Every esoteric knows another One True Cause of all disease

Alternative practitioners constantly claim that conventional medicine treats only symptoms while they treat underlying causes. They’ve got it backwards.

Chiropractors, homeopaths, naturopaths, acupuncturists, and other alternative medicine practitioners constantly criticize conventional medicine for “only treating the symptoms,” while alternative medicine allegedly treats “the underlying causes” of disease.
Nope. Not true. Exactly backwards. Think about it: When you go to a doctor with a fever, does he just treat the symptom? No, he tries to figure out what’s causing the fever. If it’s pneumonia, he identifies which microbe is responsible and gives you the right drugs to treat that particular infection. If you have abdominal pain, does the doctor just give you narcotics to treat the symptom of pain? No, he tries to figure out what’s causing the pain. If he determines you have acute appendicitis, he operates to remove your appendix.

I guess what they’re trying to say is that something must have been wrong in the first place to allow the disease to develop. But they don’t have any better insight into what that something might be than scientific medicine. All they have is wild, imaginative guesses. And they all disagree with one another. The chiropractor says that if your spine is in proper alignment, you can’t get sick. Acupuncturists talk about the proper flow of qi through the meridians. Energy medicine practitioners talk about disturbances in energy fields. Nutrition faddists claim that people who eat right won’t get sick. None of them can produce any evidence to support these claims. No alternative medicine has been scientifically shown to prevent disease or cure it. If it had, it would have been incorporated into conventional medicine and would no longer be “alternative.”


Are these practitioners treating the underlying cause, or are they simply applying their one chosen tool to treat everything? Chiropractors treat every patient with chiropractic adjustments. What if a doctor used one treatment for everything? You have pneumonia? Here’s some penicillin. You have a broken leg? Here’s some penicillin. You have diabetes? Here’s some penicillin. Acupuncturists only know to stick needles in people. Homeopaths only know to give out ridiculously high dilutions that amount to nothing but water. Therapeutic touch practitioners only know to smooth out the wrinkles in imaginary energy fields. They are not trying to determine any underlying cause; they are just using one treatment indiscriminately.

How do you define “cause”? We don’t know what causes gravity, but we understand enough about how it works to overcome it with elevators, airplanes, and rockets to the moon. We may not know what ultimately causes asthma, but we know enough about the causes of airway constriction and inflammation to devise effective treatments.

Let’s take a simple example: strep throat. The symptom is throat pain. Doctors don’t just treat the pain; they do a throat culture, they determine that a strep infection is causing the pain, and they treat the infection with an antibiotic. But what caused the strep infection? The body had to host the bacteria and respond to their presence by developing symptoms; the bacteria had to be capable of multiplying in the human body. The patient had to be exposed to another person who had a strep infection, who in turn had caught it from someone else, involving a chain of social and epidemiologic causes. The bacteria had to evolve from ancestor bacteria and the human from ancestor animals. And so on.

So you see, it involves a chain of causation and there can even be several simultaneous causes. “Cause” can mean pretty much anything you want it to. But however you look at it, doctors definitely do not “just treat symptoms.”

Philosophy has studied causation. Aristotle said everything had four causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. And he introduced complications: proper (prior) causation and accidental (chance) causation. Potential or actual, particular or generic. Reciprocal or circular causality as a relation of mutual dependence or influence of cause upon effect. The same thing as the cause of contrary effects when its presence and absence result in different outcomes. He recognized that the subject of causation was complicated.

Alternative providers are more “simple” minded. They often claim to know the one true cause of all disease, which is curious because medical science defines several categories of causes and sometimes more than one cause is involved (e.g., a traumatic injury gets infected). Where science finds complexity, alternative medicine imagines simplicity.

Some homeopaths claim to treat “genetic” illness, tracing its origins to six main genetic causes: tuberculosis, syphilis, gonorrhea, psora (scabies), cancer, and leprosy. Bet you didn’t know tuberculosis was genetic! Neither did I. Science classifies all these as infectious except for cancer, which is neoplastic. Homeopathy disregards science and redefines genetic to suit its own inscrutable purposes.

Science finds many causes for disease and sometimes more than one cause for a given disease. Pseudoscience has identified the one true cause of all disease—many times. I did an Internet search and found sixty-seven single causes of all disease (see accompanying box). This is not an exhaustive list but rather an exhausted list (I stopped when I got tired of searching).

It never seems to bother proponents of alternative medicine that others have found different “one true” causes. In his book Voodoo Science, Bob Park describes a press conference following a meeting to discuss government funding for alternative medicine research:

Perhaps the strangest part of the press conference consisted of brief statements by individual members of the editorial review board of what they saw as the most important issues [..] and so it went around the table, with each touting his or her preferred therapy. But there was no sense of conflict or rivalry. As each spoke, the others would nod in agreement. The purpose [..] was to demonstrate that these disparate therapies all work. It was my first glimpse of what holds alternative medicine together: there is no internal dissent in a community that feels itself besieged from the outside.

When scientists encounter two mutually exclusive claims, it bothers them. They experience cognitive dissonance and try diligently to find evidence to reject one of the hypotheses and leave a winner. They eventually reach a consensus. Alternative medicine pseudoscientists don’t seem to mind cognitive dissonance. They are content to look for evidence to support their own chosen treatment while blithely disregarding competing claims. They don’t want to look for evidence that something doesn’t work. While each claims to know the one cause of disease, they don’t seem interested in looking for the one truth.

