Complementary medicines modeling

Dr Halm’s remarks concerning homeopathy are very pertinent. They incite to call into question a lot of prejudices regarding this therapy. However we can go further and apply his whole reflexions to most of the complementary and/or alternatives medicines (CAM).

All the medicines (whatever conventional, complementary, alternative or traditional) have two faces: a scientific and a human face. That’s the combination of both faces which is fascinating.

Scientific research

A lot of scientists, doctors and therapists, usually by pure scientific curiosity, love understanding why and how a treatment or molecule leads to a therapeutic activity. To reach that goal, some experiences are settled, some models are created to reproduce the living in order to analyze and explain it by analogy. In different fields we know some studies examples which try to interpret observed activities:

*In occidental medicine, the medicine is relatively simple. It’s composed, between another, of an active molecule chemically known and we study its absorption, its distribution, its metabolism, its elimination by the organism as well as its action…

*In homeopathy things are more complicated. The medicine challenges the physics-chemistry laws. It doesn’t contain any molecule so it doesn’t correspond to any model. All the theories are exploitable and interesting. We know Dr Benveniste’s theory on the “Water memory” as well as, more recently, Pr Montagnier’s one who studies electromagnetic waves created by bacteria or virus…

*In acupuncture, “the therapeutic tool” is simplistic, the needles, but the demanded system, the meridians, isn’t recognized in anatomy.

*In phytotherapy, the medicine is a molecules complex mix. Sometimes we know a molecule family activity (alkaloids, anthocyanidols…) or a single molecule activity (codeine, epicatechol gallate…) but it’s very hard to prove the synergetic action of the whole molecules contained in one plant.

We realize that each treatment has its own specificity, its own complexity. So, we can easily understand that when a model is adapted to a medicine it may be not to another one.

 The fundamental research is essential in all the scientific fields. It leads to technical evolutions, reflexion, personal and/or community blooming, communication… However it mustn’t impede a therapy practice which efficacity has crossed the centuries.

B. Pascal said: “there are two excesses: to exclude the reason and to admit only the reason”.

Medical and human component

As we said before, whatever the studied area, any scientific theory can be exploitable and interesting, within its pertinence. Nevertheless, in medicine, an important parameter, the human, with its (physic and psychic) variability, like no other, can’t be neglected.

Nowadays, a medicine is considered as efficient when it answers to numerous statistical tests with a significant “little p”. These tests enable the extrapolation of a patients’ sample to a population. Upstream, randomized-double blind clinical studies are conducted to determine the therapeutic indications, the posology, the contra-indications and the undesirable effects of that medicine. Some of them permit also the introduction of therapeutic protocols. However, it’s interesting to notice that many CAM treatments aren’t validated by these statistical calculations.

In occidental medicine, a remedy is directly linked to a disease affecting a system (respiratory, digestive, cardiovascular…) and which different symptoms have been identified. The doctor prescribes a treatment, supervises the disease evolution and the symptoms disappearance.

In complementary and/or alternative medicines, the therapist prescribes a treatment according to the expression of the entire patient’s symptoms; he wants to find the ills deep cause. Each person being unique, each therapy will be specified to the examined patient. Then, the treatment will be adapted conjointly with the patient evolution and feeling.

The randomized-double blind clinical studies and the statistical tests never allow any treatments individualization, the doctor being, as said Dr. Halm, one of the two blinds. Their finality is the ratio Benefits/Risks determination which result must be superior to 1. All these investigations were created to validate the occidental medicine; they were adapted in order to ratify its credo “one treatment for one disease”. In this rational medical environment, we understand why the non-conventional medicines don’t pass the different controls which constitute the reference, nowadays. Unfortunately, these failures provoke, too often, a questioning of the alternative therapies efficiency, inappropriately compared with a placebo effect.

Most of the complementary medicines (homeopathy, traditional Chinese medicine, phytotherapy…) have crossed the centuries and the patient craze for this type of individualized treatment keep on increasing. Therefore it would be interesting and necessary to take this into account and to adapt the validation tests to their specificities. That sane approach will permit to open the medical debate, to lead the patient to be an actor of his well-being, to reduce medical expenses…

Dr Pascale Imbert