Alternative Medicine

An American woman goes to the doctor and is diagnosed with cancer. She is prescribed chemotherapy treatment and begins it immediately. "This is what I must do to get better," she thinks. A woman in China goes to the doctor and is diagnosed with cancer. She is prescribed a strong herbal tea and weekly acupuncture treatments beginning immediately. "This is what I must do to get better," she thinks. Medicinal practices vary greatly throughout different regions of the world and different time periods. While biomedicine, or the study of biology and chemistry for medical understanding, have opened up doors in medical possibilities such as pharmaceuticals and surgical advancements, there are a great deal of people around the world who do not use biomedicine and are effectively healed by their own healing practices from the same ailments and diseases that are dealt with in the west, such as cancer, depression, and childbirth complications. According to my studies in the class “Culture, Health, and Healing in East Asia” with professor Nicholas Bartlett at Columbia University, healing mostly takes place by the patient believing that the practice used to cure them will, indeed, work. In the Western world, biomedicine, pills, and surgery are believed to be what heals a person. In China, Traditional Chinese Medicine, acupuncture, tea, and Qi yoga is what heals. In the South American Cuna tribe, shamanistic practices of ritual storytelling and dance are effective to heal (yes, even cancer). How is it that all of these different practices all over the world effectively treat patients?

Harvard Medical School published an article on the placebo effect that opened up doors of understanding to the power of belief in healing. According to the writer Ted Kaptchuck, a placebo effect “relies on the power of belief, imagination, symbols, meaning, expectation, and persuasion,” (Kaptchuck 818). For example, if someone takes a sugar tablet that they were told by a doctor is a medication to treat their disease, they experience the same healing as if they had taken the medication itself. This brings into question an even bigger phenomenon: the power of the mind. According to Ted Kaptchuck at Harvard medical school, Stanford Anthropologist Tanya Lurhmann, and French Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, healing comes from a mix of specific and non-specific effects, but what is streamlined throughout is belief; once the mind latches onto the belief that the body is getting better, it will. As Professor Yerkes in the English Department at Columbia University said: “I was in the President’s House of Columbia University talking with 4 Columbia doctors (medical practitioners) and asked them how much “bedside manners,” are involved in patient recovery [i.e. positive thinking], to which they all responded: 95%-99%. Even our doctors are saying that the power is in the mind. When will the collective consciousness catch up?

Much of the beliefs in the power of the mind’s ability to heal itself stem from an understanding of mind/body connection, which begins to explain why western biomedicine has so much disdain for the “placebo effect.” Biomedicine does not operate out of the lens of mind/body connection, but actually quite the opposite; “alternative medicine emphasizes personal responsibility,” while biomedicine gives patients a release from the personal ability to heal themselves. To the biomedical community, the placebo effect is something that gets in the way of testing the actual effectiveness of medicine; “discarding all placebo effects in a single trash basket of “untruthfulness,” however, diminishes our knowledge of important dimensions of health care” (Kaptcuck 817). This may be causing the biomedical field to misunderstand the significance of the placebo effect altogether. Kaptchuck says “dismissing a treatment as ‘just a placebo’” is the wrong way to think of the phenomenon (Kaptchuck 318). Why? Because the fact that the placebo effect is just as effective as modern medicine, that belief in medicine is just as effective as medicine itself is what is groundbreaking. If there is so much power in placebo, but biomedicine attempts to eliminate excess placebo effect, how is biomedicine so effective? According to Harvard Medical School, “perhaps biomedicine’s effort to eliminate ritual or placebo interventions itself may ‘provide a superior placebo'” (Kaptchuck 821). Biomedicine then reverses on itself; the attempt to eliminate placebo intervention creates more belief in biomedicine’s credibility to heal, which lends it to having one of the greatest placebo powers of all.

