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^[1].
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)

Literature & Sources

1. Medical News Today: low HER2 Expressing Breast Cancer Patients Respond To Preferentially Apthera’s NeuVax (16.04.2008)

The German Society for Internal Medicine (DGIM) has awarded me as best author under 35 years in the field of hematology/oncology on their annual meeting. I was honoured for my publication:

Die N-Cadherin / [beta]-Catenin Interaktion spielt eine wichtige Rolle bei Selbsterhalt und Differenzierung humaner hämatopoetischer Stammzellen.

The honour and my gratitude goes to my co-authors, especially Larissa Pietsch.

As one out of 10 “best young authors” I am electible to the Young Investigators Award 2008. The election process requires a a 15min plenary talk on April, 01 2008 at the Rhein-Main-Halls at Wiesbaden. The prestigeous price is endowed with 3000 Euro.

Further Information

• DGIM Annual Meeting 2008 (german)

During my stay in Atlanta for the ASH-Annual Meeting I had the opportunity to visit the Georgia-Aquarium – one of the biggest Aquaria worldwide. In five wonderful “theme worlds” different natural maritime habitats and their inhabitants were presented.

Pictures from the Georgia Aquarium

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

Referring to the Addgene’s cloning protocol for the lentiviral vector pLKO.1 I would like to propose an alternative screening method für positive clones.
The original protocol suggested a double digest with EcoRI and NcoI that resulted in two relatively large bands – one at 2kb and one at 5kb. In concequence, the length relations made it hard to reliably identify clones with an intact isert. With this alternative Protocol, conducting a digestion with XhoI, you get a gel picture that is, in my opinion, much easier to interpret.

unfortunately, the protocol is currently only available in German.

Alternatives Screening-Protokoll

Material

• Plasmid Miniprep Kit (Qiagen #27104)
• XhoI (Fermentas #ER0691)
• TopVision LE Agarose (Fermentas #R0491)
• Rotiphorese 10x TBE-Buffer (Carl Roth 3061.1)

Procedere

1. (Tag 1) Nach der Trafo und 16-18h Kultur auf LB-Amp Agarplatten ca. 5-10 Kolonien von der Platte picken und in 3ml LB-Amp übernacht kultivieren.
2. (Tag 2) 2ml der ÜN-Kultur für eine Mini-Präp verwenden,
   Achtung: für den Elutionsschritt ddH₂O oder Tris-HCL Puffer nehmen, da EDTA die anschließenden enzymatischen Reaktionen stören kann. Die restliche Kultur wird vorübergehend im Kühlschrank bei +4°C gelagert oder kann als Glycerolstock eingefroren werden.
3. Für die photometrische Messung des DNA-Gehalts, mache eine 1:100 Verdünnung mit 5µl miniprep DNA und 495µl ddH₂O
4. Setze einen Master-Mix für den Verdau-Ansatz an (plane für n+2 Ansätze).
   Berechne für jeden Ansatz:
   • 1µg miniprep DNA
   • 2µl Puffer R (Fermentas 10x Puffer für XhoI)
   • 0.5µl XhoI
   • auf 20µl ddH₂O
5. Inkubiere die Verdauansätze bei 37°C für 1-2h
6. Trage die Verdauansätze auf ein 1% Agarosegel auf und mache einen Gellauf bei 10V/cm für ca. 45 Minuten.

Positive Klone haben eine deutliche Bande bei 380bp, außerdem eine schwache Bande bei 190bp und den “Rest” bei ~5000bp. Diese Klone sollten zur Sequenzierung eingeschickt werden. Bei nicht intakten Inserts ergibt sich ein Bandenshift von 50-80bp. Klone mit religiertem Stuffer haben außerdem eine Bande bei ~2000bp.

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The German Rhombos Nachrichtenservice wrote:

Trojanereinsatz gegen Bauchspeicheldrüsenkrebs Stammzellen spielen eine Rolle beim Wachstum von Geschwülsten und könnten in modifizierter Form einen therapeutischen Ansatz bieten.

The complete text of the newsflash can be found at
http://www.rhombos.de/shop/a/show/story/?1155.

Meine Kooperation mit der Arbeitsgruppe von Prof. Ingrid Herr (Molekulare Onkochirurgie) und PD. Peter Büchler (Viszeralchirurgie) über die Rolle von mesenchymalen Stammzellen bei der Entstehung und der Therapie des duktalen Pankreaskarzinoms trägt erste Früchte: Beim diesjährigen 39. Treffen des European Pancreatic Club (EPC) in Newcastle, UK erhielt unsere Publikation “BONE MARROW DERIVED MESENCHYMAL STEM CELLS FOR THERAPY OF PANCREATIC CANCER” den Preis als bestes Grundlagenpaper (“EPC 2007 Award for best basic science paper”). Mein Glückwunsch und Dankeschön für die gute Zusammenarbeit gilt insbesondere meinen Koautoren aus der AG Herr.

Vom 03. bis 08. März 2007 hatte ich die Gelegenheit das jährliche Stammzellmeeting in Keystone, Colorado zu besuchen. Vier Tage lang gab es exzellente Vorträge, Seminare und Postersessions rund um die Themen normale und leukämische Stammzellen und Stammzellnische.

Bilder aus Keystone