Hood, Bruce - Supersense

Much of traditional Chinese medicine is based on essentialist and vitalist notions of sympathies. Pregnant women are advised to eat dragon-tiger-phoenix soup, which combines the energies of snake, chicken, and our old friend the civet cat. Yes, that’s right. If it’s not enough that we drink its droppings in our coffee and smear its buttock juice on our necks, it’s also a popular ingredient in a common Chinese medicinal soup. Civets may have the last laugh against their human tormentors. The severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak that threatened a world-wide pandemic in 2003 was transferred to humans by civet cats stacked in crates in the infamous wet markets of the Far East before being shipped out to restaurants. SARS is a coronavirus. It replicates by hijacking the DNA contents of a cell and replacing it with its own genetic material. You could say that a coronavirus substitutes one essence for another. How ironic that the cherished supernatural essence of infected cats was in fact a real and deadly virile essence with a one-in-ten fatality rate.

HOMEOPATHY IS ESSENTIAL

Modern homeopathy is equally a direct descendant of sympathetic magical reasoning and logic. Much of its practice is based on the publication of the German physician Samuel Hahnemann’s (1755–1833) law of similars: similia, similibus curantur , or ‘like cures like’. If your baby has a diaper rash, homeopathy recommends treating it with poison ivy, a toxin that produces severe rashes. For children’s diarrhoea, try a dose of rat poison. But don’t worry, the first law of similars was supplemented by the second law of infinitesimals, which states that the more dilute the dose the more effective the treatment.

Homeopathic remedies are diluted to such an extreme that it is unlikely that the liquid contains anything but pure water. This is because the practitioner adds the ingredient to a beaker of water and then takes one-hundredth of the solution and adds this to a new beaker. He or she then takes one-hundredth of that solution and repeats the process over and over again. A typical homeopathic remedy will be so dilute that it contains one particle of the original target ingredient in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 particles of a liquid. You get the picture. You would have to drink twenty-five metric tons of water for there to be a remote chance that you had swallowed just one molecule of the original substance. Apparently this is not a problem. According to homeopathy, shaking the solution ten times with each dilution releases the vital energy of the active ingredient, which imprints a memory trace in the water.

Needless to say, the scientific community regards homeopathy as supernatural quackery. 40It is based on holist, vitalist, and essentialist beliefs. Yet it is an alternative approach to health that is increasingly popular. In 2007 the United Kingdom’s Times Higher Education Supplement reported a one-in-three increase in applications to study alternative medicine at alternative educational institutes and a corresponding decline in applications to study anatomy, physiology, and pathology at traditional universities. 41Homeopathy is available through the National Health Service, and even Bristol is home to one of five NHS homeopathic hospitals, despite the fact that the evidence for the efficacy of homeopathic treatments is at best equivocal. Boots, the United Kingdom’s largest chain of pharmacies, once rejected homeopathy but today sells a range of homeopathic remedies. It also includes a full online educational course to teach children about homeopathy, holistic healing, vital forces, and why diluted honey is good for bee stings.

What is it about modern medicine that leads people to prefer to put their faith and the care of their bodies into supernatural remedies? For one, homeopathy actually works. It works because patients believe it will. On average, one in three sick patients will improve if they believe they are receiving an effective treatment. This is the so-called placebo effect. The placebo effect is the remarkable finding that people get better if they think that they are taking a medicine or undergoing some therapy even if it has no direct active ingredient. Every drug that is regulated in the United Kingdom has to pass clinical trials that prove it is more effective than the results achieved by placebo alone. No such ruling exists for homeopathic treatments. For example, in the United States, Nicorette, a chewing gum that helps smokers give up smoking, had to pass stringent clinical evaluation before its maker gained a license to sell it. But in the same drugstore you can buy CigArrest, the homeopathic equivalent that did not have to pass any such evaluation. It would appear that the regulatory authorities are more concerned about the potential side effects of drugs with active components than treatments that are not distinguishable from pure water. Anyway, how could you prove that any homeopathic remedy did not have the appropriate active ingredient? You couldn’t find it if you looked for it!

The placebo effect is very real, and if belief improves health, then should we be concerned by supernaturalism in our health care? After all, homeopathic remedies are just water, and most practitioners refer to them as complementary medicine meant to be used in conjunction with clinically evaluated treatments. If this enhances the placebo effect, so be it. The problem occurs when complementary treatments are believed to be equally effective alternatives. This was revealed in a scandal made public last year about homeopathic anti-malarial treatments. The London School of Tropical Medicine was increasingly alarmed at travellers returning with malaria because they had not taken conventional prophylaxis. They found that of ten randomly selected homeopaths operating in London, all of them recommended taking homeopathic preventive treatments alone. 42This was despite the recommendation of the United Kingdom’s Society of Homeopaths, which concedes that there is no known effective homeopathic anti-malarial treatment.

There must be other reasons why people reject proven modern treatments in preference for supernatural cures. Over the past decades, there has been a change in attitudes toward modern medicine. For one thing, holistic treatments consider the whole of the person, and in doing so alternative therapists spend much more time listening to the patients and their problems in comparison to doctors working to a time-sensitive regime. Patient satisfaction and significant improvement in health are directly related to the amount of time the doctor listens to the patient’s problems. 43Not only is a problem shared a problem halved, but the sharing often leads to significant improvement in health.

Another reason for the rise in the popularity of alternative medicine is that we are increasingly concerned about the advances in science and treatments that seem unnatural. Have you noticed how common the word ‘natural’ is in advertising today? In our so-called ‘postmodern’ era, we hanker for a return to a simpler time, and a preference for natural products reflects this changing attitude and anxiety about modern science. But what exactly is a natural cure, and is it less dangerous than modern medical treatments? It turns out that nature has many more natural toxins than those synthesized by man. In fact, much of homeopathy works on the principle of a tiny bit of bad is good for you. So just because a substance is naturally occurring doesn’t make it safe.

DISGUSTING RESEARCHERS

The supernatural basis of alternative medicine sounds like the sort of mumbo-jumbo confined to the unenlightened dark ages of prescientific societies. But we should not be so quick to mock those who seek such treatments. The same laws of sympathetic magic are arguably part of daily life for all of us today, and no more so than in the peculiar human experience of disgust and our fears of contamination. Our contamination fears reflect our reluctance to come into physical contact with things that we find disgusting. We may be able to fight the urge and overcome our disgust, but it can operate at a gut level, making it difficult to control through reason.