On the other hand of biomedicine’s attempts to repress the intervention of placebo effects, alternative medicine is thought to work effectively because of it’s enhanced placebo effects. Placebo effects can also manifest as something in medicine called “nonspecific effects,” which are things besides the designated treatment itself that contribute to one’s healing, such as “communications of concern, intense monitoring’ diagnostic procedures; labeling of complaint’ and relationship to the illness,” (Kaptchuck 817). In other words, a doctor’s understanding, sympathy, and attention serve as one of the agents that promote recovery in a patient. This is because things such as the doctor to patient relationship have what anthropologists call “performative efficacy,” or an aid in the belief that one is being healed (Kaptchuck 817). In many places in East Asia and South America, non-specific effects such as the patient-healer connection are enhanced for the purpose of allowing greater recovery. One way that this shows up in alternative medicine is in the Cuna tribe of Panama. The Cuna people’s way of medicine is shamanism. They have shamans called “nele” which are “considered innate, consists of supernatural sight, which instantly discovers the cause of the illness” (Levi-Strauss 319). For example, if a Cuna woman is having complications in birth, she will call upon the shaman who will sing a song; “the shaman’s song provides a mythic language in which the patient can express the inexpressible incoherence of pain and disorder,” (Levi-Strauss 318). He provides a narrative that alleviates the woman’s pain by understanding her struggle; this is a non-specific effect that carries a great deal of performative efficacy, leading to a full recovery. We experience a similar sensation of this in psychiatry in the west, where “there is no longer any room for myths, except within man himself...psychoanalysis is the patient's own personal myth” (Levi-Strauss 318, 327). Because of the collectively understood narrative and belief in the spirit world in the Cuna people, they have just as much if not more faith that their practices in childbirth will heal them as we have faith that our biomedical practices will heal us. If a woman in the Cuna tribe was given an epidural for her childbearing pain, it would have little to no effect because it is not understood by their collective unconscious that it would work. Considering that “native women of Central and South America have easier deliveries than women of Western societies,” maybe biomedicine should better promote non-specific effects such as a closer relationship between patient and doctor to promote performative efficacy in things such as epidurals.

Traditional Chinese Medicine also provides a non-specific effect that biomedicine doesn't: certainty of diagnosis. “40%-60% of patients may never receive a firm diagnosis in conventional medicine,” Harvard Medical School says (Kaptchuck 819). This causes “dysphoria of uncertainty” which can worsen health conditions due to fear and confusion (Kaptchuck 819). For this reason, many turn to unconventional medicine because it is “more likely than its mainstream counterpart to produce a precise diagnosis that matches patients’ perceptions,” (Kaptchuck 819). Unlike in biomedicine, “patient experience is never devalued or brushed aside as unreliable,” (Kaptchuck). In alternative medicine, the problem is always addressed by the acupuncturist or chiropractor; studies show that the diagnosis itself leads to faster recovery. In a study, 200 patients were at random given either a “firm diagnosis” or were told that “their condition was uncertain” (Kaptchuck 819). Although the treatment was exactly the same throughout, those who were given a firm diagnosis “produced significantly faster recovery,” (Kaptchuck). Alternative medicine shows us that even having a diagnosis serves strongly as a placebo effect.

The placebo effect, specific effects, and non-specific effects in Cuna shamanism, biomedicine, and traditional Chinese medicine give the mind a narrative to latch onto to aid in one’s belief that their body is getting better. I am again left wondering, why do we put more emphasis on the power of medicine to heal than the power of the mind to heal? Does medicine--specific and non-specific--serve as the middleman to grant the mind it’s power? What if people started to believe in their mind’s ability to heal itself and chose to do so on their own? Many bloggers on manifestation have podcasts that allow you to reprogram your unconscious beliefs so that the mind can be awakened into its power to self-heal. If the collective consciousness were to rise in self-actualization and pharmaceuticals became less frequently requested, doctors’ roles may take one of the greatest medical turns in western history. Instead of prescribers of medication, they would need to return to serving primarily as agents of non-specific healing effects, providing sympathy, understanding, and a narrative to describe one’s suffering. People have been denied the reality that their mind holds the power, specifically in America, where we are taught the mind and body are not even connected. It may have something to do with the fact that capitalist America’s economy was built on the back of the pharmaceutical industry in the 1800s and that if it was to suddenly crash today, so would America’s economy. Let’s not forget that John D. Rockefeller had a great deal of control over pharma, turned natural medicine into “alternative medicine” to aid in pharma sales, took over the American Medical Association under the condition that his curriculum be taught, and removed alternative practices from medical textbooks. The separation of mind and body in biomedicine could have stemmed strictly from a monopolist's capital agenda, but being that it is now what a great deal of our economy is reliant on, it is likely not going to be broadcasted for the mass public anytime soon that we needent rely on patented medicine for healing.

Works Cited

Levi-Strauss, Claude. “Conference- The Effectiveness of Symbols.” Freud Museum London, 17 Aug. 2018, www.freud.org.uk/2015/10/24/the-effectiveness-of-symbols/.

Kaptchuck, Ted J. COMPLEMENTARY AND ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE SERIES Series ... 2002, belmont.bme.umich.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/377/2018/02/1-The-Placebo-Effect-in-Alternative-Medicine-Can-the-Performance-of-a-Healing-Ritual-Have-Clinical-Significance.pdf.

Luhrmann, Tanya M. “Of Two Minds: the Growing Disorder in American Psychiatry.” Amazon, Picador, 2001, www.amazon.com/Two-Minds-Disorder-American-Psychiatry/dp/0679421912.