Varkala Beach and adjoining Papanasam Beach are places that inspire the faithful. Each morning while the fishing boats are still beyond the break, worshipers gather to offer puja, or worship, at the edge of the sea. Holy men set up ephemeral kiosks atop coffin-sized beds of packed sand and sit shaded by colorful umbrellas to burn offerings in memory of loved ones—for a fee, of course. Their customers include some women but mostly men clad only in dhotis who make their way to the ocean’s side with garlands of flowers or offerings wrapped in banana leaves. Here they briefly immerse themselves in waters reputed to have healing powers and scatter their prayers in the lapping waves.
Perhaps it is this atmosphere of healing and cleansing that has inspired the clustering of Ayurvedic treatment centers, resorts, and spas, which are concentrated along Varkala cliff. Visitors cannot walk more than fifty feet without encountering some business venture offering treatment, and barkers stand on the sidewalk handing out flyers promoting relief from every kind of malady: piles, insomnia, sexual dysfunction, hair loss, skin conditions, and even paralysis.
In the face of this rampant commercialism where cures for disease are aggressively peddled alongside tee shirts and statues of gods, it’s hard for me not to want to walk away from it all in disgust, including my scheduled two and a half weeks of panchakarma treatment later this month. But I don’t want to give up just yet; I came for the specific purpose of receiving this treatment, and I am too stubborn not to see it through.
Understanding that I can be stubborn, I have been questioning my beliefs about natural healing and how many of my long-held assumptions came into being. My grandmother used to ask her dinner guests to refrain from discussing sex, politics, or religion at her dinner table as these topics were likely to invite controversy and ruin digestion. To that short list I would add health beliefs, as what we eat and how we heal ourselves can be very emotional topics. There is nothing more personal than how we take care of our bodies, and in this age of diminishing religious faith, health and dietary practices seem almost to have taken the place of theism.
My fascination and sometimes blind acceptance of natural medicine can be traced to my mother and her siblings’ beliefs in alternative healing, which ran counter to the conventional beliefs held by the older generations in my family where many of the men were doctors. The relatives of mine who rejected, to a greater or lesser extent, conventional medicine, were also children of the sixties, when the counter culture embraced natural remedies over the conventional medicine of their parents. One sibling became a chiropractor, one became a psychologist (which was on par with becoming a snake handler in my family), one studied herbology and Mayan uterine massage, and my mother turned vegetarian in her teens and advocated natural foods, vitamins, and alternative healing remedies all her life. I was raised drinking goat’s milk and remember arguing with a science teacher when I was fifth grade that non-organic vegetables had been robbed of their nutrient value and thus we needed to use vitamins as supplements (both my mother and the teacher have later been vindicated; studies have shown organic vegetables to have higher nutrient values but also that vitamin supplements are not necessary unless the diet is extremely poor).
Realizing the foundation for my beliefs has made it easier for me to let go of them, or at least to evaluate them non-sentimentally. But there are lots of reasons that people have for believing in alternative healing modalities aside from growing up in a family of conservative Republican doctors. Here are a few that I have culled from a book I read recently called Trick or Treatment (Simon Singh & Edzard Ernst, M.D), which seeks to examine the scientific evidence behind many modalities of natural healing, including widely accepted therapies like acupuncture and chiropracty.
Doctors
Motivated either out of ignorance of the lack of scientific evidence, laziness in wanting to give patients “something” to hold them over until nature heals the problem, or in hopes that the placebo effect will help the patients, doctors are one reason the authors give for people believing in unproven therapies. I have had doctors recommend homeopathic remedies to me on several occasions, and I’m not just talking about some shady quack at an emergency medical clinic (a “doc in a box”), I am talking about doctors from respected healthcare networks in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Similarly, in the UK, either from the reasons cited above or for its fondness for alternative therapies encouraged by Prince Charles, roughly half of all practicing doctors had arranged for acupuncture sessions for their patients according to a 2002 British Medical Association report.
The Media
The book brought up a particularly painful example of how the media is quick to cover sensationalist alternative medical “cures” with lack of proper investigative reporting into the scientific studies underlying them. In 1993, 60 Minutes ran a program called “Sharks Don’t Get Cancer” which reported on the promising possibility of shark cartilage as a miracle cure for cancer. This program aired at the time just after my grandmother had been diagnosed with cervical cancer, and my uncle encouraged her to buy and drink the expensive supplement as part of her daily routine. She hated it, but she was dying, so someone got rich off her desperation. Luckily she did not eschew conventional cancer treatments, so she got a few more years after a grim diagnosis.
The World Health Organization
The widely respected WHO has published two studies over the years upholding the efficacy of acupuncture despite there being no definitive scientific trials: Acupuncture: the WHO view (1979); and Acupuncture: Review and analysis of reports on controlled clinical trials (2003).
For the second report, the WHO took into consideration almost every trial ever conducted, which seems like a good thing on first impression, but the quality of those trials varied widely. The organization also took into consideration many sub-par Chinese trials which were almost always positive as the validation of acupuncture in China is politically motivated and negative studies are often unpublished. Further, the WHO panel evaluating the paper did not include a single critic of acupuncture.
It is these papers and their frequent citation that have led me, as one of many, to believe in the validity of a treatment despite the fact that it has not been backed up by trustworthy clinical trials. Throw in the fact that major insurance companies cover these treatments, and it is natural to assume this modality is valid.
The argument from practitioners of natural healing is that research into conventional medicines is influenced by money from pharmaceutical companies who strive only to increase their stock price at the risk of the health of those they profess to serve. We have all seen the drug commercials with the happy narrator’s voice reading through a list of side effects which are often more serious than the disease, and then later the commercials that advertise for prior users to join class action suits after the “miracle drugs” are pulled from the market.
Similarly, there are plenty of examples from academia where egos got in the way of new theories that undermined long held beliefs. Read Sapolsky’s excellent book Behave for a short history of the struggle in neuroscience circles for acceptance that the brain can change after birth, which is now the commonly held understanding.
Even if our professional reputations are not tied to our beliefs, it’s still hard to let go of them. They make us who we are, in many ways, and it takes a healthy ego let go of what no longer makes sense. It’s also very difficult to know what exactly is the “truth” when scientific findings are either supported or undermined by new evidence on a regular basis because, well, it’s science. I just read in the New York Times that fish oils are no longer believed to help with heart conditions despite prior studies showing the reverse and millions of dollars being spent on this supplement (which still may help with depression and other ailments, but that will take further study). Sometimes it makes me want to pull out my hair in frustration, but I will have to resist the urge—I don’t think the Ayurvedic clinic down the street can help me grow it back.
