Testing therapies

So, we can see that CAM views a human being as more than a collection of physical (and psychological) parts. As Stephen Gascoigne writes in The Manual of Conventional Medicine for Alternative Practitioners: "The essence of alternative medical thought is that there is a vitalistic principle behind and encompassing any physical object", explaining that "vitalistic" means that there are "objects which are non-physical in part or whole". The vital force of homeopathy and qi of TCM are non-physical – it's impossible to see them, no matter how powerful an electron microscope was used. Qi and the vital force are ideas that are put forward to explain how the body heals itself.

From the point of view of producing scientific evidence then, we have a problem – as we can't detect the qi or vital force using the usual scientific techniques, then we can't directly prove or disprove the existence of them. Some modern scientists reject such vitalist philosophies saying that they belong to the centuries before we understood the biophysical nature of disease and, now that we have this knowledge, such theories are redundant.

This may seem to leave us in a difficult position as far as testing CAM therapies and their effects on people, but even though we can't prove whether or not the underlying forces that restore health exist, we can test scientifically whether they have an effect on the body. For conventional medicine, it is possible to describe precisely how the medicines act on the body's cells, nerves, organs and systems; for CAM we can only look at the effects that the vital force or qi have on these indirectly by seeing whether the treatments cause changes in cells and structures of the human body.

In 2004, Iris Bell and colleagues, in an article published in the International Journal of Neuroscience, described research that showed that the alpha brain waves in people with fibromyalgia (a painful disorder of muscles) were changed by homeopathic medicine. In 2004, Joos and colleagues, reporting research in the journal Digestion, studied patients with Crohn's disease (a painful, inflammatory disease of the digestive system). They found that lab tests of the guts of people treated with acupuncture showed there was less inflammation in their digestive systems than in the people who had dummy acupuncture.

As well as looking at the physical effects of CAM on people being tested, the effects of CAM can also be tested indirectly by literally looking down a microscope at the effects of treatments in a test tube, rather than a human body: a number of researchers have looked at what are called "ultra-high dilutions". These are solutions in which the substance that was originally dissolved has been diluted so much that there is unlikely to be anything of the original substance left in the solution. Homeopathic medicines are made in this way and sceptics claim they can't possibly have any effect because they're so diluted.

Despite this, when Belon and his colleagues reported research in 2004 in the journal Inflammation Research, they showed that ultra-high dilutions of histamines (which are proteins involved in allergic reactions and causes, for example, inflammation of the breathing tubes in asthma) are active in influencing human cell activity. Although their research was not on homeopathy directly, it shows that the types of dilutions used in homeopathic medicines can still be active despite appearing to have been diluted out of existence. So although it's possible to show that homeopathy and acupuncture have effects on the body's cells we cannot show exactly the means by which this works when a person takes a homeopathic medicine, a TCM herbal medicine or has acupuncture.

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