By Martin Oliver

We live in interesting times. Wherever you look, things are in a state of accelerating flux. Against such a backdrop many people are searching for something solid to hold onto or believe in. In some cases this is provided by one's family; in others religion, and increasingly people are flocking to science.

If the militantly atheist British author Richard Dawkins is correct, God does not exist, and we should instead believe in a reductionist form of science. Elevated to the level of a religion, this risks taking on some of religion's less desirable qualities, such as a marked intolerance of everything that fails to fit inside its version of what is true.

In addition to this is a belief that all human experiences can be defined through scientific terms. While the most devout within this community reject such non-scientific qualities as intuition, knowingness and gut feelings, they ignore the fact that many scientific breakthroughs of the past, such as those achieved by Einstein and even Descartes himself, were achieved through an intuitive leap.

Reductionist and holistic

Reductionism (or Cartesianism), a scientific view championed by the French philosopher Descartes in the 17th century, is essentially the belief that a biological system such as an animal can be reduced to the sum of its parts. Today this forms the basis of much of modern science. Such a philosophy is highly mechanistic, and indeed Descartes himself believed that creatures were essentially complex machines.

While reductionism is valuable to a point, it falls down when faced with multifaceted interactions such as those between body and mind, which are increasingly regarded as a single continuum and could play a role in the placebo effect. These can only be explained through holism, a fundamentally different scientific direction that involves creating wholes out of the small Cartesian pieces.

In today's scientific community, while curiosity is valued, certain non-reductionist lines of enquiry are generally frowned up, resulting in a mild form of censorship. However, some important discoveries have slipped through the net. In 1988, French scientist Jacques Benveniste claimed to have discovered, to his amazement, that water diluted to high-potency homoeopathic dilutions affects biological reagents. This effect was replicated in laboratories in Italy, Israel and Canada before being aggressively debunked.

PR offensives

If scientists, attired in their white lab coats, are the priests of this new religion, the proliferating 'sceptics' groups could be likened to the evangelists crossed with the dragon-killing saints. They have a hard-line attachment to 'science' and 'reason', and hold little sympathy for anything that fails to conform to their views.
In the area of health, reductionism is generally the territory of pharmaceuticals, while holism is frequently encountered in the field of naturopathic healing. For its efforts, naturopathy has faced aggressive and well-orchestrated media and PR campaigns. Effective PR involves constructing a narrative that might be a gross distortion of the true picture, and to keep repeating it endlessly until it will hopefully sink into the mainstream consciousness. However, despite all the bad press that natural therapies have received over the years, many would say unjustifiably, consumers continue to flock to it.






Debate and the power of the internet

When it comes to natural therapies, large numbers of people experience a remarkable benefit every day, but for those who are yet to be convinced, they have to look to outside sources of information, including the media, and decide who to believe. On both sides of the debate, arguments are often dominated by emotion and personality type rather than facts, with the nurturers (dominated by women) most supportive of it and the autocrats (dominated by men) most critical.

Throw into this mix the far-reaching influence of the internet. Recently the British journalist George Monbiot raised the question of how many of the anonymous comments following online articles come from 'astroturfers' within corporate PR units, as a means of presenting an impression that a majority thinks a certain way. Monbiot was contacted by one whistleblower who claimed to be from a team working for corporate clients, and who posted under 70 different aliases, or 'sock puppets' as they are now known.

Health freedom, or health controversy

The average sceptic nearly always advocates whatever involves a higher level of technology to its natural and traditional alternative, and this frequently triggers a vigorous debate with natural healing and health freedom advocates. Some areas in the health field include:

Natural therapies: Behind the mud-slinging, two herbal substances, St. John's wort and kava, both have as good an evidence base as allopathic medicine. For herbal medicine as a whole, and nutrition, to give two examples, a good body of evidence for health benefits exists.

Home birth and midwifery: Despite the scaremongering, studies find that for low-risk women this is on average as safe as, or safer than, birth in a hospital.

Water fluoridation: While there are only six countries (including Australia) where more than 50% of the population receives fluoridated water, and dental fluorosis is a major issue among young people, sceptics are fully in favour of the practice.

Vaccination: Campaigners advocating freedom of choice for parents commonly challenge the 'herd immunity' theory that purports to explain why vaccinated children are at risk from those who haven't received vaccines.

Health benefits of organic food: The sceptic narrative here involves such terms as 'middle-class fad' and 'gullible'. This ignores the fact that many people prefer not to ingest chemicals, and also buy organic food for its environmental benefits.

Nutritional supplements: While we are told that it is possible to obtain all our nutrition from conventionally grown food, its nutritional levels have been dropping for decades. Studies have shown improved health outcomes a range of different supplements, including fish oil and a daily multivitamin.

Electromagnetic radiation: We are exposed to fields that are millions of times greater than the levels experienced prior to the industrial age. Many studies have identified biological effects below levels that are capable of producing heating of tissues.

Upholding the right to choose

One cornerstone of democracy is a right to freedom of expression. Over the past couple of years, the Australian Vaccination Network has been targeted both by sceptics and the NSW Government. However, people routinely make controversial statements that challenge the status quo on a wide range of health-related topics, and there is no vital reason why vaccination, which seems to rile the sceptic community more than any other, should be an exception.

Another important issue is freedom of choice – while in most countries adults are treated as such, and it is assumed that they are capable of thinking for themselves, in Australia this is not always the case.

While the sceptics are well organised, they are outnumbered; about 60% of Australians use some form of natural therapy each year. We deserve the freedom to use any therapy we want, so long as it is ostensibly non-harmful, and especially if it does not create long-term side-effects that are liable to be a burden on taxpayers down the track. If such a therapy is found to make a major impact in preventative health terms, then there is an argument for government subsidies such as those provided for pharmaceuticals.

Ultimately, extreme ideological positions generally fail to shed light on the truth. What we need is a nuanced rather than a polarised debate based on all of the facts, rather than spin, and at the moment we are not getting it.

Resources

PRO-HEALTH FREEDOM
Australian Vaccination Network
www.avn.org.au
Australian Fluoride Action
www.australianfluorideaction.com
Alliance for Health Freedom Australia
www.health-freedom.com.au
Alliance for Natural Health Europe
www.anh-europe.org
Alliance for Natural Health International
www.anhinternational.org

SCEPTIC SITES
Stop the AVN
www.facebook.com/stopavn
Australian Sceptics
www.sceptics.com.au
Young Australian Sceptics
www.youngaussceptics.com

Martin Oliver is a writer and researcher based in Lismore (Northern NSW).