Recent Studies on Alternative Medicine: Bad Medicine or Bad Reporting?
Friday April 21, 2006
Does it seem like recent headlines on alternative medicine have all been negative? It's not just your imagination, says NaturalHealthLine.com journalist Peter Barry Chowka:
Read the NaturalHealthLine.com article.
"As in the case of any scientific study, however, the published results of these recent negative ones were not as black and white as the media portrayed them to be. The inaccurate or incomplete reporting is partly the result of the limitations of the sound-byte driven news business and also accountable to the somewhat misleading way that the researchers reported the conclusions in several of the studies."I've talked here about problems with the echinacea, glucosamine, and homeopathy studies. The flaws in these studies were largely ignored by the media.
Read the NaturalHealthLine.com article.
Comments
I have only one question. Who funded the studies? That question should always be asked first and foremost. Is there an ongoing effort to debunk natural cures? There is not a lot of money in natural cures.
The echinacea and glucosamine studies were both funded by the National Institutes of Health.
Part of the problem is that the journals that publish these studies often appear to be biased against alternative medicine.
Take the echinacea study as an example. The study looked at a form of echinacea and a dose that’s different from what people use in real life. The study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Instead of saying just that-that this form and dose of echinacea were not found to be effective in this study, the scathing editorial said that echinacea doesn’t work period and that herbal medicine doesn’t work. That’s ridiculous! And unfortunately, that’s what the media reads and it shapes their stories.