Scientific vs. Alternative Medicine
Recently I heard on the news that people with chronic conditions tend to use alternative treatments more frequently than the rest of the population. Those of us with fibromyalgia are dealing with a medical condition which has no known cause, and thus at times, we become frustrated with our physicians and just want to feel better. A friend will suggest a suppliment, and we head for our nearest health food store to try it.
The scientific vs. alternative debate will continue until something is found that actually helps all people with fibromyalgia. Since what works for one person may not work for another at this time, we may become so discouraged with our pain and fatigue that we will try anything to feel better.
Dr. David Nye has pointed out some interesting facts in discussing scientific vs. alternative medicine. Copies of his articles can be found at Fibrom-L through the list server. He says that scientific medicine is a body of knowledge about the human body, its maladies, and their treatment, acquired by the application of scientific methods of study. These methods were developed for science in general and medicine in particular after it was discovered in how many often non-obvious ways subtle biases influence the outcome of a study. One of the best known of these ways is the "placebo effect." Many patients given a placebo (a pill with no active ingredients) will experience benefit, sometimes dramatic, simply because they expect to.
An initial study of the use of a liver extract and vitamins in chronic fatigue syndrome reported dramatic improvement in all patients. When the same researchers followed this up with a randomized, controlled, double-blind study (RCDBS), they found the treatment no better than placebo. In a RCDBS, patients are divided into two groups, one of which gets the treatment being studied and the other a placebo or sometimes another known-effective treatment to which the first is to be compared. The assignment is done in such a way that neither the patients nor the physician evaluating the patients' responses knows who is getting which. At the end of the study, the codes are broken and the results tallied and analyzed.
He explains alternative medicine as a name given to several schools of folk (non-scientific) medicine whose treatments are typically derived from tradition rather than from scientific study. The ideas often come from a single founder and are then passed along with little
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