Live and let live? Create your own reality? Truth is only relative? The same thing may be simultaneously true for me and false for you? Maybe it boils down to a mutual tolerance of delusions (okay, I’ll believe that you are Jesus if you believe that I’m Napoleon). For the cynical, follow the money: “I won’t interfere with your livelihood if you don’t interfere with mine.”

I can play the cause-finding game too. I’ve discovered the one cause of all the one-cause theories: a deficiency of critical-thinking skills combined with an overactive imagination. And, of course, a failure to test beliefs using the scientific method.

This is a slightly modified reprint of the original article “The One True Cause of All Disease” von Harriet Hall, published in the Skeptical Inquirer  34.1, Jan/Feb 2010. It is reprinted here with the kind permission of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
The German article on this blog “Die einzig wahre Ursache aller Krankheiten” is based on a translation of this manuscript.

Vaccination against the tumor feature HER2/neu could improve the survival rate of patients with breast cancer, according to the preliminary conclusion of a study conducted by Linda Benavides and their employees from San Antonio, Texas. The American scientist now presented the results of their studies with the experimental vaccine NeuVax (E75), in which a total of 163 patients participated, at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research.
Especially the group of patients in which only a low expression of HER2 is present in the tumor (“low expressors”), seems to profit from the vaccination. After succesful first line treatment of breast cancer with conventional chemotherapy a relapse of the disease could be greatly reduced through vaccination – only 8% of the vaccinated patients got a relapse, while the recurrence rate in the non-vaccinated patients was 21%. The vaccine appears to have a positive effect on the overall survival as well; while all vaccinated patients from the group of “low expressors” are still live, unfortunately 20% of patients in the control group succumbed to to their illness.
Interestingly, especially patients for whom treatment with the monoclonal HER2/neu-Antibody Mabthera is not applicable, might benefit from this new form of therapy.

Due to the small numbers of patients in this preliminary study there are still no definitive conclusions. We may be very excited about the results of the impact studies, on which about 700 to 1000 patients will participate.

(semi-automated translation thanks to google.com)

Every year the American Society of Hematology (ASH) invites to their meeting that lasts several days. This month I had the opportunity to attend to this biggest meeting for hematology/oncology worldwide. The Event took place in Atlanta, the capital of Georgia.

Pictures from the ASH-Meeting in Atlanta

I’ll be speaking at the annual meeting of the german surgical society (DGCH) which takes place in munich from April, 5 to April, 8. During the “surgical forum” i will be giving a lecture about the role of notch-signalling for the neurovascular developement in pancreas carcinomas. the script will then be published to the surgical DGCH-yearbook, which, unfortunately, isn’t citated by medline.

At 9:30am this morning my excursion to the body-worlds began. but first i had to pick up a friend of mine and we had a quick breakfast at his place. the drive to Frankfurt-Fechenheim was no deal but finding the event-hall in midst of an industrial park took us quite long. there were buses filled with crowds of highscool students awaiting us.. as if they had nothing better to do at 11 o’clock! even so it was not necessary to stand in line at the cash box (in mannheim visitors often had to wait 4h to get in!) … the admission charge was 9 Euro (reduced prize), catalogues and wireless info phones not included.

Unfortunately the exposition itself really was a big disappointment for me (maybe my expectations were to high?). the show room had only about 200 square meters, which is about 600 square feet, and there were only circa 25-30 full body plastinations and several smaller parts on display. Some of them were clearly designed only for cheap show effects and had no educational message at all, others i had already seen before. Just 1h later we were on our way back home & i had spent about 30 Euro altogether. btw. no cameras were allowed, so i don’t have any pictures for you. mind you, i would not show them anyway…

on the whole, instead of spending that much money for almost nothing, i would rather recommend to visit an anatomical institute at a university nearby. most of them have anatomical exhibits of their own and will surely let you see them (free of charge).

The notorious anatomical exhibition body worlds is back in germany again. it is supposed to have completely new and unseen preparations. back in the 90ies i have visited the showroom in mannheim and was quite impressed.
in the meantime the exhibition and his founder – the infamous “professor” von-Hagens, inventor of the plastination-method – has been the object of many scandals in regard to the aquisition of dead persons and other ethical questions (e.g. the correctnes of his professorship).
Von-Hagens, who has temporarily been a professor for anatomy at the university of heidelberg in the 80ies, is known to be a wacky/eccentric person. He has a strange, “artistic” approach to the prepararion of his anatomic exhibits, which i find quite inappropriate. He always said in defence, that the plastinated corpse has no identity any more, but becomes an article of virtue of it’s own, and noone will recognise the donator, anyway – thus the peace of the dead cannot not disturbed. Yet, lately von-Hagens plans to reveal the identity of each exhibit in order to rebut all reproaches linked to the alleged utilisation of chinese death-row-candidates for preparation! So, maybe every exhibit will soon be labled like that: “this has been klaus mueller from duesburg who died of heart failure”. How bizarre.
Nevertheless, i will visit the exhibition on wednesday, cause it is indisputable, that those plastinations are an invaluable source of anatomical education for medical students… if medical laypersons (even children) should be allowed to visit the exhibition, well, that’s another story!