HEALTHY DOUBTS, Wallace Sampson - While his views may not be popular in Northern California, Wallace Sampson, clinical professor emeritus of medicine at Stanford University and editor in chief of the Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, is frank about his thoughts about alternative medicine. "It doesn't exist," he says. "We've looked into most of the practices and, biochemically or physically, their supposed effects lie somewhere between highly improbable and impossible."
Sampson has been invited by the Commonwealth Club to hold forth on one of the most popular alternative medical practices, acupuncture.
There are two major misconceptions about acupuncture, Sampson says, and both contribute to the misunderstanding of its worth as medical treatment. First, most people assume that it's an ancient Chinese cure that has existed, unchanging, for centuries. Not so, says Sampson, noting that "acupuncture was formalized in a complex way over the past 100 years, mostly in Europe and France and after the Communist takeover in China. Before that time there was no consistent formalization of acupuncture points or what each place was supposed to do. It was largely regional, and the thinking varied from city to city."
The other mistake people make about acupuncture, Sampson says, is that it offers specific cures. "It is nonspecific," Sampson says. "If it has the effect of, say, releasing endorphins through the application of needles, well, many things release endorphins -- a walk in the woods, a 5-mile run, a pinch on the butt."
Clinically, it has been shown that acupuncture can have counter-irritative effects. The basis for this is simple: If you have a headache and someone applies pressure through needles to your arms and neck, you get distracted from your headache. "It has no effect on disease process," Sampson says, "but it can affect perception of symptoms through these nonspecific devices, such as attention diversion or the desire of the patient to please the treater and feel benefits."
Sampson doesn't actually find acupuncture to be a very dangerous procedure -- although it is invasive, most people seek acupuncture for a known, nonserious disorder -- but he does say it's useless.
"I look at it this way: what if acupuncture didn't exist?" he says. "Would medicine or society be any worse off? If no one knew about it, nothing would change. You would still have ways to apply counter-irritation, through massage or rubbing."
But there are more dangerous aspects to the world of alternative medicine, Sampson says, starting with the wildly popular practice of chiropractics. In general, he says, one of the biggest problems with the whole notion of "ancient Chinese medicine" is that it falsely pits itself against "Western medicine." Sampson says these distinctions are useless; a more apt comparison, he says, would be ancient Chinese medicine to ancient European medicine, which share many similarities in their fundamental notions about how the body works. Western medicine, on the other hand, has grown up as the world rejected those ancient notions.
Sampson points to the Western ideal of "first do no harm" as a major difference in the approaches. "Some find Western medicine to be cold because there's no laying of hands on the body unless it's absolutely necessary," says Sampson. "But we took an oath. Physicians should not lay on hands or do something that doesn't accomplish its goal. Cracking a neck or a back, for instance, can do much more harm than good. You have to draw the line somewhere. "
Sampson has been invited by the Commonwealth Club to hold forth on one of the most popular alternative medical practices, acupuncture.
There are two major misconceptions about acupuncture, Sampson says, and both contribute to the misunderstanding of its worth as medical treatment. First, most people assume that it's an ancient Chinese cure that has existed, unchanging, for centuries. Not so, says Sampson, noting that "acupuncture was formalized in a complex way over the past 100 years, mostly in Europe and France and after the Communist takeover in China. Before that time there was no consistent formalization of acupuncture points or what each place was supposed to do. It was largely regional, and the thinking varied from city to city."
The other mistake people make about acupuncture, Sampson says, is that it offers specific cures. "It is nonspecific," Sampson says. "If it has the effect of, say, releasing endorphins through the application of needles, well, many things release endorphins -- a walk in the woods, a 5-mile run, a pinch on the butt."
Clinically, it has been shown that acupuncture can have counter-irritative effects. The basis for this is simple: If you have a headache and someone applies pressure through needles to your arms and neck, you get distracted from your headache. "It has no effect on disease process," Sampson says, "but it can affect perception of symptoms through these nonspecific devices, such as attention diversion or the desire of the patient to please the treater and feel benefits."
Sampson doesn't actually find acupuncture to be a very dangerous procedure -- although it is invasive, most people seek acupuncture for a known, nonserious disorder -- but he does say it's useless.
"I look at it this way: what if acupuncture didn't exist?" he says. "Would medicine or society be any worse off? If no one knew about it, nothing would change. You would still have ways to apply counter-irritation, through massage or rubbing."
But there are more dangerous aspects to the world of alternative medicine, Sampson says, starting with the wildly popular practice of chiropractics. In general, he says, one of the biggest problems with the whole notion of "ancient Chinese medicine" is that it falsely pits itself against "Western medicine." Sampson says these distinctions are useless; a more apt comparison, he says, would be ancient Chinese medicine to ancient European medicine, which share many similarities in their fundamental notions about how the body works. Western medicine, on the other hand, has grown up as the world rejected those ancient notions.
Sampson points to the Western ideal of "first do no harm" as a major difference in the approaches. "Some find Western medicine to be cold because there's no laying of hands on the body unless it's absolutely necessary," says Sampson. "But we took an oath. Physicians should not lay on hands or do something that doesn't accomplish its goal. Cracking a neck or a back, for instance, can do much more harm than good. You have to draw the line somewhere. "
