The lack of regulation on alternative medicine makes it dangerous

By: Ahmed Ali

Essentially, alternative medicine is any treatment that is not part of conventional, evidence-based medicine, such as one would learn in certified medical schools. Canadians spent around $8.8 billion on alternative medicine treatments in 2016 and around 56% percent of Canadians tried at least one alternative medicine treatment in 2015.

I personally feel that a lot alternative medicine is flawed and potentially dangerous. Much of the “alternative medicine” world is lacking in scientific proof of effectiveness. To quote Tim Minchin: “You know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proved to work? Medicine.” A variety of factors make alternative medicine something of which to be wary.

There are definitely practices that fall, or have fallen, under the “alternative medicine” banner that have advantages. Marijuana, for instance, can be used to treat glaucoma, chronic pain, and seizures. Some meditation therapies can reduce our dependency on pharmaceutical painkillers.

However, there are many other alternative treatments that deserve to be criticized. One example would be homeopathy, a school of treatment dating back to the 1700s which holds that illnesses can be cured using small doses of the substance that caused the illness in the first place. Though many people will use homeopathy because it’s more “natural,” and it does have its supporters, it has been heavily denounced by various parts of the medical and scientific community.

“The concepts behind homeopathy defy our understanding of the laws of nature,” Consumer Reports quotes from their chief medical advisor, Marvin M. Lipman. Indeed, many of the studies on homeopathic medicine have found it to be dependent on the placebo effect or otherwise ineffective.

Conventional medical treatments have had years of testing and study, making them reliable. Antibiotics and vaccines, for example, often require up to 10–15 years of testing to be deemed safe for use in humans. But a lack of regulation on alternative meds means that many products, especially supplemental pills, can get away with containing useless to dangerous substances.

Many herbal supplement pills, due to their official classification as “dietary supplements” rather than medicines, do not face the same level of scrutiny on their labelling, which lets their producers gets away with failing to accurately report the effects of the supplements. For example, the herbal supplement kratom, popular in bodybuilding circles and already forbidden in multiple states in America, was linked to a case of pulmonary edema in a police officer in Albany this year.

The pills did not have pulmonary edema listed as a possible side effect. If they had — and if there were more measures in place to address the dangers of substances that are used medically despite not being properly classified as medicine — then these kinds of occurrences could be more easily avoided. Without those measures, one must be cautious about approaching alternative medicine.

Dr. Paul Offit, in his book Do You Believe in Magic? stated that “alternative medicine becomes quackery” in four ways: by “recommending against conventional therapies that are helpful;” “promoting potentially harmful therapies without adequate warning;” “draining patients’ bank accounts;” or by “promoting magical thinking.”

When people spend their money on ineffective treatments, relying on the placebo effect while decrying more effective cures, that checks all of the above boxes. While it can be tempting to think of alternative medicine as purer, more natural, and therefore superior, doing so is incredibly dangerous.