CAM II

I have to say, I am skeptical about CAM. The lecture has helped me become more receptive to such perspectives, though, which is good. I think my background, which has always been grounded in "Western" science, hypothesis-driven experiments, and critical thinking and reasoning, persuades me against easily accepting these other healing modalities. I am also wary about scams that take advantage of sick and vulnerable people. But more and more, randomized controlled trials and other "conventional Western" studies are verifying or refuting evidence regarding CAM. Thus, mainstream physicians are becoming more familiar with them and the patients who use them.

It's interesting that from a philosophy standpoint, such studies may not be suitable for studying these alternative healing modalities. CAM involves a different paradigm of medicine than conventional Western science. Their view of the world and internal rules for coherence are fundamentally different than that of Western medicine. Instead of talking about enzyme kinetics and cell biology, CAM might deal with harmonizing the soul and aligning different life forces. Philosophers such as Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) would argue that evaluating CAM by Western standards is absurd; you can't judge a completely different system of thought with the rules of your system of thought. It's like evaluating quantum mechanics by the rules and criteria of Newtonian physics: you will get wrong answers even if it is a valid way of looking at the world. The two types of medicine are so different that they cannot be compared head-to-head.

Now to very Western thinkers, this is a ridiculous claim. Traditional science, they might say, uses objective criteria. Especially in evidence-based medicine, outcomes such as death or length of survival or recurrence of cancer are studied. These benchmarks can be used for any paradigm of health and illness. But a true Kuhnian would not be convinced. Perhaps the strength of traditional Chinese medicine is in the subjective experience of acupuncture; perhaps what's important is not the release of endorphins or the decrease in nausea and vomiting. Those are just the benefits that Western science evaluates. Unless you see the world from that paradigm, you can't predetermine how that paradigm should be evaluated. Of course, this leads to the big Kuhnian problem (which he acknowledges) that paradigms cannot be evaluated. They can only be analyzed for internal coherence, but never extrapolated to determining how close they model the world (also a very Kantian view). So it may very well be the case that both Western medicine and CAM operate to improve someone's health even though the former acts by modulating vascular reactivity to prolong survival while the latter optimizes meridians to improve the flow of Qi.