Om or Aaah? Acupuncture or physical therapy? Meditation or talk therapy? Do you lean more towards wellness or more towards traditional medical treatments to feel your best? As Western medicine adopts more Eastern tenets the line is becoming fuzzier.
There is a booming business around wellness which encompasses a wide array of therapies and healthy living ideas. Many aspects of wellness are heartily sanctioned by the traditional medical community, but quite a few are suspect. From the relatively benign act of drinking green juice every morning to the truly eyebrow-raising coffee enema to cure cancer, medical practitioners are facing patients who are searching the internet for relief of symptoms often before they arrive in a physician’s waiting room.
Are we living in an age of hyperdiagnosis?
Critics of both the medical and wellness industries point to “hyperdiagnosis,” the over-diagnosing of symptoms that often clear up on their own with zero intervention. This can happen with well-insured patients in the medical field, but in the wellness industry it can truly flourish. ePatients can purchase various medical tests and treatment, only limited by their bank accounts. From genetic testing to blood, urine and stool, ePatients can track a wide variety of functions letting even the slightest flaw to come to light.
Wellness and the placebo effect
According to Josephine Briggs, M.D., Director of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, a division of NIH, the placebo effect has a lot to do with keeping the wellness industry flourishing.
She estimates that about 40 percent of the general public uses some form of alternative therapies, from yoga to meditation, from juicing to acupuncture and those numbers are higher for people facing a serious disease.
In an interview with the Boston Globe, she says, “The placebo effect is very strong for symptoms. It sometimes gets oversold for changing the course of chronic disease – it by and large doesn’t. This word ‘placebo effect’ is really a short hand for all the contextual factors that influence the patient and their interaction with the health care provider and the system. Context really changes symptoms.”
Is the wellness industry flourishing because of the placebo effect or because there truly are some good approaches in the mix? According to Briggs, “we start with a skeptical approach, but we think there are promising things hidden in this wide array of health practices.”
What do you think? Have you worked with patients who embrace alternative treatments for medical issues? Have you found some of them to be beneficial? If you’re an M.D. or D.O. please feel free to discuss if more inside our physician community.
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