It is difficult to find a good book on alternative medical approaches. They generally split into (1) books by "true believers" (the most common) and (2) skeptical debunkers.
Here the author provides an excellent middle ground. She's happy to try out a whole range of approaches - "virtual reality" as a distraction from pain, meditating on a California beach, watching her heart pulse in a biofeedback machine, and even a visit to Lourdes - with genuine enthusiasm. At the same time she never loses her sense of evaluating what is going on from a standpoint of science, and sometimes plain common sense. This is also a very well researched book, with citations from Science to Time Magazine and from the 1960's to 2015.
She begins with perhaps the most startling finding, one hiding in plain site: that placebos give a sense of subjective relief so strong that it is often hard for "real" medication to do better. She uses this as evidence of the mind's power to (sometimes) heal itself, and in favor of alternatives to bring this out. The rest of the book can be taken as an inquiry into just how far this can go. She also begins with a common-sense hypothesis: alternative approaches can change the subjective experience (for example, chronic pain), but are unlikely to affect the underlying disease mechanism. She then goes off in search of evidence to the contrary, where alternatives can affect the underlying physiology. After all, she argues, it is known that stress has all sorts of damaging effects on the body. Is it possible that its opposite might have healing properties? She finds some...but very few.
Conclusions? They can't help but seem like cliches. Modern medicine ("Western medicine", she calls it) should pay much more attention to the human side of health care. The dominance of drug companies as funders of research crowds out other worthy approaches. Meditation-based approaches have promise to help with chronic pain and with quality of life in general. Poverty causes a huge increase in stress and consequently damages health. Longevity is aided by a strong social support network, and even religion. Society should view its elderly more as a resource - this benefits both. Lastly, many alternative therapies offer great promise - but caveat emptor. Nothing too surprising - but the level of detail and nuance provided give this book its value.
Readers should note that this is not a "how-to" book by a practitioner, but rather an outside evaluation by a science-minded research beetle who knows how to write, a willing participant who tempers her enthusiasm for alternatives with a hard science background.
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Reviews with images
Imagining A Ritual Partnership With Materialist Medicine
Jo Marchant's new book, Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body, reveals the gaps in current scientific knowledge as much as the knowledge that already exists. Much of the research she describes is tentative, suggesting findings that are not yet fully confirmed by thorough scientific study. It's an unavoidable challenge in her work, because her direction of inquiry confronts a materialist bias within medicine. Marchant always labels these initial studies as such, and although it's clear that their suggestions excite her greatly, she also gives appropriate voice to the plainly untrustworthy truth-claims made by faith healers and proponents of alternative medicine.What this book suggests, without fully exploring, is the possibility that some of the benefits of placebo can be purposefully integrated into materialist medicine, and not just in the form of sugar pills. Marchant considers placebo phenomena in a larger sense, as a tool for enhancing certain aspects of patient experience. Most exciting of all are her hints that the conscious ritualization of medical treatment could simultaneously improve patient outcomes and drive down health care costs. Constructing an experience of healthcare as a meaningful ritual, rather than as a cold transaction, requires minimal investment, but can decrease patient noncompliance, reduce dependence on painkillers and sedatives, diminish symptoms associated with patient stress, and improve patient perceptions of healthcare quality, protecting doctors and medical institutions from the threat of malpractice lawsuits.Marchant is plain about what stands in the way of the development of a positively ritualized system of medicine. The current system, which incentivizes medical staff to regard their work as a Taylorized assembly line, with patient interactions kept short and clinical, emerges as penny wise but pound foolish.Marchant skillfully walks the boundary between the need of conventional medicine to work with therapies based upon scientific evidence and the need of patients and doctors alike to be recognized as complete human beings rather than as objects that can be worked upon without psychological and cultural expertise. Her experience as a medical researcher with an advanced scientific degree enables her to reject the fraudulent claims made by homeopathic snake oil salesmen at the same time that she exposes the devastating blindness of the materialists who believe that medicine can provide effective treatment without deeper consideration of the practical consequences of how the practice of medicine actually makes patients feel.
Top reviews from other countries
Claudia Montserrat Hernández Salas
Un libro excelente
Reviewed in Mexico on April 21, 2024
Chris Southworth
Excellent book, well researched.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 26, 2020Leonard A. Barrie
An excellent review of role of caring in health care
Reviewed in Canada on February 28, 2018
