The Complete Patient

The Wall Street Journal's op ed page has a pretty amazing article today by a Harvard Medical School physician, Dr. Jerome Groopman, who seems to be saying that if a patient feels relief or is helped by a nutritional supplement or other alternative therapy not proven out by "rigorous metrics," the patient is likely a victim of the placebo effect. He spends a lot of space defending a physician friend who refused to believe the testimonials from "many of her patients" that glucosamine, chondroitin sulfate helped relieve their arthritis pain. He then goes on to argue that now that the federal government's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) is doing "rigorous testing" of alternative approaches, we'll soon have all the answers we need about what works and what doesn't.  Whew, I feel better already!

Dr. Groopman is someone who does a lot of intelligent writing about medicine for the New Yorker magazine. But you have to wonder about his parroting of the medical establishment's company line trashing most alternative approaches as "magic," just where he's coming from these days.