Nov 22, 2015

The dark side of alternative health treatments

Samantha Selinger-Morris
Daily Life
November 22, 2015

Why are some of us taking advice from "wellness" gurus instead of medically trained professionals?

Sarah Mathieson* just wanted the best chance to fall pregnant. So, she did what so many of us do. She researched her options, then visited a naturopath, who prescribed five bottles of supplements. And then, having developed joint pain, she went back ... and the naturopath prescribed another 16 bottles.

Dr Kerryn Phelps, a supporter of evidence-based complementary therapies and a former president of both the Australian Medical Association and the Australasian Integrative Medicine Association, treated Mathieson. "She came to see me saying she was feeling worse, terrible, achy, unwell." It turned out that Mathieson had ingested "toxic levels" of certain micronutrients.

Mathieson was one of the luckier ones. After stopping all of the supplements and taking a standard pre-pregnancy multivitamin, she went on to have a healthy pregnancy. But she is an example of a disturbing trend that Phelps sees in her practice: educated people – mostly women – falling victim to unqualified alternative health practitioners, many of whom they find online.

"They're inquisitive, looking for answers, not happy with 'Take this and go away' as an answer," says Phelps, who was motivated to write a book, Ultimate Wellness, in part because of her experiences with such patients. "They're prepared to invest time and energy and intellectual capital into their healthcare. But the question is, where are they getting their information from? In some cases, they're getting it from good websites on the net. And [in] some cases, from rubbish websites and unqualified practitioners."

Lately, alternative therapies have made front-page news. Jess Ainscough, the former journalist behind the globally popular blog The Wellness Warrior, died of cancer in February at the age of 30 after practising – and championing – a cancer-fighting regimen consisting largely of fruits, vegetables and coffee enemas.

And self-proclaimed Chinese healer Hongchi Xiao, who promotes his services on Facebook, made headlines in April when a diabetic seven-year-old Sydney boy, Aiden Fenton, died after attending one of Xiao's "slapping therapy" workshops. (Patients are slapped, often to the point of bruising, to "unblock poisons".)

Why are some of us taking advice from "wellness" gurus instead of medically trained professionals? Especially when so many of these gurus give advice that is, at the very least, highly suspect?

Dr Sue Ieraci, an emergency physician and executive member of Friends of Science in Medicine, a body that opposes scientifically unproven alternative health treatments, thinks many online wellness gurus garner huge followings because they make people feel powerful.

"It's not PC in our postmodernist society to get your simple answers from [medical] professionals, because that's paternalistic and 'giving in to the man'," says Ieraci. She says the online health gurus "make you feel empowered, because you're going against orthodoxy".

People who are struggling with illnesses that don't have a cure are particularly vulnerable. Like the followers of Kerri Rivera, an American woman who advocates, online and in her book Healing the Symptoms Known as Autism, the use of bleach enemas to "recover" children from autism. She believes that chlorine dioxide, an industrial bleaching agent, destroys the parasites that "cause" the condition. There is no medical basis for her beliefs and the FDA in the United States warns that it has the potential to cause nausea, severe vomiting and life threatening drops in blood pressure.

"People who are really struggling with those behavioural difficulties, it must be really challenging, so they're looking for someone to validate their struggle and give them something to blame," says Ieraci of the parents who follow gurus like Rivera.

"If you look at a lot of those sites, they're very good at courting them, saying how brave they are, and that they're the only people who don't believe the 'sheepol' – that's people who are sheep because they believe what they've heard [from mainstream medicine]."

Two years ago, a 55-year-old Brisbane man burnt a potentially fatal hole the size of a golf ball into the side of his head after he used a corrosive herbal treatment known as "black salve" – a paste often made from bloodroot and zinc chloride that is marketed as being able to "draw out" cancer – that is sold online as an alternative cancer remedy.

Phelps, who has treated patients who have used black salve, says "they're telling people what they want to hear, that they don't have to go through chemo or radiotherapy. And, to be honest, who wouldn't be terrified by the prospect of chemotherapy or radiotherapy?"

Dr Robert Walters, a Hobart GP, says Australia's medical culture is partly to blame for the current trend.

