NigeriansTalk

I still remem­ber the shock when I realised that the prac­tice of home­opa­thy was funded within the National Health Ser­vice (NHS) in Eng­land. I was tak­ing a lunchtime stroll when I came across the Royal Lon­don Home­o­pathic Hos­pi­tal, which as it turned out was one of the hos­pi­tals within the UCL Hos­pi­tals NHS trust, which also included the hos­pi­tal to which the Insti­tute of Neu­rol­ogy where I was study­ing at the time was affil­i­ated. I almost felt ashamed.

It was par­tic­u­larly shock­ing because the United King­dom does have a rep­u­ta­tion for sci­ence and ratio­nal­ity that is hardly equalled else­where in the world. The expe­ri­ence how­ever made it less shock­ing for me when I got to Syd­ney, Aus­tralia and found lots and lots of alter­na­tive prac­tices, with all sorts of inter­est­ing and grand names, struc­tured to deceive and con­fuse with legit­i­mate sci­ence. How­ever, I doubt that like in the UK, any is funded from the pub­lic purse of Australians.

Two weeks ago, I met a black woman from Jamaica (although born in Lon­don and raised in Auck­land). She was the first black per­son I walked up to and spoke with in Syd­ney, and the first and only per­son ever to have referred to me as ‘brother’ in the restricted black folk sense of the word. It was rather strange. I had never been a ‘brother’. There are not many in Australia.

We got on the bus together. She had stud­ied ‘alternative/complimentary med­i­cine’ in her youth and had also received train­ing in home­opa­thy. Much of the rest of the trip was spent dis­cussing the claims of home­opa­thy, dur­ing which she argued that home­opa­thy was much like vac­ci­na­tion. I was so mad, but out of cour­tesy I had to change the topic imme­di­ately. It reminded me of Ray­mond Tallis‘ 2007 Sense about Sci­ence annual lec­ture where he said:

…and this is how it is with junk sci­ence that bor­rows the ter­mi­nol­ogy of sci­ence, with­out any sense of its true mean­ing, and of the mas­sive inter­con­nected hin­ter­land of facts and con­cepts and even uncer­tain­ties behind them.

…and so we have treat­ments such as ‘reflex­ol­ogy’ which expro­pri­ates a well-established, indeed cen­tral, con­cept in bio­log­i­cal sci­ence, and uses it to label treat­ments that have no bio­log­i­cal foun­da­tion whatsoever.

…and ‘homoeopa­thy’ which, being in Greek, one of the lan­guages of sci­ence, sounds very sci­en­tific but is based on magic think­ing that would shame a six year old child.

…they domes­ti­cate terms by uproot­ing them from a com­pli­cated nexus of hard-won concepts.

When­ever I see those Syd­ney shops or offices, what comes to mind is how suc­cess­ful alter­na­tive med­i­cine practice/movement is in Nige­ria as well, and how they feed on pretty much the same sen­ti­ments. I reckon it must indeed be a uni­ver­sal phe­nom­e­non. Thank­fully, we are not yet at the stage where the Niger­ian gov­ern­ment will fund an alter­na­tive med­ical prac­tice, but I bet we are not that far either. I am almost cer­tain of it that the move­ment will soon have a ’sci­en­tific’ arm made up of peo­ple trained as much as to be able to throw ter­mi­nolo­gies around but not quite as much as to have any deep, nuanced under­stand­ing of them.

Here is an excerpt from an adver­to­r­ial on the pop­u­lar Doc­tor Akin­tunde Ayeni of Yem-Kem Inter­na­tional Nige­ria Lim­ited:

…he [has] invested resources – time and money to visit renowned herbal homes in India, China, Aus­tralia, Japan and Pak­istan. In sim­i­lar vein, [prac­ti­tion­ers] of alter­na­tive ther­apy in those coun­tries visit him, here in Nige­ria, to exchange notes. The result of these research efforts is man­i­fested in the emer­gence of our three prod­ucts namely (1) Blood Cure, which a blood puri­fier and immune boost­ing herbal med­i­cine (2) M & T Cap­sule which is an effec­tive herbal med­i­cine for all chronic fever and (3) Energy 2000 which is a pow­er­ful herbal med­i­cine for sex abil­ity defi­cient patients.

The words again: ‘research’, ‘immune’, ‘cap­sule’, ‘doc­tor’, ‘dis­cover’, et cetera. It is also inter­est­ing that Aus­tralia has its place among the vis­i­bly ori­en­tal coun­tries that Akin­tunde Ayeni has visited.

John Dia­mond, who before his even­tual death had his hopes of cure from can­cer falsely raised by sev­eral alter­na­tive med­i­cine prac­ti­tion­ers did put what would be my sum­ma­tion very beau­ti­fully: “There is in real­ity no such thing as alter­na­tive med­i­cine, just med­i­cine that works and med­i­cine that doesn’t…There isn’t an ‘alter­na­tive’ phys­i­ol­ogy or anatomy or ner­vous sys­tem any more than there’s an alter­na­tive map of Lon­don which lets you get to Bat­tersea from Chelsea with­out cross­ing the Thames.”

So how do you define med­i­cine that works? Well, the same way that Artemisinin made its way from the fields of cen­tral China to clin­ics every­where chloro­quine resis­tant Malaria is treated.