The topic of yesterday’s Quote of the Day message: “Should a single payer system include complementary and alternative therapies?”

Martha Livingston, Ph.D., Professor of Health and Society, SUNY College at Old Westbury, responds:

Email
May 4, 2012

Dear Don,

I am deeply troubled both by the JAMA piece you cite here and by your comment.  The author – and you – have lumped together a world of different treatment modalities and individual treatments, and you have further characterized them all as “quackery.”  Not all CAM treatments are the equivalent of “drugs.”  And there is good science demonstrating the efficacy of many treatments referred to as CAM.  The JAMA author has chosen to cite only studies that did not show a therapeutic effect of a particular single treatment, and you have apparently decided that there are therefore no rigorous scientific studies showing the efficacy of any alternative treatment.

The term CAM itself is problematic, suggesting that all such treatments complement “regular” medicine.  Lumped under the heading of CAM are not only various herbal and other non-PhRMA-manufactured products, but “alternative,” that is, “non-M.D.” practitioners, and entire methods of treatment.  So the issues really must be distinguished and analyzed, e.g.,

1. Who gets to research various treatments?
2. Who gets to practice medicine or, more broadly, healing?
3. Who gets to decide who’s right?

Briefly, there is a long, convoluted history inextricably tied to issues of power, class and racism, e.g., the suppression of midwifery and continuing suppression of the superior woman-centered model of childbirth; the dismissal of traditional healing systems, e.g., the 4000 years of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).

Further, proponents of (some) “alternative” modalities argue that a huge proportion of what is practiced in “regular” or “scientific” medicine has no scientific basis whatever, and only the weight of generations of apprenticeship behind it.

I doubt that you are prepared to defend that all that is practiced in “regular” medicine is supported by good science, yet you aren’t dismissive of all regular doctors as quacks.  If you’d like to learn more about the science of other-than-standard medical practice, I refer you to the terrific body of work by Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman of Georgetown, a longtime PNHP member.

Finally, I think it’s really important not to toss grenades into our coalition, Don.  Many PNHP members, both physicians and non-physicians, are supportive of some of the practices lumped together under the umbrella of CAM.  We need each other, and must agree to disagree about many issues, this one included.

Best,

Martha Livingston

qotd: Should a single payer system include complementary and alternative therapies?
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2012/may/should-a-single-payer-system-include-complementary-and-alternative-therapies

Martha Livingston’s message reflects the tenor of many of the anticipated responses to my biased opinions expressed in yesterday’s Quote of the Day – views that I made clear were my own and did not represent the policy position of PNHP.

When the views are expressed as support or opposition to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), passions run high and conflict is inevitable. That is the way I framed the message – quite deliberately to carry my point. But the real issue is not CAM. It is where do we draw the line on where our collective tax funds in a single payer national health program should be distributed?

There should be very little disagreement with a framing that all reasonable, beneficial, affordable, effective, preventive, diagnostic and therapeutic health care services should be covered under a single payer system. There should also be agreement that blatant quackery such as the Hoxsey cancer treatment should not be covered, though some still disagree with this.

Merriam-Webster defines “medicine” as “the science and art dealing with the maintenance of health and the prevention, alleviation, or cure of disease.” “Science” is defined as “the state of knowing; knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding.” “Art” is defined as “skill acquired by experience, study, or observation.”

Medicine is science combined with art, but it is not not art alone. If we are going to pay for the health care of other people, this is the standard that we should meet.

As you read the following quote from my comment yesterday, dismiss from your mind the arbitrary categories of “traditional medicine” and “complementary and alternative medicine.” Simply read carefully what I wrote:

“The application of science to medicine is a dynamic. Many older approaches prove to be ineffective or even harmful. As we gain new evidence, those approaches should be denied payment from our collective health funds, whether private or government. Beneficial new approaches should be added. These decisions should continue to be based on science.”

In medicine, we need to dump the bad and bring in the good – some of which may arise from CAM. CAM was chosen for discussion yesterday because it is a rich resource of unscientific and sometimes artless interventions of the type that we should not be asking our fellow countrymen to fund. If we want those services, we should pay for them ourselves.

For those who insist that the art of medicine is all we need and that we do not need the science, I can only say that our health care financing system cannot bear paying for extravagances such as the $120 million paid for “The Scream,” or $120 billion to be allocated for “scream therapy.”