July 10th, 2009 
admin Though many of us looking to improve and maintain our health may use supplements on a regular basis, we often do so without any guarantee as to whether these alternative medicinal products provide any positive benefit at all. When it comes to patients with more serious diseases or cancers, the use of alternative medicines in combination with or as a replacement to accepted medicines becomes more risky. This is simply because the effects of these alternative medicines and the possible interactions with other accepted medicines is frequently unknown.
The use of alternative medicines often has a polarizing effect among people including doctors because while some trust the strong historical and anecdotal evidence for the effectiveness of the these natural medicines, others are not convinced until a full-blown scientific study is performed. One of the credibility problems associated with well-known traditional remedies is the effect of too many benefits being associated with a single “medicine”. Both the “old-wives” and snake-oil salesmen alike will often claim one hundred and one benefits to a given product. The thought process seems to be that if it gets rid of my stomachache, it must cure cancer too, not to mention eliminating wrinkles.
On top of this credibility problem, alternative medicines are usually made from readily available sources with that being how their benefits became known in the first place. This poses a problem because of the nature of the pharmaceutical business. Pharmaceutical companies spend large numbers of dollars to develop their medicines and to run them through the series of clinical trials to prove that they are effective. They do so with patents protecting their research and development to give them the best chance to make siginficant profits from their investment.
As a result, if there is no patentable research for a product, then there is no incentive for a pharmaceutical company to run through all the phases of clinical trials in order to prove that a readily available material has health benefits. Some other company would simply be able to start making the same product without having to invest in the research and testing. The net result of this is that even if an alternative medicine does show some inkling of medicinal properties, only limited efforts are possible to prove this.
This does not keep the public from getting these alternative medicines, but simply prevents them from knowing whether the products are effective since many companies still make a lot of money selling the herbal and other alternative medicinal products, but without officially stating the benefit that the product may offer. Though good for the sellers of the supplements, herbs and extracts, this leaves the public largely at the mercy of the “old-wives” and snake-oil salesmen for their information gathering, even more so with the advent of the Internet.
Although doing so with limited funding, a number of universities and medical research organizations are doing the hard work of analyzing some traditional and alternative remedies with the required scientific vigor of the same double-blind placebo-controlled procedures that the pharmaceutical companies must use. The double-blind drug trial with use of a placebo means that all the patients in the trial are given either the drug being tested or something like a sugar pill with no medicinal value. At the same time neither the patient taking the pill nor the doctor providing the pill know whether it is the real drug or not. This form of trial is the best at ensuring that nobody involved in the trial can manipulate the results.
As can be expected, many of the claims made for alternative remedies are being disproved, but some are showing value in treating specific conditions. In many cases, because of the baggage associated with some untested alternative “medicines”, researchers have a large number of tests that they can run for the various claims against a given “medicine”. The one good thing about testing products that people have been taking for a while is that generally, they are not highly toxic with a host of unknown side effects that would required lengthy animal testing. The unfortunate part is that these researchers cannot generally run studies with large numbers of participants because of the costs. The result is that the same trials must be run by a number of organizations in order to gain sufficient credibility.
So while mangosteen, green tea, grape seed extract, melatonin, ginger extract, lycopene from tomatoes, various antioxidants and resveratrol from red wine are all being actively promoted online in various formats to treat a variety of ills, the facts surrounding these possible natural remedies are taking time to develop. If it makes you feel good, there is nothing wrong in taking many of the supplements. However, if you have a medical condition, let your doctor know just what other alternative medicines your taking just the same way you would if you were taking the accepted medicines. It is also a good idea to support the efforts of the universities financially, because in those cases where the researchers do confirm the benefits of an alternative medicine, we will all benefit.
What alternative remedies would you like to see trialled to see if they are effective?
Related Links:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1293925
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_medicine
http://www.mendosa.com/bratman.htm
http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/
http://www.mbmc.org/healthgate/GetHGContent.aspx?token=9c315661-83b7-472d-a7ab-bc8582171f86&chunkiid=21805#ref32
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/53459.php
http://pt.wkhealth.com/pt/re/bjui/abstract.00002414-199805000-00016.htm;jsessionid=KVlbxnbJpmyhhwJc3CYywS7dyLLkbjlT3tGZy7Ln62JB7N5GjX0y!1109661354!181195629!8091!-1
http://healthlibrary.epnet.com/GetContent.aspx?token=e0498803-7f62-4563-8d47-5fe33da65dd4&chunkiid=21738
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1542356506008007
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7803619.stm
http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00654667
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