- Position‹3 of 3
- Alternative medicine can cause serious harm
Millions are spent both on research into alternative medicine as well as the money spent by people on their alternative health care.
The argument
Alternative medicine can cause serious harm even to people who never take it, because of the scale of the money it absorbs and what that money is diverted from. The first channel is public. Under the pressure of public opinion some governments subsidize homeopathic treatments — for example by including them in public services — and fund research in this field. Health budgets are finite, so this is not simply an addition: allocating funds to homeopathy may mean the funds available for actual scientific medical research are reduced, and a reduction there is a reduction in the treatments that reach patients years later. The resulting harm to the general population is real but invisible, because it takes the form of research that was never done and therapies that never arrived. The second channel is the scale involved. An enormous amount of money is spent on researching alternative medicine. In the USA alone, since 1992 the US National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine has spent $2.5 billion on research, with no robust evidence to show for it. That last clause is what makes the figure an argument rather than a statistic: money spent on research that fails to establish an effect has not merely underperformed, it has been consumed by a question that repeated investigation keeps answering the same way. The third channel is private, and larger still. Each year people spend $9 billion in the US alone on their own alternative therapies — money that comes directly out of household budgets. In a time when many people cannot afford health care, that spending competes with care that is known to work: every dollar committed to an unproven therapy is a dollar unavailable for one that is proven. Money should be focussed on treatments that work, and on this argument the failure to do so is itself a harm.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Funding for scientific and homeopathic research do not necessarily come from the same resource. Normally there are sufficient funds for both. A government should not focus on a single approach such as scientific research, but use a more holistic approach that ensures no avenue is overlooked. CAM is almost impossible to research. To answer the question 'does yoga work to reduce back pain?', we must ask what kind of yoga? What kind of back pain? And what does it mean to "work" — to help someone avoid surgery, hold a job or need less medication? Some things — the body meridians that acupuncturists say they follow, or energy forces that healers say they manipulate — cannot be measured, and many scientists question their existence.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P2] This does not necessarily take money away from mainstream healthcare.