Alt Med Reporting, October 2006:

Window into a Dystopian Future

(October 1, 2006) This month, October 2006, it’s exactly ten years since my work began appearing in this space. Every two weeks since then, on the 1^st and the 15^th of the month, there’s another deadline, come hell or high water, whether it’s over the holidays or during a mid-summer’s doldrums. To date, approximately 400 of my original articles, interviews, thought pieces, reviews, rants, and commentaries have piled up – totaling well over one million words or the equivalent of ten-plus books’ worth of material. Fortunately, thanks to the Internet the dissemination of this output has not required the destruction of any trees or other living things.

Humbled by the quickening passage of time, I will resist for the present the natural temptation to attempt to take a comprehensive “look back” over the decade. Instead, a brief review – really all that I have the stomach for – will have to suffice.

In October 1996 I had been writing and reporting about health issues, with an emphasis on alternative medicine, for – gasp – about twenty-five years. (The landscape of the period when I began reporting – the early- to mid-1970s – today seems as if was on another planet entirely.) I also had a deep interest in, and since the late 1960s had reported a lot on, national politics, various artistic and literary figures, and popular culture, more often than not from a frontline, experiential perspective. I was therefore always looking at health and medical issues, and alt med in particular, from a vantage point somewhat broader or more expansive than the one held by most of the field’s practitioners and proponents, many of whom tended to operate in a more insular environment.

In 1996 public interest in and mainstream acceptance of alternative medicine was picking up considerable steam. Four years earlier, the NIH Office of Alternative Medicine had opened its doors and only six years after that humble and shaky beginning the federal effort would expand into the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM). Incredibly, by 2005 the NCCAM’s budget had grown almost 10,000 percent from the funding level of its predecessor office’s first year in 1992.

In the midst of all of this, my outlook in 1996, always tempered by realism I thought, was still hopeful in terms of the role that alternative medicine could and would play in the body politic. A lot of the reporting here then – the occasional controversies that always seemed to pop up notwithstanding – was about the expansiveness of alt med into mainstream realms.

Retrospective 20/20 hindsight, as is often the case, brings past events into a clearer, often harsher focus. What was going on in the mid-‘90s in fact was the willful modifying and radical transformation of alternative and unconventional medicine practices into “CAM” – complementary alternative medicine. (The use of the word “complementary” in this context always rubbed me the wrong way from when I first heard it linked to medicine in the 1980s.) CAM is an unproven, trendy hybrid, aptly describing the co-optation of legitimate alternative medicine therapies by the mainstream medical Establishment and their absorption into the $2 trillion-a-year American allopathic medical-industrial complex.

By the mid-‘90s alternative medicine’s early, charismatic, inspiring thought-leader-type proponents (many of them, like Linus Pauling, Ph.D. or Dean Burk, Ph.D., truly larger than life) had mostly passed from the scene or been marginalized and relegated to the backwaters. Meanwhile, the younger generation of self-selected leaders was allowing itself to be seduced and co-opted by the powers that be.

The acronym “CAM” says a lot – alternative medicine redesigned and rechristened as a safe, non-threatening complement or adjunct to the still dominant, hegemonic allopathy.

In the CAM era, the original, creative impetus shared by many early players in the alternative medicine field – including the commitment to a strong alternative paradigm based on primary methods of healing and a concomitant holistic philosophy – became seriously diluted and even forgotten, like a relic of some distant, scarcely understood past era, irrelevant in 21^st century America. In many cases CAM came to serve as little more than an Oprah-esque, feel-good PR/marketing strategy to help keep the Titanic ship of allopathic medicine afloat.

The complicity of CAM in the perpetuation of the conventional allopathic therapeutic model isn’t the only problem, either. The independent, pragmatic, quasi Libertarian impulse behind much of early alt med has given way to the acceptance and, in many cases, the actual championing of the grossly expanding and metastacizing Orwellian/1984/Brave New World business-government-media matrix represented by orthodox medicine. This model of Medicine, Inc., predicted to grow from its current 16% to a mind blowing 25% share of all domestic spending by 2030, includes unrestricted state-of-the-art databasing, monitoring, and control of the personal health care choices of 300 million Americans.

Every day now – literally – there are new articles, polls, reports, white papers, op-eds, editorials, and bills in the Congress and many state legislatures all proposing that we turn over all of our nation’s health care to some central government authority (state, federal, or a combination of the two). Intelligent and informed opposition to this seemingly inexorable historical onslaught, rapidly reaching a point of political critical mass, is not easy to find. People who are rabidly concerned about the government’s actions abroad and in the War on Terror might want to take a closer look at the home front, too, and try to consider, apart from their knee-jerk ideological biases, what national health care might really mean to our essential freedoms and personal choices.

(It is worth recalling at this point what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in a dissenting opinion in Olmstead v. U.S., 277 US 438, 479 (1927): “Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government's purposes are beneficient. . . the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”)

Meanwhile, as I have also chronicled recently, the HIV/AIDS meme has penetrated more deeply into the centers of our collective psyche (and economy) and presents another threat level of heretofore unimagined proportions to everyone’s (and I do mean everyone, the world over) personal freedom.

Ten or twenty years ago I still would have thought – had I known how things would turn out in the 21^st century – that alt med’s leaders would have been in the vanguard of highlighting and challenging these and other noxious developments that I have touched on. Instead, the leadership of CAM today usually welcomes the increasing role of government, sold to us using disingenuous buzzwords and bogus concepts like “universal health care,” “single payer,” and “health care is a right.” For with the hype come specific promises: The widely held assumption appears to be that CAM has grown so big and powerful in the marketplace (as well as in academia, the media, the government, and so on) that it will surely be included in (and its proponents will be well compensated for) any future plans for socialized national health care. (This was not the case in Hillary Clinton’s failed national health care reform scheme of 1993-’94 which would have criminalized the then pre-CAM practice of alternative medicine.)

A sane critique of, and a roadmap to help us navigate, the emerging dystopian statist future of American health care, alas, is not to be found in CAM. (One leading CAM group, the National Foundation for Alternative Medicine, in 2004 actually (and – sad to say – typically) went so far as to rhapsodize the Communist dictatorship of Cuba as a “model for alternative medicine.”)

Instead, it’s fallen to a handful of groups like the Institute for Health Freedom and the Citizens’ Council on Health Care (neither of which is a proponent of or has anything to do with CAM or alt med, by the way) to enlighten us about some of the unprecedented dangers that lie ahead.

I sincerely hope that what Robert Broadwell, N.D., a senior member of the licensed naturopathic community, said about his profession on August 28, 2003 isn’t true for the field of alternative medicine as a whole:

“Someone was asking me the other day what we could do to keep naturopathy alive. And I said, from my own perspective, you're talking about something that's already dead. Because it’s not being taught in a meaningful way in the [naturopathic] colleges today. They’ve become so preoccupied with their view of credibility that they’ve been willing to give up on all of the basic premises. So that is what is going to be a problem for a long time to come.”

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