Alternative Medicine?
Though some therapies will become mainstream,
most will go the way of snake oil and orgone booths.
Excerpted From Time Magazine: Visions of the 21st Century - November 8, 1999 - 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 American
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.
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 a primitive and false 19th century beliefs.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 usage, they will begin making fewer trips to the health-food store.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.
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Legitimate medical schools - and most of them are - will dispassionately dissect the alternatives
and evaluate their effectiveness. In doing so, 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 preemptively 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.
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