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The Editors welcome submissions for possible publication in the Letters section. Authors of letters should:
•Include no more than 300 words of text, three authors, and five references
•Type with double-spacing
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Letters commenting on an Annals article will be considered if they are received within 6 weeks of the time the article was published. Only some of the letters received can be published. Published letters are edited and may be shortened; tables and figures are included only selectively. Authors will be notified that the letter has been received. If the letter is selected for publication, the author will be notified about 3 weeks before the publication date. Unpublished letters cannot be returned.
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IN RESPONSE:
Dr. Sergeant's discussion of the “inevitable truths” underlying medicine is eloquent. The term “faux medicine” is a creative addition to the groups of terms (such as “unproven” and “unscientific”) that view the common thread of alternative medicine as a bogus, primitive, and delusional conceptual model.
Indeed, science and technology have bestowed much of humanity with enormous material benefits. But for most patients in the waiting room, their health care is not reducible to a scientific event. As Dr. Sergeant has implied, disease may be a physical fact, but existential, personal, and subjective considerations necessarily linger whenever health is threatened (1, 2). Being sick inevitably involves passion and the imagination and has a deep component of narrative and fantasy (3). The suffering of illness includes “the realm of social roles, group identification, the relation with self, body, or family, or the relation with a transpersonal, transcendent source of meaning” (4). Much that is not scientific is at stake.
In my view, whenever the proud banner of triumphant science is used to separate conventional medicine from alternative medicine, alternative medicine inevitably wins. In the face of irreducible uncertainty and genuine mystery, physicians need to foster and use a language that acknowledges, without necessarily agreeing to, alternative responses to the “unbearable” sorrow of life. As noted by Stanley Hauerwas, “We must be careful not to rob others of … [their humanity] in our attempt to spare their suffering” (5). This includes medical beliefs and practices that one may disagree with or that threaten the cultural and political power of medicine. Calling the beliefs of people (especially our patients) “ignorance” is inevitably perceived as a kind of “white-man's burden” colonialism. Like telling patients not to feel fear, grief, or despair, dismissing “subjective clutching” does not make it go away.
The value of alternative medicine for conventional medicine should not be primarily as a “foil” with which to proclaim conventional medicine's own righteousness and scientific certainty. Alternative medicine might instead be an opportunity for medicine to reflect on how its scientific apparatus needs to be tempered by magic—even if this magic is usually called “art.”
The Editors welcome submissions for possible publication in the Letters section. Authors of letters should:
•Include no more than 300 words of text, three authors, and five references
•Type with double-spacing
•Send three copies of the letter, an authors' form signed by all authors, and a cover letter describing any conflicts of interest related to the contents of the letter.
Letters commenting on an Annals article will be considered if they are received within 6 weeks of the time the article was published. Only some of the letters received can be published. Published letters are edited and may be shortened; tables and figures are included only selectively. Authors will be notified that the letter has been received. If the letter is selected for publication, the author will be notified about 3 weeks before the publication date. Unpublished letters cannot be returned.
Annals welcomes electronically submitted letters.
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