Alternative health’s dark side
Educated people, mostly women, are falling victim to unqualified alternative health practitioners. Samantha SelingerMorris reports.
SARAH MATHIESON★ just wanted the best chance to fall pregnant. So, she did what so many of us do. She researched her options, then visited a naturopath, who prescribed five bottles of supplements.
And then, having developed joint pain, she went back . . . and the naturopath prescribed another 16 bottles.
Dr Kerryn Phelps, a supporter of evidence-based complementary therapies and a former president of both the Australian Medical Association and the Australasian Integrative Medicine Association, treated Mathieson.
‘‘She came to see me saying she was feeling worse, terrible, achy, unwell.’’ It turned out that Mathieson had ingested ‘‘toxic levels’’ of certain micronutrients.
Mathieson was one of the luckier ones. After stopping all of the supplements and taking a standard pre-pregnancy multivitamin, she went on to have a healthy pregnancy.
But she is an example of a disturbing trend that Phelps sees in her practice: educated people – mostly women – falling victim to unqualified alternative health practitioners, many of whom they find online.
‘‘They’re inquisitive, looking for answers, not happy with ‘take this and go away’ as an answer,’’ says Phelps, who was motivated to write a book, Ultimate Wellness ,in part because of her experiences with such patients.
‘‘They’re prepared to invest time and energy and intellectual capital into their healthcare. But the question is, where are they getting their information from? In some cases, they’re getting it from good websites on the net. And [in] some cases, from rubbish websites and unqualified practitioners.’’
Lately, alternative therapies have made front-page news. Jess Ainscough, the former journalist behind the globally popular blog The Wellness Warrior, died of cancer in February at the age of 30 after practising – and championing – a cancer-fighting regimen consisting largely of fruits, vegetables and coffee enemas.
And self-proclaimed Chinese healer Hongchi Xiao made headlines in April when a diabetic 7-year-old Sydney boy, Aiden Fenton, died after attending one of Xiao’s ‘‘slapping therapy’’ workshops. (Patients are slapped, often to the point of bruising, to ‘‘unblock poisons’’.)
Why are some of us taking advice from ‘‘wellness’’ gurus instead of medically-trained professionals? Especially when so many of these gurus give advice that is, at the very least, highly suspect?
Dr Sue Ieraci, an emergency physician and executive member of Friends of Science in Medicine, a body that opposes scientifically unproven alternative health treatments, thinks many online wellness gurus garner huge followings because they make people feel powerful.
‘‘It’s not PC in our postmodernist society to get your simple answers from [medical] professionals, because that’s paternalistic and ‘giving in to the man’,’’ Ieraci says.
She says the online health gurus ‘‘make you feel empowered, because you’re going against orthodoxy’’.
Two years ago, a 55-year-old man burnt a potentially fatal hole the size of a golf ball into the side of his head after he used a corrosive herbal treatment known as ‘‘black salve’’ – a paste often made from bloodroot and zinc chloride that is marketed as being able to ‘‘draw out’’ cancer – that is sold online as an alternative cancer remedy.
Phelps, who has treated patients who have used black salve, says ‘‘they’re telling people what they want to hear, that they don’t have to go through chemo or radiotherapy. And, to be honest, who wouldn’t be terrified by the prospect of chemotherapy or radiotherapy?’’
General practitioner Robert Walters says medical culture is partly to blame for the current trend. ‘‘Alternative practitioners . . . often give the patient more time,’’ says Walters, who has treated patients whose health has been made worse by seeing unqualified health practitioners.
‘‘This is where the medical profession has probably got to look at itself a little bit, because we’re so busy, rushed, consultations are so short.
‘‘If we spent more time explaining medicine – and medicine’s not really a mystery, it’s basically plumbing, you know – if you can explain disease process, explain what you need to worry about and what you don’t need to worry about, and just spend a little bit of extra time with your patients, then I don’t think they’ll go looking for magic cures elsewhere with witchcraft.’’
Compounding these issues is the fact that alternative practitioners are largely unregulated. So how can we determine which alternative health treatment – and practitioner – is safe and which isn’t, particularly when some alternative health treatments that sound wacky have solid scientific backing?
For instance, the use of fecal microbial transplants – when a healthy person’s stool is inserted into a sick person’s colon – was lauded in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2013 after a study proved the therapy’s effectiveness at fighting the bacteria Clostridium difficile.
Infection with the bacteria causes symptoms similar to Crohn’s disease, and kills 15,000 people a year in the United States alone.
And, although controversial, some laboratory studies have shown that combining high doses of intravenous vitamin C with chemotherapy improved the effectiveness of chemotherapy in the treatment of some cancers.
Alarm bells should ring, says Phelps, if a non-medical practitioner discourages you from continuing care with your doctor or medical specialist.
People should also seek medical advice about any alternative therapy that carries even the slightest risk, taking particular care with the manipulation of bones and muscles and anything that is to be swallowed or that will pierce the skin.
We should also consider whether, in some situations, it might be emotional support we are seeking. Dr Sarah McKay, a neuroscientist and mother of two who has studied online wellness gurus notes that they often provide this role.