Roberta Bivins’s well researched history of alternative medicine, now available in a paperback edition, shows that popular interest in medical alternatives is not new. The author also remarks that the extravagant costs and proliferating bureaucracies of ‘objective’ biomedicine” as well as the decreasing effectiveness of antibiotics and the failing of many miracle medicines have done much to fuel the interest in alternative medicine.
Hermann Busschof was successfully cured from a severe gout attack during his stay in Batavia, (now Jakarta, Indonesia) in 1662, thanks to the technique of moxabustion whereby small cones of fiber are burnt on top of certain points on the body’s surface. Busschof wrote enthusiastically about this technique which causes no “blisters” or “after pain”. He argued that, the reason this technique was unknown, was due “to the carelessness and conceitedness of the Europeans… as if they alone were possessed of all knowledge, and those nations had no share at all in it.”
Busschof was joined by Sir William Temple, a well-known English diplomat, in his condemnation of “regular European Medicine… overtly devoted to theory and orthodoxy, and insufficiently interested in observation and empirical practice.”
Moxabustion was successful in Europe because it was westernized and compared to caustics and cautery; when those techniques ceased to be used, so did moxabustion. Acupuncture, unlike moxabustion, had no European equivalent, and it did not attract the attention of a particular group of patients like gout sufferers who were cured by moxabustion.
Although Europeans, in the late 18th and early 19th century, were indifferent to Chinese and Indian medicine, they were attracted to homeopathy, developed in the early 1800s by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843). It is a low-cost, non- toxic health care system now used by hundreds of millions of people around the world. It is particularly popular in South America, and the British Royal Family has had a homeopathic physician for the last four generations. Homeopathy is an excellent first-aid system and is very effective in the treatment of minor ailments such as earaches, the common cold, and flu. Homeopathy is again based on the treatment of the individual and when used by an experienced practitioner can also cure hay fever, digestive problems, rheumatoid arthritis, and respiratory infections.
Homeopathy was successful mainly because it was gentle and did not produce immediate and dramatic effects on the human body. On the other hand, people treated by conventional medicine in the early 19th century were subjected to harsh treatments: “Patients were regularly bled to syncope (unconsciousness), cupped, and scarified. As well being bled through these general means, they were puked, purged, and poisoned; in some common diseases such as syphillis, patients were treated with mercury until their teeth loosened in their jaws…"
And of course they were the leeches. One American patient, Emily Mason, wrote to her sister of the treatment she was due to receive for facial pain: "Today, I am threatened with leeching: Don’t you envy me having those sweet little worms in my mouth?”
It is also interesting to see how Europeans judged traditional Chinese medicine. Sir John Floyder, in the early 18th century, wrote that “the Asiatic have a gay luxurious imagination, but the Europeans excel in reasoning and judgment, and clearness of expression.” A century later, Berlioz, a young French physician investigated the technique of acupuncture, acknowledged its benefits for certain ailments. However he denied Chinese physicians any credit for discovering the technique. Moreover, acupuncture in those days was practiced without any reference to yin, yang and qi, a system of channels and vessels linking the body’s organs with its surface.
The amazing commercial success of Tiger Balm in the West from the 1960s until today shows how mentality has changed in Europe concerning traditional Chinese medicine. Originally created, produced and marketed by the sons of the Aw family, Hakka Chinese immigrants to Rangoon and thence Singapore and Honk Kong in the late nineteenth century. This shows that Western consumers have now access to any medication in the world, and can use it in the same way it is used in their country of origin.
With the rise of chronic and degenerative illnesses, intransigent to biomedical intervention, alternative therapies are very appealing. Furthermore, migraines, depression, back pain, allergies, arthritis, nausea, addiction, insomnia and chronic pain have proven unresponsive to orthodox medicine. However, many people whether practitioners or patients, are calling for regulations in the case of homeopathy, herbal medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, Ayurvedic medicine and chiropractic.
Ayurvedic medicine has been practiced for the past five thousand years and has recently undergone a renaissance in the West due to the work and lectures of Dr. Deepak Chopra. It is a very comprehensive system that places equal emphasis on body, mind, and spirit and uses a highly personalized approach to return an individual to a state where he or she is again in harmony with their environment. Ayurvedic medicine uses diet, exercise, meditation, yoga, massage, herbs and medication and is as applicable today as it was 5000 years ago.
Nowadays, concludes the author, “more people can gain access to a variety of medical systems and purchase the medical productions of a global marketplace” thanks to the information available on the Internet and to the success and popularity of the travel industry.
