What Will Happen To Alternative Medicine?

Ginseng, ginkgo biloba and homeopathic potions have become as American as apple pie, but will anyone still be taking them in 2025? Advocates of alternative medicine, buoyed--and enriched--by the $30 billion Americans spend annually on unconventional therapies, confidently predict that herbal remedies and homeopathic potions will not only flourish in the coming decades but will also take their rightful place alongside vaccines, antibiotics, gene therapy and the other tools of modern medicine.

Baloney. "Alternative medicine" is merely a politically correct term for what used to be called quackery. Any alternative therapy that can be proved valid will swiftly be incorporated into mainstream medicine. Any "medicine" that is based on myth, irrationality and deception will eventually be rejected. "Once the public finds out what homeopathy is," predicts Dr. John Renner, head of the National Council for Reliable Health Information, "once they find out that chlorophyll is necessary for plant life but not human life, they're going to turn on these alternative groups."

Public disenchantment with homeopathy, for example, will grow when consumers of homeopathic potions finally wise up to the fact that in many cases they are paying big bucks for a highly diluted mixture that is essentially pure water, and that homeopathy is based on primitive and false 19th century beliefs.

When patients discover that their "therapeutic touch" practitioner has not been manipulating their "human energy field"--a nonexistent entity--but merely making useless hand motions in the vicinity of their bodies, they will reject mysticism and move toward more rational therapy. And when herbal medicine devotees become aware that any useful ingredient in their unregulated leaves, stem and root mixtures can be isolated and made available as regulated drugs, labeled with full information about content and proper dosage, they will begin making fewer trips to the health-food store.

Cost is also an issue. Managed-care providers, eager to cash in on the alternative boom, are luring subscribers by offering to cover some of these dubious treatments. But most consumers of alternate products use conventional medicine too, and when it becomes evident that the alternatives are not cost effective and at best produce only a placebo effect, the HMOs will drop them in a heartbeat. Says William Jarvis, a professor of public health at California's Loma Linda University: "Useless procedures don't add to the outcome, just to the overhead."

While the purveyors of this voodoo medicine today point with pride to the fact that most U.S. medical schools, influenced by research grants and public opinion, have launched courses in alternative medicine, the result will not be what they expect. Legitimate medical schools--and most of them are--will dispassionately dissect the alternatives and evaluate their effectiveness. In so doing, they will breed new generations of doctors who will urge patients to be skeptical about false claims and bogus science.