Alternative Medicine
By Dr. Robina Coker
Monarch. 141 pages. £4.99
ISBN 1 85424 324 1
We are familiar with the phenomenal rise in popularity of alternative medicine, now used by 26% of our population. A Christian perspective of these practices is desperately needed, and Robina Coker's contribution assists discrimination between the sound and the dubious.
She describes some of the failures of orthodox and the attractions of alternative medicine. Her well-researched assessment of alternative medicine's risks is a startling revelation. Some herbal and Chinese herbal remedies have caused liver and kidney failure, sometimes fatally, whilst others, including homeopathic ones, have contained ingredients such as mercury, arsenic, potent steroids and pigeon droppings! She implies that herbal medicines in general provide a serious risk of poisoning, two such being valerian and skullcap. Most qualified medical herbalists would dissociate themselves from her criticisms, arguing that the majority of remedies are mild, well-labelled, free of side-effects, and tried and tested down through the ages.
There are psychic risks too, with therapies that invoke a vital energy. Coker gives the examples of yoga and transcendental meditation, in which each position represents an act of worship to a Hindu god. She rightly denounces this activity for the Christian who is called to worship the one and only living God. She links the potentially dangerous craze of excessive strenuous exercise to New Age thinking. She associates vegetarianism unnecessarily with Hinduism, and claims that the post-Flood change of diet to include meat is instructive. Surely, however, this is a permissive text, supplementing rather than changing the creation mandate. The Christian is not obliged to eat meat...rather, there is liberty here!
Specific alternative medicines are described only briefly since it is such a rapidly expanding field. Instead, the emphasis is in providing valuable principles to evaluate them; for example, the therapist's worldview and motives. However, a well-researched guide to the precise attributes of the main alternative practices would indeed be a valuable tool. It can be difficult to discern dubious aspects of a practice, indeed it can be embarrassing to do so in direct conversation with a practitioner. She does bring here a welcome corrective to an extreme charismatic view that failure to be healed is due to unbelief. God can heal, but she makes a plea for the Church to also rediscover a theology of suffering.
The book is well suited to reaching its intended general readership, but apart from her useful ideas for a Christian doctor's response to alternative medicine, a more rigorous balanced analysis is needed for its claim of suitability for doctors and medical students. A very narrow line of evidence is documented (i.e. that vitamins have no effect in prevention of cancer) that could mislead readers into viewing a healthy diet as being of minimal importance. At the very least, she should assent clearly to the vital importance of dietary fibre in prevention of cancer of the bowel. An account of the history of medicine is interesting but promotes the virtues of orthodoxy unduly so. Maybe orthodox medicine needs more reforming that she gives credence for.
