Stardate 20020516.1509

(On Screen): Yet another UN agency may have been ruined by politically-correct sensitivity to tribal customs. You'd expect that kind of thing to happen to UNESCO or UNICEF, but you'd have expected the World Health Organization to have more sense, wouldn't you?

Hell, no. They're now going to place their stamp of approval on alternative therapies. They will study and issue reports on the proper use of things like aromatherapy, which is a way of treating disease by sniffing perfume.

Some alternative therapies contain some germs of usefulness, but it's rarely what their practitioners think it is. A good example of that is acupuncture. The Chinese believed that acupuncture worked by helping to channel the body's life energy, and that by sticking needles into the proper points they could relieve pain, help with lung congestion, and cure disease.

There are elaborate maps showing all the key points and showing them all connected together in a network. What's interesting is that many of the points correlate to major nerve ganglia, although the connections on the chart bear no resemblance to anything real.

Study of acupuncture has now confirmed that it has the ability to cause release of endorphins, the body's opiates. (As a confirmation, the effects of acupuncture can be reversed with the use of naloxone or other opiate antagonists.) Endorphins can relieve pain and they do have the ability to relieve lung congestion, just as can the opiates (which seem to work by imitating endorphins). Endorphins do not, so far as anyone knows, have any effect on disease.

And the way that acupuncture works has nothing whatever to do with what the traditional practitioners thought it did. There's no scientific evidence for any kind of life force or any ability to channel it. Endorphins are proteins released by the pituitary due to signals from the hypothalamus, which is part of the nervous system. Stimulation of a nerve ganglion can cause endorphin release. (One problem with acupuncture is that it is unreliable.)

Primitive medicine around the world has relied on the use of naturally occurring herbs and plant materials. That's also valid in some cases, though totally bogus in others. For instance, some folk remedies for minor pain included solutions boiled from the bark of certain trees. It turns out that they contain salicylates, which are similar to aspirin and have similar effect.

Folk knowledge was that if you were suffering from serious chest pains, that if you were to chew parts of the foxglove plant then it might relieve the pain. The plants contain digitalis, which is a very powerful heart stimulant. (Too much of it will kill you, though.)

South American natives long knew that there was a stimulating effect from chewing the leaves of the Coca plant. (We all know what that contains.)

On the other hand, a hell of a lot of folk remedies and alternative treatments are complete quackery. In some cases it's deliberate quackery; all you have to do is go to a store and read the side of the package of some herbal substance and see all the things that they claim they'll treat to realize that it's little different than snake-oil salesmanship. (Actually, you'll see a lot less of that these days because the FDA has been cracking down.)

Maybe, just maybe, what the WHO is going to try to do is to separate the wheat from the chaff, to find the things which truly do work, and try to add them to the common medical armamentarium. That would be nice; it could be extremely valuable. Unfortunately, there's just too much risk that what will actually happen is that political correctness will get in the way and the WHO will be forced to bless forms of treatment which are not only useless but which may well be actively harmful, in order to avoid offending some group out there which consider those treatments part of their religion or culture.

Considering the unbelievable resistance of the South African government to the use of western anti-AIDS drugs, the last thing we need right now is for some respected international organization to say things like this:

Studies have shown success in treating conditions ranging from malaria and HIV to high blood pressure and lower back pain.

That's counterproductive, at the very least. "Studies have shown" is a cop-out: who did the study, how was it done, what controls were in place? Many studies have "proved" some of the damnedest nonsense, and the fact that a study exists doesn't necessarily prove anything.

A statement like that could cost a million lives. Let's not go there.