"Science, Faith, and Alternative Medicine" by Ronald W. Dworkin, in Policy Review (Aug. & Sept. 2001), 1030 15th St., N.W., 11th fl., Washington, D.C. 20005.

Skeptics can’t understand the allure of alternative medicine. Why would patients flock to therapies unproven by science? Yet Americans spent more than $21 billion on alternative medicine in 1997, and last year spent more money for alternative therapies than they spent out-of-pocket in the entire mainstream medical system. Dworkin, a physician and a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, perceives a logical basis for the migration: "Patients are fleeing the medical profession because doctors concentrate on rational knowledge at the expense of life’s mysteries," he writes. "Organized religion concentrates exclusively on the unknown, and therefore seems to know nothing. In alternative medicine, people have discovered a compromise."

In the past, when people suffered "the two great misfortunes in life . . . illness and gloom," doctors, and also clergymen, offered sympathy, counsel, and consolation. Today, urged on by insurance companies, physicians put their patients into diagnostic categories and rush them through, rather than hear out each individual’s complaints. Few doctors have the time or patience for such niceties today.

Alternative therapies—including acupuncture, herb therapy, biofeedback, magnet therapy, and chiropractic—attract patients disaffected by conventional medicine as well as those dissatisfied by religion’s solutions. In Dworkin’s view, practitioners of alternative therapy appeal to patients because they synthesize the most attractive aspects of medical science and religion. "Because alternative medicine is not confined by the limits of rational or testable knowledge, its powers of explanation are enormous, and patients leave ...thinking that their troubles have real spiritual significance."

Many of these alternative therapies may depend upon the placebo effect, a phenomenon long recognized among medical professionals. Physicians in the past sometimes dispensed placebos, such as sugar pills, for "three purposes: 1) to make a patient feel better when there [was] no illness, 2) to make a patient feel better (e.g., [feel] less pain) in spite of ongoing illness, and 3) to make a patient feel better by instilling hope when medical science deem[ed] a patient beyond hope." Doctors today are uncomfortable with this kind of deception, despite the fact, says Dworkin, that "conventional medical therapy has little effect on outcome in the vast majority of cases seen by doctors; patients will either recover on their own or stay with their disease."

Facing diagnoses of chronic or terminal conditions, or experiencing ineffective treatments from doctors, patients seek out alternative therapies, often combining these with the medical treatment they receive from their original doctors. Instead of receiving cold, hard truths—or the indifference of assembly-line medicine—patients are told by their alternative practitioners that their condition is unique to them, and that the power to heal may exist inside their own bodies. The "boundless possibilities that suddenly appear on the horizon raise the spirits of these patients in the present. This is not a bad thing."