Columns

Hi everybody!

There’s a column that I meant to churn out during our spate of sexual sicknesses, but I’ve been sidetracked by other topics (poo is funny, don’t listen to housewives). This week I was determined to finish off the column about horses and thrush when I saw the ODT article “Therapy hope for young boy” (10/5/13).

For those who don’t read religiously read the Otago Daily Times while taking your morning dump, the article outlined a Dunedin man’s planned $15,000 journey to Hong Kong so his developmentally-delayed son could receive tongue acupuncture.

Now I do have the deepest empathy for the family of the boy in question – it’s an incredibly trying situation that nobody could understand from an outside point of view. That being said, y’all are fucking idiots.

There’s always a bit of a tension when complementary medicines get brought up in consults. The general resolution is that the doctor politely sidesteps the issue with a line like “it probably won’t hurt, but we need to know about it.”

The awkward thing with alternative medicine is that it’s absolute rubbish, but we can’t just ignore them as some do have an effect. Things like St. John’s Wort, ephedra and ginseng do have documented (mild) effects on a range of diseases and disorders. They also have well-documented side effects, risks and interactions with medications (particularly the Wort), which you won’t hear about from the hippie at Health 2000.

The problem with alternative medicines begins with the fact that they aren’t regulated. When you buy 500mg Paracetamol pills from Countdown, there are a heap of laws saying that the pills have to work, they have to actually contain 500mg of Paracetamol, and the side effects have to be clearly displayed. Alternative medicines are usually classed as “food” and therefore have no such legislation.

There are plenty of studies demonstrating that alternative medicines don’t play by those rules. One study from the Canadian Journal of Clinical Pharmacology showed that only two out of 54 brands of St. John’s Wort contained within 10% of the level advertised. Even more disturbing, an older study showed 85% of ginseng products contained absolutely no ginseng whatsoever. Ginseng is clearly the Ribena of the supplement world.

Coming back to our Dunedin berk du jour. Hopefully, as educated students, you realise that placing 40 pins on a kid’s tongue will not fix a chromosomal abnormality, but we’re comforted by the thought that it might. That’s the thing about alternative medicine: it comforts us. It paints a picture of a life without pills, drips, surgeries and appointments. It vindictively makes us pay $15,000 for the hope of a better life.