Scientists attending one of the nation's largest gatherings of researchers are taking the offensive against alternative medical treatments they say are grounded more in hope than scientific fact.
They are particularly troubled that many alternative medicine practitioners are promoting their techniques backed by questionable research and fanciful links to established science."Americans are spending $15 billion a year on things that amount to sugar pills wrapped in this scientific aura," said University of Maryland physicist Robert Park at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science here Friday.
There's a growing anxiety among researchers that the often plodding pace of experimental science is both misunderstood and underappreciated by a public looking for quick, simple results.
"A fertile climate for quackery has been created by a number of social and psychological factors, which are convincing both the purveyors and the consumers of alternative therapies that the treatments are valid, despite the fact that they cannot pass the usual scientific tests of efficacy," said psychologist Barry Beyerstein of Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia.
Ursula Goodenough, a molecular biologist at Washington University, St. Louis, has taken up debunking alternative medicine and particularly New Age healing as an avocation. She said she is struck by the way proponents re-write scientific fact to fit their theories, while at the same time expressing doubts about the value of modern Western medicine.
"There's a lot of anti-science mixed with a need to have the assurance of science," Goodenough said. "The popularity of these practices demonstrates the alienation and scientific ignorance of many people in our society. We as scientists have an obligation to make the real science story be something not so difficult for people to deal with."
Goodenough and Park argue that many alternative healers appear to succeed simply because they are more attentive and reassuring to their patients than conventional medics. "The fact that something makes someone feel better - whether its religion or parapsychology or touch therapy - doesn't make it medicine," Goodenough said.
Beyerstein and others also noted that alternative therapies are most likely to appeal to people who are basically healthy physically but are worried about their health and under psychological distress. Thus, they are most likely to respond to the reassurance and the placebo effect - the well-documented phenomena that a certain percentage of patients will get better taking sugar pills just because they believe something has been done to cure them.
Dr. Wallace Sampson, a Stanford University Medical Center professor and cancer specialist, said he's concerned that alternative treatments are being supported by flawed research that becomes published due to inadequate or nonexistent reviews.
As chairman of the National Council Against Health Care Fraud, Sampson has reviewed a number of studies of homeopathic, chiropractic and mind-illness therapies and insists there is "no credible evidence" for the vast majority of claims made by proponents of alternative medicine.
Sampson is even critical of a much-cited study of breast cancer survival done at Stanford that found that those who took part in group therapy lived an average of 18 months longer.