabilities. Imagine that.

CAM, naturally, suffers from the double standard reserved for anything that challenges prevailing paradigms. The medical establishment argues that most CAM methods lack reliable studies of effectiveness. How true, especially since the majority of such research is paid for by pharmaceutical companies that have no profit incentive to study CAM. (All significant CAM research in this country is funded by the federal government through NCCAM.)

Artificial hormone replacement therapy also lacked the same kind of validation, but that didn’t stop doctors from handing it out like candy to women for decades. Until a better-late-than-never study ended years early after showing dramatically that long-term synthetic HRT use greatly increases the risk of stroke, heart attack, breast cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Oops.

Very recent research also shows that heart bypass surgery and angioplasty do nothing to increase the chances of preventing future heart attacks after an initial episode. Yet these procedures have been performed millions of times over decades based on nothing more than “tradition.” Good luck getting heart doctors to change their ways. Their livelihoods depend on ignoring this evidence.

This isn’t an either/or situation. The Western model works well in certain health situations, while CAM is far better for others. For example, a great deal of CAM spending is motivated by chronic pain, which “often is very hard to treat effectively with traditional medical approaches,” Nahin told a group of reporters.

This is precisely the point. In addition to studying CAM’s effectiveness, we should take a long, hard look at the cost difference between traditional Western medical approaches and CAM for similar conditions, like back pain or anxiety. The results might be eye-popping, to say the least.

If we ever decide to bring CAM fully into the medical mainstream, we might just end up more fit, fiscally as well as physically.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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