Mind Over Matter: Debunking Alternative Medicines

When Dr. Paul A. Offit published “Autism’s False Prophets” in 2008, he elected to skip the usual round of book signings. His defense of childhood vaccinations so enraged some people who consider them a cause of autism that he was getting credible death threats.

Others might have chosen to flee the public arena after that, but not Dr. Offit, the chief of infectious diseases
at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, whose appetite for the good
fight seems only to have grown. Over the last decade he has become a
leading debunker of mass misconceptions surrounding infections and
vaccines, and now he is taking on the entire field of alternative medicine, from acupuncture to vitamins...



His long “consume at your own risk” list contains most of the treatments
and substances composing the nation’s multibillion-dollar
alternative-medicine industry. The book’s subtitle may suggest that
“sense” and “nonsense” will get equal play, but Dr. Offit spends most of
his time discussing and dismissing nonsense. In fact, the sensible
treatments he identifies can be summed up in one short paragraph.

And here it is: Dr. Offit gives a nod to 4 of the 51,000 supplements on
the market: omega-3 fatty acids to prevent heart disease; calcium and vitamin D to prevent osteoporosis in postmenopausal women; and folic acid during pregnancy to prevent spinal-cord defects in newborns. As it happens, several months ago — presumably after the book went to press — an influential national task force
found the evidence for calcium and vitamin D to be unconvincing. So
that reduces the list of sensible supplements to two.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that the remaining 50,998 products are
worthless, Dr. Offit points out, or that acupuncture, chiropractic,
massage and other unproven procedures don’t bring real relief. In fact,
most of them probably work reasonably well, enabled by the extraordinary
magical powers of the human mind. Dr. Offit’s chapter on the depth,
range and power of the placebo response is comprehensive and convincing,
perhaps one of the best brief reviews of that subject to be found.

And with it, his discussion of sensible alternative medicine draws to a close...


The terrain is full of repeating patterns. Among them, unfortunately,
are the stories of children and adults who died of treatable diseases
because they shunned conventional medicine for hocus-pocus. Then there
are the public figures, often actors, who reinvent themselves as medical
authorities: Dr. Offit focuses on the hormone-fueled Suzanne Somers and
on Jenny McCarthy, a proponent of the vaccination-autism link and a
champion of dozens of miracle substances...


Humans wise and foolish clearly have a remarkable talent for deceiving
themselves and others — sometimes with dollar signs glinting in their
eyes, but sometimes with only the conviction that a smart,
self-confident person armed with the right potion should be able to
reconfigure nature.

www.nytimes.com/2013/07/02/health/mind-over-matter-debunking-alternative-medicines.html?ref=science