David Seidler wasn’t supposed to walk across the stage to receive the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for “The King’s Speech” during this year’s Academy Awards.
Seidler, 73, was supposed to be sick, bedridden or worse. Diagnosed with bladder cancer in 2005, Seidler most likely envisioned that he would not see recompense for “The King’s Speech,” a project he started soon after his diagnosis.
But before Seidler entered surgery to remove his tumor, his doctor noticed his cancer was miraculously gone.
Even more incredible was Seidler’s explanation for his cancer’s spontaneous remission — he imagined it away.
“I spent hours visualizing a nice, cream-colored unblemished bladder lining,” Seidler said.
I hold the belief that people have largely underestimated the power of the mind’s ability to affect the chemistry of the body.
However, Seidler’s cancer-curing imagination is too much of a stretch. He was not stupid for his actions, just hopeful and maybe desperate — understandably.
But this has not stopped people from claiming his recovery as a victory for alternative and complementary medicine. The U.S. National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine would classify his recovery as a “mind-body intervention.”
Alternative medicine is not a new phenomenon, as the techniques it employs have existed in many cultures for centuries. It was only with the dawn of conventional medicine that alternative medicine could be categorized as something separate.
The NCCAM characterizes complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) as difficult to define, but practiced by those who are not medical doctors or other allied health professionals — physical therapists, psychologists, nurses.
Most of the methods utilized by “naturopaths,” practitioners of CAM, have not been rigorously tested nor always adhere to the basic laws of physics.
Without skepticism, CAM’s main proponents, like U.S Sen. Tom Harkin, have expressed, “It is not necessary for the scientific community to understand the process before the American public can benefit from these therapies.”
Harkin’s logic seems sound, except it does not account for the fact that many therapies associated with CAM have not been tested for safety or credibility — and when they have, they’ve been disproven as legitimate treatments.
With the establishment of NCCAM in 1991 as an office of the National Institutes of Health, supporters of CAM hoped to institutionalize CAM and use actual scientific methodology to legitimize their concepts.
Unfortunately, NCCAM has spent more than $800 million since its inception and has never demonstrated any method of CAM to be effective.
I cannot help but feel that NCCAM still exists for reasons greater than the failure of government bureaucracy.
Americans spend more than $27 billion on CAM annually, and there is evidence that society puts faith into CAM because of the steadily growing distrust between doctors and patients.
Some have traded their primary care doctors for natural medicine specialists because of the suspected profit-seeking of doctors and drug companies, according to a 2006 New York Times article.
In fact, a study by Consumer Reports magazine for its 2011 issue claims some physicians contact pharmaceutical sales representatives 10 to 20 times a month, and more than a quarter of patients surveyed were uncomfortable with this practice.
Another source of strain in doctor-patient relationships could be the advent of the Internet and people’s tendency to self-diagnose, according to a 2003 NIH publication.
While it would be foolish to put 100 percent of your confidence in any single doctor, we shouldn’t forsake natural laws and medical physics to treat our ailments.
It’s not that I don’t like the idea of alternative medicine. It’s that I just don’t believe it actually exists.
As Richard Dawkins eloquently stated, “There is only medicine that works and medicine that doesn’t work.”
Chris Freyder is a 21-year-old biological sciences junior from New Orleans. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_Cfreyder.
 
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Contact Chris Freyder at [email protected]