Dr. Peter J. Weiss

Today I’d like to talk a lit­tle bit more about alter­na­tive care. I talked to you about alter­na­tive care before, and today I want to talk about under­stand­ing alter­na­tive care and being com­fort­able with alter­na­tive care even if you don’t like the expla­na­tion or the the­ory behind the prac­tices.

And this is so com­mon, I think, peo­ple sort of want to try alter­na­tive care.  They’re work­ing up to it, but then they read more about it; they read about the the­ory and they say, “No I don’t believe that the­ory.  That can’t pos­si­bly work.  There’s noth­ing to it. I’m not going to do it.”  But, the prob­lem is that the the­ory of why some­thing works or the expla­na­tion is not nec­es­sary related to the effect of how things actu­ally work.

Here’s a sim­ple exam­ple: Sup­pose I believe that light is a liq­uid, and it trav­els in pipes in the wall.  And I believe that when you turn on the light switch, the light trav­els up the pipes in the wall, over the ceil­ing, and comes out of the light bulb and radiates/evaporates light into the air.  Is that true? Is that a good expla­na­tion of light? Prob­a­bly not!  But that doesn’t mean that the light switch doesn’t work for me.  If I turn on a light switch it’s going to work no mat­ter what I believe about how the light comes out of the fix­ture in the ceil­ing.

And so let’s think about alter­na­tive care that way, and let’s just take two com­mon exam­ples. Chi­ro­prac­tic:  Many, many mil­lions of peo­ple use chi­ro­prac­tic and are happy with it. The expla­na­tions for chi­ro­prac­tic are orig­i­nally related to ver­te­bral sub­lux­a­tions (which can’t be noticed on x-ray) that some­how inter­fere with ner­vous trans­mis­sion in the body caus­ing all kinds of prob­lems.

You don’t have to believe that nec­es­sar­ily to go a chi­ro­prac­tor and get help for your back pain.  In fact, many peo­ple don’t even care about the expla­na­tion; they just go to the chi­ro­prac­tors and get help.  So, the expla­na­tion and the effect are not the same or not nec­es­sar­ily even related.

The same is true, I think, of acupunc­ture, which is another com­mon modal­ity — increas­ingly com­mon in the west­ern world — that was really devel­oped in ancient China in a pre-scientific era.  The Chi­nese devel­oped these the­o­ries of energy flow (or Ch’i) in the body, along chan­nels related to merid­i­ans; and all of that define the prac­tice of acupunc­ture.

There’s no sci­en­tific basis for any that.  None of it can be mea­sured as far as we know, in our sci­en­tific world today.  That’s a totally sep­a­rate ques­tion than, “Will the prac­tice of acupunc­ture help my pain get bet­ter?” or help me feel bet­ter, or help me with my prob­lem.  And many, many peo­ple are accept­ing that acupunc­ture works for them.  It doesn’t mean nec­es­sar­ily that it works in the way that it has been tra­di­tion­ally explained for thou­sands of years.

So this is kind of what I’m talk­ing about.  Don’t get so hung up on the expla­na­tion that you don’t believe in, that you’re unwill­ing to try a prac­tice that might actu­ally help you.  Just keep an open mind.  You don’t have to know every­thing about how things work; you just have to know that they work. Just like, do I really under­stand elec­tric­ity or do I just know that if I turn the light switch, the light comes on?

A good exam­ple, I think from west­ern med­i­cine is this drug Lunesta.  You’re prob­a­bly famil­iar with it.  It’s the lit­tle but­ter­fly that flies around on the com­mer­cial while the lady is try­ing to get a good night sleep and the com­mer­cial talks about how Lunesta can help you sleep.  And at the very end of the com­mer­cial, the very very end, there’s this lit­tle state­ment, some­thing like, “The mech­a­nism of action of Lunesta is unknown” or “How Lunesta actu­ally works is unknown.”

Or, “We just don’t know how this stuff works basi­cally.”  So, this is a widely pre­scribed drug, mar­ket lead­ing drug, many many doc­tors are writ­ing for it, the drug com­pany is mak­ing it, the FDA has approved it, and no one knows how it really works!  We just know it helps peo­ple sleeps.  That’s okay.

Trans­fer that the­ory into Alter­na­tive Care.  We don’t know how all those prac­tices work either but they seem to work to help peo­ple. So free up your mind a lit­tle bit.  Don’t get hung up by expla­na­tions that don’t make sense to you.  If you think the prac­tices are safe and they might help you, open your mind a lit­tle bit give them a try.  Leave the expla­na­tion behind and do what works for you.