Buddhism and Alternative Medicine

An article by David Freedman at The Atlantic, unfortunately titled "The Triumph of New-Age Medicine," got me thinking about alternative medical therapies and their connections to Buddhism. (I say "unfortunately" because I think it's intellectually sloppy to shovel everything that is not Western Rational Materialist Orthodoxy into the "New Age" box, but that's another rant.)

Reiki seems to have some connection to Zen, although I don't know precisely what that connection is. Meditation (especially mindfulness!) is being widely touted as a health aid these days. I understand traditional Tibetan medicine considers the three poisons to be at the root of many physical ills.

I have little personal experience with alternative medicines, but that's mostly because my insurance doesn't cover it. When I was younger I was very scornful of everything the medical establishment told us to scorn. However, these days I'm inclined to think that medical science doesn't know everything, and just because there is no known scientific explanation for the effectiveness of, say, acupuncture, doesn't mean acupuncture isn't effective. If people say it helps them, I believe them.

Placebo effect? Years ago health care experts realized that sometimes a sugar pill could be as effective as "real" medicine if the patient believed he was getting "real" medicine. But instead of investigating how a patient's beliefs and thoughts could affect outcomes, the experts treated placebos as gremlins of statistical noise that must be factored out of results.

Only recently have researchers taken a serious look at how placebos work. They're finding that variables such as the colors of pills and the personalities of the administrators of the pills make measurable differences in outcomes. They don't know precisely why this might be true, any more than they know why acupuncture or reiki might help someone feel better. But it's starting to dawn on some in the health care field that maybe the placebo effect could be a resource instead of a problem.

There's a lesson here about how difficult it is even for smart people to see beyond the limits of their assumptions.

Getting back to the Atlantic article -- one of the points it makes is that modern western medicine actually began when doctors learned how to cure infectious disease. Especially before there were antibiotics, most of the time doctors could do remarkably little to actually cure people. They could perform crude surgeries, lopping off limbs and cutting out tumors without anesthesia or antiseptic measures. They could sometimes find ways to relieve discomfort from symptoms. Then, if the patient got better, the doctor took credit. But often, medical treatment before the 20th century probably hurt more than helped.

But then came antibiotics, and that changed. Now doctors could diagnose a problem (infection) and prescribe a treatment (antibiotic) and, voila! the disease would be cured, often with dramatic swiftness.

So the entire medical establishment organized around the infectious disease model. "To a large degree, the medical infrastructure we have today was designed with infectious agents in mind," David Freedman writes. "Physician training and practices, hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, and health insurance all were built around the model of running tests on sick patients to determine which drug or surgical procedure would best deal with some discrete offending agent."

This approach works very well with some kinds of health problems, but not so well with others. And these days, our health care system spends far more time and resources treating heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and other illnesses unrelated to infectious disease. Yet most of the medical establishment has not re-thought the infectious disease approach of diagnosing an illness and prescribing a treatment to cure it.

But that is beginning to change. Integrative medical clinics that combine establishment and alternative medical practices under the same roof are springing up around the country. Some of these are affiliated with top medical colleges, including Harvard and Yale. The highly regarded Mayo Clinic has a Complementary and Integrative Medicine program "to help integrate appropriate complementary and alternative medicine therapies and wellness programs into the patient's overall treatment plan." These therapies and programs include acupuncture and meditation, I see.

Much of the medical establishment still thinks of alternative medicine as quackery, of course, and a lot of non-scientific stuff marketed to treat this and that probably is quackery. The interesting part of the alternative medicine article was, for me, the way people can be trapped inside their own assumptions. In this case, the assumption is that if the current body of scientific knowledge can't explain something, it must be a mirage.