CAMs

Nobody wants to get sick. But once you do, you want to be in the right place: people are happier to be ill in a first rate hospital with state-of-the-art care. You may enter, as Lara did, in a dire condition, doing battle with a disease that will kill you if left untreated correctly. A lot of people (doctors, paramedics, nurses, support staff), over many months last year, spent a lot of resources on getting her in full remission and with her lungs on the mend; she has a lot to be grateful for. Still, being an acute leukemia patient, one wonders if treatment needs to be limited to chemotherapy, irradiation and bone marrow transplants. And why does collateral damage of the treatment - in Lara’s case respiratory problems - need to be relegated and confined to physical therapy? For those are the only things Lara’s treating hematologists refer to. Their attitude follows the dictates of established practice. True, they are plugged directly into the vanguard of scientific innovation. But is that all there is to it? Outside these conventional methods lies a whole field called ‘complementary and alternative medicine’. Known as ‘CAM’, doctors at the hospital never even mention it. Why? We had to find out for ourselves.

Without a doubt, CAM is a huge field rife with unsubstantiated claims and do-gooders, as well as charlatans and quacks. Quackery, to be sure, is not merely a medieval phenomenon or about snake-skin oil from the Wild West. Look at the Internet and be amazed what is on offer to the gullible and desperate. (A Dr Ringold promises his mineral pills will help men with erectile dysfunction.) So it is easy to see why mainstream doctors are prone to dismiss the whole terrain. As does my best friend, a physician, who writes off the entire remit of homeopathy until he has seen convincing scientific evidence that shows replicable benefits. What they seem to overlook is that over 180,000 doctors in the European Union have been trained or educated in one or more CAM modalities. In ten EU Member States, government administered regulation of CAM is in place; in Belgium since 1999.

Take acupuncture. As recent as a few decades ago, the practice was associated with the lesser parts of town and dubious second floor studios with a Chinese restaurant on the ground floor and a ditto laundry in the basement. No longer so. Acupuncture, in a country like Belgium, has been stiffly government regulated for the last thirteen years. It is recognized as a distinct therapeutic system in twelve EU Member States. Lara’s acupuncturist took an MD here at Louvain University and specialized in traditional Asian medicine during a five year sojourn in China and Japan. At her reception desk, before you have even told the doctor what you came to see her about, you put a finger in a machine and it measures your aura, displaying it in a multicolor print, front and sideways. The treatments mark visible differences in successive displays. (It is a Korotkov GDV camera; GDV stand for Gas Discharge Visualization). Lara feels better every time she goes there. Her breathing improves and even her blood stats did, too. Still, Lara mentioned the treatments to her hematologist once, and seeing her reaction, decided to keep ensuing treatments to herself.

Take nutrition. It is estimated that half of cancers are caused by what we eat. Nutrition is not only about not eating certain things, but also about the positive effect on health of eating the right things. Lara found a doctor here in Brussels who has specialized in that part of her profession.  She was trained in Israel and has uncovered astounding deficiencies in Lara’s chemical make-up (if I may call it that). Again, nobody in Saint Luke referred to her or any of her colleagues, as if conventional doctors are blind-sided.

While you are in a hospital, you can forget about CAM doctors coming to your hospital room. They simply don’t venture inside the building. Recommended by a dear friend, we tried to summon a homoeopathist to Lara’s bedside during her third chemotherapy. He reneged.

After release from a clinic, it doesn’t get any easier. Finding complementary medical treatment in the aftermath of a hospital stay is no simple matter. Where do you go? Which doctor do you turn to? Whom can you trust?  Which raises the question, why is it left up to patients - some more resourceful than others - to seek alternative or complementary help? Imagine if conventional and alternative practitioners could accept to bond like opposite poles. How powerful a union that would make! Think of the benefits it would bring to the patients. Instead, the two seem to repel each other like the same poles of different magnets.