What Will Happen To Alternative Medicine?

By LEON JAROFF

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.

Public skepticism, in turn, will spike the guns of the friends of alternative medicine in the U.S. Congress who have, through legislation and intimidation, harassed and weakened the Food and Drug Administration. New laws will restore the power of the FDA not only to ban dangerous therapies pre-emptively but also to remove patently worthless products from health-food-store and drugstore shelves.

The coming years will also see the demise of the quack-laden Office of Alternative Medicine, which seven years ago was foisted on the reluctant National Institutes of Health, largely at the insistence of Tom Harkin, the otherwise sensible Senator from Iowa who believes in the curative powers of bee pollen. Talk about getting stung. Taxpayers will be incredulous when they become aware that after spending millions of dollars in its first seven years "investigating" highly questionable alternative therapies, the OAM failed to validate or--more significant--invalidate any of them (with the possible exception of acupuncture). And they'll be furious when they recall years from now that in 1998, as a reward from Congress for its failures, the agency was quietly elevated to a full-fledged NIH Center and given a budgetary raise: to $50 million annually.

Charades can't persist forever. In the years to come, as conventional medicine continues to make rapid advances and as the public becomes better informed about the deception and outright medical ignorance of many of these hucksters, alternative medicine will be consigned to what indeed is its rightful place: alongside snake oil, orgone booths and laetrile in the dustbin of medical history.

TIME contributor Leon Jaroff was founding editor of DISCOVER, in which his "Skeptical Eye" column skewered bogus science