The dark side of alternative health treatments

 "Part of the difficulty is, how do you regulate something that's so vague?"

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Out of AU but some very salient points,,,

Sarah Mathieson* just wanted the best chance to fall pregnant. So, she did what so many of us do. She researched her options, then visited a naturopath, who prescribed five bottles of supplements. And then, having developed joint pain, she went back ... and the naturopath prescribed another 16 bottles.

Dr Kerryn Phelps, a supporter of evidence-based complementary therapies and a former president of both the Australian Medical Association and the Australasian Integrative Medicine Association, treated Mathieson. "She came to see me saying she was feeling worse, terrible, achy, unwell." It turned out that Mathieson had ingested "toxic levels" of certain micronutrients.

Mathieson was one of the luckier ones. After stopping all of the supplements and taking a standard pre-pregnancy multivitamin, she went on to have a healthy pregnancy. But she is an example of a disturbing trend that Phelps sees in her practice: educated people – mostly women – falling victim to unqualified alternative health practitioners, many of whom they find online.

"They're inquisitive, looking for answers, not happy with 'Take this and go away' as an answer," says Phelps, who was motivated to write a book, Ultimate Wellness, in part because of her experiences with such patients. "They're prepared to invest time and energy and intellectual capital into their healthcare. But the question is, where are they getting their information from? In some cases, they're getting it from good websites on the net. And [in] some cases, from rubbish websites and unqualified practitioners."
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"It's not PC in our postmodernist society to get your simple answers from [medical] professionals, because that's paternalistic and 'giving in to the man'," says Ieraci. She says the online health gurus "make you feel empowered, because you're going against orthodoxy".
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"If we spent more time explaining medicine – and medicine's not really a mystery, it's basically plumbing, you know – if you can explain disease process, explain what you need to worry about and what you don't need to worry about, and just spend a little bit of extra time with your patients, then I don't think they'll go looking for magic cures elsewhere with witchcraft."

The dark side of alternative health treatments