Why I am not an alternative therapist.

Hail,
First, some news from the world of science.

Have you ever noticed how gravediggers are such jolly, happy people, merrily playing japes upon each other and laughing all the while?

Me neither. But I was reading about the alleged (and this is all very experimental) anti-depressant effects of Mycobacterium vaccae, a common-or-garden soil bacterium. It seems, as far as such things can be determined, to somehow have some anti-depressant effects. It seems to make drowning mice less depressed, anyway, which means it may be a promising therapy for those of us who when depressed feel like a drowning mouse (paws up).

Now, this is obviosly a long way from us opening the psych wards and herding the depressed out into the fields, but I am reluctant to dismiss ideas like this. I have vague ideas about the number of efficacious, cheap, relatively safe therapies we withold in modern medicine, mainly because they can't get through the same set of hoops that, say, the latest product of the multi-squillion dollar pharmaceutical industry can. I have unclear images of the deeply depressed spending time sitting in the sun, psych ward beds like individual rooms, families instead of individuals being treated, therapeutic communities. That kind of thing.

But not the kind of thing you can copyright and run an advertising campaign on, so unless things change, some pendulum swings back, that's the end of that. We are left without alternatives.

I should stress here that I am not talking about alternative therapies in the commonly accepted meaning of the term, crystals and so forth. If by alternative therapties you mean stuff that has been tested and shown not to work, I am not a believer in alternative therapies. No harm to those who are, many fine people, etc. etc. etc., but there is a philosophical chasm between most believers and me that I suspect will never be crossed. The attached philosophical baggage - the whole romanticism versus classicism, the things alternative therapists say about nature, the mind and the self - I can't adopt that.

That's an ugly looking paragraph there, but I suppose what I am trying to say is that you don't have to be tin-foil-hat-wearing crazy to realise that modern medical questions and answers are at the very least distorted and at worst defined by a very sizeable medical/pharmaceutical/economic industry. The industry - and I don't so much believe in conspiracies, I believe in people acting in their own interest, influences the treatments and the illnesses that exist, who gets considered as a patient and what it is acceptable for a doctor to do, and so on - says what questions can be asked as much as what answers will be given.

Having said that, if you tape a magnet onto your belly-button ( I saw this last week, on a woman whose licence I had to take away), it won't make your knee get better any faster. I beleive I know this as much as I know what country I live in, or whether my wife loves me, or a number of other things. And if you sell magnets to people and tell them, or hint to them, or allow them to believe, that they are helpful, you'r not a doctor anymore, you're a charlatan, on the same continuum as those nineteenth century women who pulled muslin from various orifices in seances, or cold-readers who tell grieving widows that they can communicate with the dead.

And don't tell me "They laughed at Galileo, now they're laughing at my new remedy" stuff. They laughed at John Brinkley, too - when he implanted goats glands into men's testicles and told them it cured low libido. And it wasn't because he subverted the dominant hegemony of the pharmacomedical paradigm, or because he allowed the vibrational energies of the glands to cleanse the blocked tissue in a way inaccessible to conventional allopathic medicine, it was because his ideas were crap.

Anyway, my preachy detector just went off. I think I am defensive about this because a sizeable number of alternative therapists over the years have told me how close-minded and docile and unthinking I am purely as soon as they find out what I do for a living. But I have seen a young woman who never used contraception because her chiropractor told her she couldn't have children, and a baby born who would never walk or talk because of the herbs his mother ate while pregnant, and a friend of mine has seen - but I haven't yet - dissection of the carotid artery following chiropractic manipulation - i.e.: a stroke.

Anyway. Enough of this. We need meaning and healing and life, some of us at some times more than others, but trusting people who offer to sell it to us seems dangerous to me. But I better go off and be a slave to the dominant hegemony.

Thanks for listening, and sorry for being such a curmudgeon.
John