By Austin Reifsnyder
I’m sure many of you reading this
are wondering about the title of this column.
Back in the age of Harry Houdini, language was very different than it is
today, especially profanities. Many words
that people would consider non-offensive or even comical in today’s society,
used to be horribly profane barely 100 years ago! One of those words was “humbug.” In the late 1800s and early 1900s, “humbug”
was a phrase used to point out falsehoods, similar to the word bull…. well you
get the idea. So since I can’t use
modern profanity, I’m going to use funny 1800s profanity to get my points
across.
In the maiden voyage of this
column, I’m calling humbug on alternative medicine. Before we begin, you should know what
alternative medicine is. Alternative
medicine is any practice that is not standard in the medical community, such as acupuncture, aromatherapy, magnetic
field therapy, some forms of chiropractic and thousands more. Of the 50 people I surveyed, only 17 even
knew what alternative medicine was. These
alternative practices are not recognized by professional doctors, and are not
proven to be effective by the medical community.
There are many on both sides of the
debate. Those in favor of alternative
techniques argue that the standard medical community is hiding the
effectiveness of alternative practices from the public in order to make more money
for themselves. Although this is a
fairly logical argument, it is not to be believed.
According to a recent poll conducted by the
finance site NerdWallet.com, of over 21,000 physicians in the country, over
half of them said that if they were to go back in time and choose a career,
they would not have chosen to be a doctor.
The reason many of them gave was that the amount of money they made did
not outweigh the debt that had piled up from their medical school student
loans. This leaves the other half who
would choose to be doctors again. These
people are still plagued by debt and quite possibly a declining salary, yet
they would still choose to be doctors again.
What this tells us is that they really want to help people, and that
making money was not why they became doctors, and those selfish doctors who
thought they would be making money off sick people were sorely mistaken.
Now I know there
are some of you out there screaming, “Well medical science doesn’t know
everything!” That’s true, science
doesn’t know everything; but science is not exclusive. If someone has an alternative medical
practice that they believe works, all they need do is bring it to a lab to be
tested. If it works, the medical
community will certainly accept another method to help those in need. But until the alternative medicine
practitioners can prove their products work, they could claim that cat food
heals people, and there will be those that believe it and willingly pay
hundreds or even thousands of dollars for the magical cat food treatment. Comedian,
musician and poet Tim Minchin once said, “By definition, alternative medicine
has either not been proved to work, or been proved to not work. You know what they call alternative medicine
that’s been proved to work? Medicine.”
I could continue ranting, but
instead I’ll turn to a scary fact I collected in my surveying. There were 33 people that said they didn’t
know what alternative medicine is. Of
those 33 people, 16 said that they were in
favor of the use of alternative medicine.
Let’s stop and think about that for a second. People, who do not know what something is,
still somehow manage to support it. If
you go to an acupuncturist who doesn’t know what they’re doing, the best-case
scenario is you’ve wasted your money, with the worst case being you getting
seriously hurt. If you take away one
thing from reading this, NEVER support or refute something you do not know
anything about.
Well that’s it for my very first
humbug. If you stuck around this long, I
congratulate you and will reward you handsomely with a more exciting topic next
time. This has been your friendly
neighborhood skeptic Austin, signing off...
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