"Alternative practitioners ... often give the patient more time," says Walters, who has treated patients whose health has been made worse by seeing unqualified health practitioners. "This is where the medical profession has probably got to look at itself a little bit, because we're so busy, rushed, consultations are so short.

"If we spent more time explaining medicine – and medicine's not really a mystery, it's basically plumbing, you know – if you can explain disease process, explain what you need to worry about and what you don't need to worry about, and just spend a little bit of extra time with your patients, then I don't think they'll go looking for magic cures elsewhere with witchcraft."

Compounding these issues is the fact that alternative practitioners are largely unregulated. Chinese medicine practitioners, osteopaths and chiropractors are the only alternative health therapists required to be registered with the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA). The rest are accountable to no one particular body.

There are government departments and agencies, both state and federal, that can handle complaints, including the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), and the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA). But red tape and a lack of resources – in 2013-14 the ACCC fielded 202,363 complaints (not all health-related), with just 27 prosecutions – means they are difficult to shut down.

It took authorities six years to stop Homeopathy Plus!, a company based on the NSW Central Coast, from selling a homeopathic whooping cough "vaccine". In October, the company and its director, Frances Sheffield, were banned from selling the products for five years by the Federal Court and ordered to pay fines totalling $138,000.

But this came after years of various orders and requests by the ACCC and the TGA. In one instance, Sheffield refused to publish a retraction regarding the claims she made on her website about the homeopathic vaccine, stating that she was not "advertising" but rather "providing evidence" about the company's homeopathic treatments.

Sheffield still features a section on her website called "Reversing Autism", with testimonies from parents who describe how their children's autism was cured with homeopathy. ("Melissa went from zero words to almost 50 in one day!" one parent writes.)

But people cannot be prosecuted for stating a scientifically unproven belief. "It's a little like trying to regulate religion, in a sense," says Adelaide-based lawyer Mal Byrne.

"Part of the difficulty is, how do you regulate something that's so vague?"

Byrne would know. Fourteen of his clients sued South Australian homeopath Monika Milka three years ago for allegedly infecting them with bacteria and permanently scarring them after she treated them with "biomesotherapy". This involved injecting saline solution and other substances under their skin. One client opted for the treatment to remedy arthritic pain. Others did so to boost a "general feeling of wellness". What they got instead were shame and isolation.

"You know, they were embarrassed," says Byrne. "A lot of them had to cover [their scarred skin]." Some clients needed antibiotics for years to eradicate the infection and were afraid to touch their children in case they infected them.

Milka denied the claims in court through her lawyer. She later settled with all 14 out of court but continues to work as a homeopath. In October, she published a claim on her Facebook page that her "Wellness Tonic" rid her late mother of cancer after chemotherapy failed to do so. This, says Byrne, is a "flagrant breach" of both the South Australian Code of Conduct for Unregistered Health Practitioners and laws regarding misleading and deceptive business conduct. (Authorities are now reviewing her Facebook page.)

So how can we determine which alternative health treatment – and practitioner – is safe and which isn't, particularly when some alternative health treatments that sound wacky have solid scientific backing?

For instance, the use of fecal microbial transplants – when a healthy person's stool is inserted into a sick person's colon – was lauded in The New England Journal of Medicine in 2013 after a study proved the therapy's effectiveness at fighting the bacteria Clostridium difficile. (Infection with the bacteria causes symptoms similar to Crohn's disease, and kills 15,000 people a year in the US alone.)

And, although controversial, some laboratory studies have shown that combining high doses of intravenous vitamin C with chemotherapy improved the effectiveness of chemotherapy in the treatment of some cancers.

Alarm bells should ring, says Phelps, if a non-medical practitioner discourages you from continuing care with your GP or medical specialist. People should also seek medical advice about any alternative therapy that carries even the slightest risk, taking particular care with the manipulation of bones and muscles and anything that is to be swallowed or that will pierce the skin.

We should also consider whether, in some situations, it might be emotional support we are seeking, says Dr Sarah McKay, a Sydney-based neuroscientist and mother of two who has studied online wellness gurus.

Noting that they often provide this role, she asks, "Who doesn't want a bit of mothering, a bit of TLC?" •

*Name has been changed.

http://m.dailylife.com.au/health-and-fitness/dl-wellbeing/the-dark-side-of-alternative-health-treatments-20151120-gl3v2w.html

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