Alternative healing under fire

Burrow through a copy of your favourite daily newspaper’s classifieds section these days and you’ll stare into the abyss of alternative “healing”.

Herbalist Prince Fahad Mama Farida wants to sell you a magic stick that will make you rich in seven days. Prince Wakho (sic) offers safe abortions and better pay, while Prof Dunga proffers good grades and no disappointments. Penis enlargement, return of stolen goods and “mutti to move underground and fetch riches” are just a few more of these wonderful “herbal” potions on offer.

But any puffed-up self-righteousness over such shameful exploitation of the weak, the desperate and the ignorant just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Just look what we the middle class are forking out for: tarot, astrology, psychic reading, channelling, crystal therapy, feng shui, chakra balancing, peace dancing, mindfulness training, angel card reading, numerology, scarab reading, sacred geometry, past life regression. The list goes on and on.

And I ask myself: now which one of us really is the ignorant, superstitious, pathetic loser?

I was almost tempted chuck homeopathy into the pot as well, no thanks to a book I have just read, an ugly little volume that turns the knife deep into the alternative health sector. Suckers: How Alternative Medicine Makes Fools Of Us All, is a nasty, sneering piece of work written by a venal cow called Rose Shapiro that pierces the heart of homeopathy and a slew of other non-orthodox treatments (chiropractic and Bach flower remedies are savaged especially brutally). As though orthodox medicine and big pharma stand on any high ground!

Homeopathy gets so thoroughly trashed by Shapiro that I am left reeling on its behalf even though I too am a sceptic. Imagine a treatment where the dilution of the active ingredients is such that there is a good chance that not a single molecule of the stuff is actually left in the tot of brandy that makes up the rest of the heavily shaken-up mixture. Like heals like? In Shapiro’s view, more like dumb deceives dumber. Her notes about the founders of homeopathy and chiropractic make you wonder whether the lunatics really did take over the alternative asylum.

Shapiro, however, makes a piss-poor effort to quackify Ayurveda, recognising perhaps that she is on shaky ground when it comes to trashing a healing tradition that is thousands of years old, but she does kick Chinese “traditional” medicine firmly in its crooked teeth, arguing that far from having a long history it’s really just a concoction of the Maoist period. She avoids any confrontation with nutritional medicine, thus saving herself from the venomous fangs of his Royal Vitamin-ness Patrick Holford.

Shapiro’s nasty little paperback left me angry and resentful. Orthodox medicine wins by default in this one-sided healing contest.

Can someone please come to the defence of homeopathy?