Our partner in medical issues, Network Globalhealth, founded a new network 3 years ago, the Network Extended Medicine. In a series of articles for a magazine, the network’s advisor, Volker Schrader, a qualified educationalist and psychologist, explained why such a network makes sense. In the foreground of his pleas is the confrontation between orthodox medicine and alternative medicine.
The A Beautiful Health Blog has asked to be allowed to publish this series as well. Although it is actually written for health professionals, we think it is very important for you as a reader, because it addresses many different issues of modern medicine that every reader should actually be informed about before visiting a doctor.
Orthodox medicine versus alternative medicine. What is actually behind it?
A medical-sociopolitical plea
Volker Schrader
Introduction
For decades, a seemingly relentless battle between two competing systems has been raging in the public sphere, promoted by various media and opinion leaders. As a matter of course, this public discourse and dispute is conducted in the media about the advantages and disadvantages of two types of medicine, without once shedding light on the real meaning and genesis of these linguistic creations. This article is intended to help look behind the hidden motives of both sides, to discover their causal connections and to make a proposal that resolves this apparent division.
The battle of the systems
The “official” or orthodox medicine – that is, the doctors and health professionals who practise medicine within the framework of a social health policy (this includes licences, registrations, fees, health insurance companies, examinations and training, professional associations, etc.) – has never given itself such a title.
It has received this designation from an “alternative movement” with a negative evaluative connotation. The protagonists of this group call themselves alternative (i.e. opposite) and often think they are something better. I myself have been to many “alternatives” and have experienced this impetus throughout. It is also necessary, otherwise no one would have to go to the “alternatives”.
This supposed ideological struggle over the “right” way to understand health and illness and their therapies – including all immanent evaluations – belongs to the social-scientific subject area just like morality, ethics and the science-theoretical discourses on systems theory, truth criteria, Aristotelian logic or Newtonian mechanics that are paradigmatic for medicine.
But are there really only these polarities in these contexts?
And if not, how did the present factional formations come about?
Just as clerics guilty of abuse cannot bring Christianity into question or cases of corruption into question democracy as a form of society, irresponsibility and its consequences among individual alternative practitioners cannot bring this field of medicine into question, just as the 20,000 deaths as a result of malpractice or wrong treatment within the official health system cannot bring the health policy of democracies into question.
This is not to say that further development work does not or should not be done on both models.
Medicine as a commodity – the veiled connection
The ideological dispute over these issues hides and obscures the real background, which is – as always – economic.
On the one hand, this is about the unavoidable, but not conducive to the object of medicine, connection of pharmaceutical and technological corporations with the health system and the legions of lobbyists who enforce their interests in health policy and professional associations not on the basis of the principle of health, but of returns and profits. The main maxim here is: Everything that is cheap is to be demonised, because it does not satisfy the shareholders. All medical faculties are also dependent on the goodwill of these financiers. Research funds are invested or not according to profit interests.
There is nothing to be earned from traditional Chinese medicine (at most from further training), there are no licences lurking there, because they have been around for thousands of years. So: that’s ancient nonsense.
In the context of this problem in the context of health policy, democratic controls and regulations would be necessary here, otherwise health will fall by the wayside or in the wallet.
On the other hand, the “alternatives” work on the same economic basis. They too are concerned with existence, with profit, only at a lower level. However, this usually includes the inconvenience of a larger bill for the patient. By definition, the “alternatives” are forced by competition to sell something different, otherwise all patients could stay with their family doctor. This something different is supposed to provide better, more humane, holistic medicine and its therapeutic tools. This is what is being sold, whether it is true or not.
When medicine becomes a commodity, it gives rise to some alarming scurrilities.
Extended Medicine – World medicine with an inexhaustible historical reservoir
So what is “medicine” as a science of diseases and the resulting therapies without being bound to economic and ideological interests?
The richness of medicine consists in the synthesis of experience and knowledge since the beginning of mankind. In this long period of time, it has discovered and applied both energetic, naturopathic, pharmaceutical, surgical and physiological knowledge.
The healing effects of the shamans belong to energetic therapy as well as acupuncture, homeopathy, parts of kinesiology and neural therapy, and naturopathy also belongs to the means of the shamans, TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) and especially monastic medicine. So all this was and is historically official medicine. Modern medicine builds on this, not only theoretically but also in its practice: many university-trained doctors prescribe fennel cough syrup, acupuncture and administer Arnica in homeopathic doses for bruises and injuries. Discrimination is only done in the ideological battle factories by the lobbyists and manic do-gooders.
Modern medicine has produced wonderful tools and methods. It cannot yet cure chronic diseases because it has lost the understanding of the overall context due to its fragmentation in specialist medicine – also in the departments of the universities.
Therefore, one must consider a multitude of findings and methods from the history of medicine, naturopathy and pharmacology as meaningful enrichment.
On this level, in reality, there is no issue of dispute to be discovered.
Here is a good example: It is about our common drug aspirin. The main active ingredient is willow bark, which has been used at least since ancient medicine. After salicylic acid was produced in a preliminary stage, it was thrown into acetic anhydride and the more effective substance acetylsalicylic acid was produced. What a paradox: Today, people are once again thinking about treating pain with the synergistically acting 50,000 different active substances of willow bark!
For this reason, and because modern medicine cannot afford to forget historical knowledge, the Network Globalhealth proposes the term “Extended Medicine” as a synthesis of all the achievements of the human family in the field of medicine that does not require exclusion.
The energetic forms of therapy including the placebo effect are indisputably successful. If they were not, no one would get upset about them and polemicise against them.
Their problem is verification and still uncontrolled application. Nobody knows exactly, because energy and spirit are not measurable, what happens and how it has to be dosed. We are also in the realm of the quantum world.
Some premises – arising from the current knowledge about systemic connections – should be taken into account in Extended Medicine: Energetic therapy should never be used in the same way as allopathy, because it affects the patient’s self-healing powers and this needs to be adapted to the individual. Standards are counterproductive here and lead into therapeutic error. Energetic interventions are not trifles, but highly effective. This requires experience that freshly qualified alternative practitioners have just as little of as the graduates of an increasingly thoroughly technologised medical business.
Unfortunately, these are claims that a necessarily functioning mass medicine cannot responsibly make. But is it not an indictment of educational institutions and scientific research that they do not engage in research into these procedures, but instead run more and more uncritically into the arms of the pharmaceutical industry?
Medical science does not need inquisitors, nationalists, separatists, racists and rabble-rousers like the Church, which also rehabilitated Galileo only hundreds of years later, it needs the common, synergetic effort for the survival of humanity through holistic medicine. We have the current pandemic to thank for this realisation at least.
Conclusion
Controversies about the further path of research into medical interrelationships are important and necessary; they do not require economically determined arguments and the ideologically determined exclusion of other positions. Medical knowledge must and will continue to develop, because only through the further gain of knowledge can the synergies be generated that can counteract a society that is becoming increasingly ill.
Author
Volker Schrader is a qualified educationalist and psychologist. He has advised the Network Globalhealth on its strategic orientation since its foundation in 2003.
Further information can be found here: www.network-globalhealth.com