 a primary care doctor at Beth Israel-Deaconess Medical Center in
Boston and a professor at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. TOM DELBANCO: What was very important was how we
showed that people don't talk about it with their doctors and how it's almost
as if there are two separate systems going on and they don't interact. That seems kind of silly. I think, in that sense, it was
good. It opened Pandora's box,
which is always a mixed blessing.
NARRATOR: The results of the Harvard survey were
of no surprise to Dr. Andrew Weil. By the early '90s, the Americans counted by Eisenberg had made Weil into
a media star.
[Promotional video: "Spontaneous
Healing"]
ANDREW
WEIL, M.D., Dir, Integrative Med, U of Arizona: Thank you. Hello. I'm going to be talking to you about
spontaneous healing, the body's--
NARRATOR: His books and videos are consistent
best-sellers. They tap into
America's fascination with natural approaches to healing.
Dr.
ANDREW WEIL: Your body can do these things.
The interest in alternative therapies waxes and wanes in
long historical cycles. That
depends primarily on how well conventional medicine is seen as doing its job.
NARRATOR: According to Weil, who has degrees in
both medicine and botany from Harvard, conventional medicine gets low marks for
delivering the kind of medical care Americans want.
Dr. ANDREW WEIL: People are very fed up with being
passive recipients of authoritarian, paternalistic medicine. And many of these other systems make
people feel that they are more autonomous, more in charge of their own
destiny. I think that's a great
longing of people today.
Conventional medicine is now seen as being reckless,
dangerous, forcing on people things that are toxic. It's become out of balance in its enthusiasm for external
technological solutions to problems.
NARRATOR: And this, Weil believes, is one of the
reasons that so many Americans are seeking so many alternatives. In Los Angeles, California, Gil and
Christie Goren are waiting to be seen by a group of traditional healers, the
Maoris from New Zealand. These healers
use a form of deep tissue massage that they say clears out stored-up bad energy
that prevents the body from healing itself. If it looks painful, that's the point. The Maoris believe that's one way to
heal.
The Gorens are here today hoping the Maoris can help
Christie get patient. They have
already spent three years and $45,000 on five unsuccessful rounds of in vitro
fertilization.
GIL GOREN: In vitro is-- it's a business. You know, she would walk into an
examination room, and a doctor would walk right in and wouldn't say a word, and
then put her legs up in stirrups and put on a glove and examine her right
there, with never even saying, "Hi. How are you?"
NARRATOR: Disheartened by their experience with
in vitro, the Gorens are looking for a new approach from this group of Maori
healers and their leader, Papa Joe. They are just one of 100 couples who the Maoris will treat for
infertility during their two-week stay in Los Angeles.
PAPA
JOE, Maori Healer: Hey, hey, hey, hey. How you be?
CHRISTIE
GOREN: I'm good. How are you?
PAPA
JOE: Bloody marvelous.
With Christie, she was full of anxiety, which allowed a lot
of emotional blockage, which then transferred into physical blockages that
wouldn't allow pregnancy to happen. The body's got to cleanse itself before anything can happen.
NARRATOR: Alternative therapists like Papa Joe
believe that the mind wields power over the body. And to many of the millions who turn to alternative
therapies, this attention to the mind-body connection is the essential
ingredient missing from the care they receive from mainstream medicine.
Dr. ANDREW WEIL: We know all sorts of machinery that
connects the mind to the body. When I approach a patient, you know, my first-- my thought is always,
"Why is healing not happening in this person?" You know, "What's blocking it?" Conventional medicine has become very narrow in its focus on
the physical body. People are
spiritual entities. They're
mental/emotional beings.
[: Read Weil's interview]
CHRISTIE GOREN: We feel like we have a lot of good
partners now, rather than when we were working with the medical profession, we
felt like we were really alone in that. And I feel that we're really close, and I feel that we're-- we're going
to be successful.
PAPA
JOE: Give yourselves a bit of space, a bit
of time. It will happen within
three weeks. Don't go hard at
it. You're both so tense. But if you let it happen from here--
sweet. Yeah? It'll happen within three weeks.
CHRISTIE GOREN: I really didn't expect to hear
that. I expected maybe another
five months. It just has always
been another five or six months for me. Almost a little unreal, kind of like everything I've been waiting for
could happen in three weeks.
Dr. TOM DELBANCO: The question is how to find that
terribly important medical ingredient called hope. In alternative medicine, when they need something to be
hopeful about, the messages are definitive, clear, very emphatic, as far as I
can see, and from what I've read, based on incredibly little scientific
evidence.
NARRATOR: What is the science behind these
alternative therapies?
EXHIBITOR: [New Life Expo] Once the body is harmonically in tune
or in balance with itself, it starts to assimilate and integrate medicine
better.
NARRATOR: With millions of Americans spending
billions of dollars on alternative medicine, we wanted to find out what the
scientific research has shown. We
went back to the NIH to find out what the Office of Alternative Medicine that
Senator Harkin set up 10 years ago has learned. The office, it turns out, has been mired in a continuing
controversy between the NIH scientists and the politicians. The scientists argue that Congress was
more interested in advocating for unproven therapies than subjecting these new
treatments to real evaluation. Harkin and his fellow congressmen complained of slow-moving, overly
cautious scientists.
Sen. TOM HARKIN: The people at NIH just thought they
could just bury it. It was new,
and it wasn't invented here. And
it didn't fit into the narrow kind of research confines that NIH had been used
to.
NARRATOR: But Harkin was undeterred by critics of
the office, as he continued to pressure Congress for more money.
Sen. TOM HARKIN: I came back the next year and the year
after and the year after and kept on them to start expanding and to do more
research.
NARRATOR: Finally, in 1998, Harkin won a major
battle when Congress agreed to turn the small office into a full-fledged
research center. With new status
and real money, the NIH could no longer ignore alternative medicine. And as a sign that times were changing,
the institute put one of its top research scientists in charge, Dr. Stephen
Straus.
STEPHEN STRAUS, MD, National Institutes of Health:.
NARRATOR: Now universities around the country vie
for new-found grant money from Straus's office. At the University of Maryland, they have received a grant
from the NIH for the largest American study ever on the Chinese therapy
acupuncture. They have recruited
570 patients for this study. All of
them suffer from osteoarthritis in their knees and have not responded to
conventional anti-inflammatory drugs.
Sylvia Ankers has had arthritis for over a decade.
SYLVIA ANKERS: We don't have any health insurance, so
I had gone, you know, to a couple of doctors, and they'd give me shots of
silicone or something in the knees. And it would last for a little bit, but then we were back to the pain
and hurting to walk, and that. So
I figured I was ready for trying anything. And I'd heard, you know, acupuncture-- it's old. It's got to be good, you know? [laughs]
NARRATOR: Brian Berman is in charge of the
acupuncture study.
BRIAN BERMAN, MD, U of Maryland School of Medicine: The
research of acupuncture is complex. Now we're beginning to look at what works, what doesn't work, for what
types of patients and what types of conditions.
NARRATOR: Though millions of Americans use
acupuncture and the therapy has been used for thousands of years in China,
large-scale scientific studies in this country have only been able to prove
acupuncture's effectiveness for two specific ailments: controlling nausea due
