In an interview with Dr. Mehmet Oz, actress Gwyneth Paltrow defended her decision to put her children on a no-dairy, low-carb, gluten-free diet to treat her son’s eczema, a skin disease, “naturally.”
“I try at home to make everything gluten-free for him because the difference in his comfort is unbelievable when he’s sticking to what he’s meant to be eating,” she told the doctor host.
Her beliefs — she also claims that she successfully treated her panic attacks, inflammation, and thyroid problems with diet — based on controversial food-sensitivity testing were lambasted by scientists and physicians as being without scientific merit. Maclean’s science blog called her a “purveyor of quack remedies.”
Still, she’s successfully marketed her lifestyle in the form of a bestselling cookbook called “It’s All Good.”
“[Paltrow] is saying natural is ‘all good.’ But that’s not true,” explains Dr. Paul A. Offit, author of the book “Do You Believe in Magic?” (Harper), a damning takedown of the alternative-medicine industry. “This is largely unregulated industry, and we aren’t told about many of the negative effects. We wade in without a lot of knowledge.”
Paltrow might be one of the more vocal advocates of alternative medicine treatments, but she’s far from a lone eccentric. Fifty percent of Americans use some form of alternative medicine — be it acupuncture, a chiropractor, crystal healing, herbal medications, or vitamins, up from 39% of the population in 1990. Ten percent even used these methods on their children.
Yet the research shows us that there is no proof that alternative medicines do us any good — and in some cases, they can do us serious harm.
“Chiropractic manipulations have torn arteries, causing permanent paralysis; acupuncture needles have caused serious viral infections or ended up in lungs, livers or hearts; dietary supplements have caused bleeding, psychosis, liver dysfunction, heart arrhythmias, seizures, and brain swelling,” writes Dr. Offit, the chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
In addition, the vitamins we take by the handful to prolong our lives might actually be shortening them. Vitamin E has been linked to higher rates of prostate cancer; and those who took vitamins A, C, E, and beta carotene had “death rates [that] were 6 percent higher” than those who did not.
What’s more is that most of what we are taking haven’t been proven to do much of anything. Of the 51,000 supplements on the market — echinacea for colds, St. John’s wort for depression, garlic for cholesterol — Dr. Offit identifies only four that might be of benefit: omega-3 fatty acids to prevent heart disease, calcium and vitamin D in postmenopausal women to prevent bone thinning and folic acid to prevent birth defects in pregnant women.
Why do so many of us know that there are serious side effects to many conventional medicines we take, yet we have no idea that vitamins and herbal remedies might cause cancer or that most are ineffective?
“The answer is that we have chosen not to know,” Offit writes. Most of us seem to know very little about the big business of alternative medicine — namely that it’s not even monitored by the Food and Drug Administration.
A Harris poll found that 68% of Americans believe that herbal manufacturers must report side effects (they don’t); 58% believe the FDA must approve herbal products (they don’t); and 55% believe that vitamin manufacturers can only make claims about safety or effectiveness with scientific evidence (not true).
Natural and ancient don’t equate to safer or more effective, he adds. Take Steve Jobs. When he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003, he had a better than likely chance of surviving with surgery. But he opted for carrot and fruit-juice fasts, bowel cleansings, hydrotherapy and herbal remedies instead. By the time doctors conducted the surgery nine months later, it was too late.
“I really didn’t want them to open up my body, so I tried to see if a few other things would work,” he later admitted with regret to his biographer Walter Isaacson.
Alternative medicine seems to tap into our conspiratorial distrust of the cold, emotionless and statistics-oriented world of big business and modern health care. Alternative medicine is “warm and fuzzy,” Offit says, and is seen as on the fringes of society — despite the fact that it’s a $34 billion a year industry.
“The alternative-medicine industry really grew out of the New Age movement, which was all about rejection of ‘the man’ and his hopeless, soulless materialism,” explains Shawn Lawrence Otto, author of “Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America.”
“We rejected the materialism of mainstream ‘corporate’ medicine and turned to ancient Eastern and indigenous practices for supposedly more ‘natural’ cures from Mother Earth,” Otto tells The Post. “It’s like saying ‘No thank you’ and trading in an MRI machine for a rock.”