Shiatsudo Blog

A few days ago, Channel 4 showed The Enemies of Reason – The Irrational Health Service by Professor Richard Dawkins. In his ongoing quest to make everyone in the world think rationally, this was his take on complementary and alternative health (or as he puts it “superstitious alternative remedies”). I have to say, I don’t really like Dawkins. I tried to read a bit of “The God Delusion” a while ago, but it just got on my nerves. Not that he doesn’t have something substantial or well thought out to say, just the way he says it bugs me. I should say here that my wife thinks he is funny, clear and convincing, but I find him condescending mostly; and although he likes to say he encourages rational thought and open, inquiring minds (though “not so open that our brains fall outâ€?), I always get the feeling that he doesn’t really believe any opinion other than his can possibly be correct. However, this is true of any devoted polemicist, and Dawkins is as evangelical in his desire that we should all embrace only Reason as many of his religious opponents are that we should embrace faith.

Back to the TV programme — no groundbreaking TV documentary format here, Richard simply wanders around visiting a few complementary health practitioners in the UK, asking them some questions and narrating a little in between. He “wants to find out why such superstitious nonsense is mounting a growing challenge to scientific medicine”. Immediately he lumps all complementary practitioners into the ‘against science’ camp. Of course you can find many that are in this camp — they don’t trust Western medicine or have been let down by it, but you can also find plenty of us who have the utmost respect for scientific medicine. I mean, there is no way I’m going to tell a client that I can fix a ruptured spleen or a broken leg, for example — nope — it’s off to A&E with you!

He brings up the autism and MMR vaccine controversy, but I think this is a bit of a ‘poisson rouge’ in the context of the show because it wasn’t complementary health practitioners who caused the MMR scare; it was a media frenzy that caused widespread panic among parents, who then chose not to vaccinate their children against terrible, but preventable, childhood diseases. I know lots of complementary therapists are against vaccines…I’m not one of them though. Herd immunity to these very contagious diseases is incredibly important, and if indeed, as Dawkins notes, up to 20% of our children are no longer inoculated for measles, mumps and rubella, we are close to being below the herd immunity threshold, which is not good for anyone.

Dawkins interviews, among others, Deepak Chopra, and takes a rather accusatory tone when he mentions in the narrative that Chopra is a one-man alternative-health industry, misusing quantum science as a marketing tool. I notice that Dawkins is no slouch on the marketing front himself, with a rather substantial website where you can even purchase T-shirts to proclaim your allegiance to Dawkins-inspired thought.

Dawkins is correct though. Properly controlled double-blind trials with peer reviews for alternative medicine have not been done. Often, trials or experiments in the field merely show a placebo effect. Anecdotal evidence, though plentiful, is not enough to earn the approval of the scientific community, because it does not adhere to their standards of repeatability. But even allocated sufficient funding , time and manpower, I’m not sure how one could set up a double-blind trial for something like Shiatsu. As I understand it, with drug-based trials, you must have groups that are given the actual drug and control groups that are given placebos and more control groups that are given no treatment at all. How do you give placebo-based Shiatsu? Or any bodywork for that matter? Even if we throw the TCM theory out the window and don’t work on any meridians or acupuncture points, the client would still receive a therapeutic massage, the benefits of which (muscular and mental relaxation and increased blood circulation) are well established in NHS-sanctioned bodywork such as physiotherapy. Also, to get a double-blind trial, in the placebo control, surely the person administering the ‘placebo Shiatsu’ should be equally unaware that it is a placebo? It’s tricky — I’m all for setting up trials, but I think it would have to be carefully planned. Not to mention expensive. And I don’t see drug companies beating down our doors to offer us funding. Incidentally, if anyone wants to fund a study, I will consider all offers.

I notice, though, that Dawkins doesn’t touch on Acupuncture or any bodywork-based therapy like Shiatsu or Tuina (the ones that I’m most interested in). Well, Marma massage is briefly mentioned, but I don’t think he really knew what it was. I wonder if that was intentional? Certainly treatments like physiotherapy are fairly well understood and accepted by Western doctors, and used everywhere from sports injuries to stroke rehabilitation.

On his visit to the Royal Homeopathic Hospital, Dawkins does raise the excellent point that complementary therapists give a lot of time and care to their patients. Usually they get an hour, which is far more than the average eight minutes a doctor can give to each patient in the UK. I touched on this in my post about continuous partial attention, and it really is important. But again, the benefits of paying holistic attention to someone’s problem are well recognized by Western medicine, in fields from counselling to psychology.

So, if clients are getting something worth their time and money from an alternative therapist, is it so bad that they and the therapist believe in an irrational explanation? This is always a difficult question. One the one hand people shouldn’t put up with irrational explanations, they should know why they are getting benefit, even if the explanation is simply placebo effect. On the other hand, how many people know the mechanism behind aspirin reducing pain? How many people even care? Perhaps to the layman it makes no difference at all. They only want to feel better as fast as possible so they can get on with their lives.

Incidentally, the programme offers two fascinating insights into Dawkins the man. Dawkins mentions, while interviewing Peter Fisher of the Royal Homeopathic Hospital, that if he (Dawkins) were a homeopath and was convinced that it worked, he would drop everything to try to prove the mechanism and win the Nobel prize for science……which I thought was an interesting look into Dawkins’ personality. He isn’t really interested in the individuals who pay complementary therapists, he wants the prize. And, while enjoying a Health Kinesiology session, the phrase that the therapist chose to focus on to heal Dawkins was ‘fear of being ignored’. Let’s check out that Dawkins website again.

Arrogantly, I hope he reads my blog.

If you missed the programme, you can find it on Google videos.