Hokum or healing?

NAOMI ARNOLD

Forget religion and politics. If you want to start a fight around the dinner table, bring up alternative therapies.

Depending on your mix of family and friends, you'll get one person strenuously denying that any of that hippie crap works, another gently suggesting that there is perhaps more to life than bald fact, someone else who'll bravely volunteer their experience with reiki, and probably a good few more who'll be keeping very quiet about the kooky stuff they've dabbled in.

Most of it is available in Nelson. Our region was once known as a hippie hotbed; now, if our hippiness has hardened to the point of gentrification, we're still a destination for many alternative health practitioners.

Nelson also hosts events like next month's Evolve, a festival of alternative and complementary treatments; and Luminate, which combines music with workshops on alternative ways of thinking, healing and living.

Whether you call your therapies natural, integrative, holistic, alternative, traditional or complementary, two things they all have in common is that they're outside the medical norm, and they claim to generally look at the whole of the human being, not just the physical.

In Nelson, they range from the reasonably familiar to the more esoteric. If you have a problem – or even if you don't – take your pick of apipuncture, ayurveda, energy healing, herbalism, chiropractic, colon cleansing, DNA reprogramming, brain repatterning, meditation, magnets, colloidal silver, detoxing, emotional freedom therapy, shiatsu, rebirthing, yoga, thermography, holistic pulsing, cranio-sacral therapy, reiki, resonance therapy, neural-spinal scans, hyperbaric oxygen therapy, Bowen therapy, herbalism, hypnotherapy, zero balancing, Chinese medicine and reflexology. Few are backed by the scientific Holy Grail of a randomised double-blind controlled trial.

A few alternative treatments got a sad sort of billing last June when Sir Paul Callaghan – bastion of science, physicist and New Zealander of the Year – turned to them to treat his terminal bowel cancer.

During an enforced break from chemotherapy, Sir Paul blogged that he was trying "unproven but interesting therapies" including intravenous high-dose vitamin C, traditional Chinese remedies and vegetable juice.

"Let me be clear. I do not deviate one step from my trust in evidence-based medicine," Sir Paul said in his blog.

However, if there was a potentially effective but unproven drug, "why would I not try it?" he asked. "Am I mad? Probably."

Sir Paul spoke out again yesterday after his "unusual experiment" failed, saying he was concerned that alternative medicine advocates were using him to promote the controversial treatment in a misleading way, and that people promoting products without evidence was "quite repellent".

But if Sir Paul will undergo inject Vitamin C, you can bet your last Panadol that any one of us, when suffering stress, cancer or pain, might trawl the internet and feel a stab of hope when we walk through the door of a complementary therapist.

And we do, in increasing numbers. The New Zealand Health Survey found a quarter of us saw a complementary and alternative health practitioner in 2002-3. In 2006-7, it was nearly a third of us. A 2007 article in the New Zealand Medical Journal stated there was emerging evidence that its use may be as common in children as adults, and a Global Industry Analysts report released last week predicted the worldwide traditional medicine market will reach US$114 billion (NZ$142b) by 2015.

Taxpayers are also forking out plenty. In May last year, the Government appointed David St George as chief adviser of integrative care, to provide professional leadership, direction and advice on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), and on the integration of CAM with conventional health care, particularly in the area of primary care and chronic care conditions.

The Accident Compensation Corporation spent $41.7 million on complementary and alternative therapies in the 2010-2011 year, up from $18.4m in 2003-04. The latest figure included $18.2m on acupuncture, $12.3m on chiropractic and $11.1m on osteopathy sessions. (In Nelson, ACC spent $574,761 on those three therapies).

Work and Income also funds alternativetherapy, as long as it is approved by a registered medical practitioner, which includes chiropractors. Big business, then.

Plenty of people, including local artist Marilyn Andrews, don't mind not knowing why their complementary therapies have an effect. They only care if it does. "It's wacky but it works," Ms Andrews says.

She's visited herbalists, chiropractors, and most dramatically, a kinesiologist, after suffering from weeks of "disturbing" heart palpitations that her GP couldn't help with. "[They] didn't seem to have a cure, apart from waiting to see what would happen in a week or two, and if it got worse to go to a hospital [for] an ECG [heart monitoring]," she says. Needless to say, she wasn't reassured.

She made an appointment with a local "magic man", a kinesiologist who she won't name – because such is his fame, he no longer advertises. It took her years to convince herself to go, and after one treatment she had no more palpitations. Suggest her cure was down to a placebo effect, and she says it doesn't matter. "Every time I've been to him with a problem he's fixed it – like that," she says. "Whatever works."

It's a common story.

"Using a sledgehammer to knock in a pin" is how Motueka's Arcadia Organics therapist Peter Woodgate describes modern medicine. He and wife Linda are refugees from the English rat race. They've now got their health store on the market as they concentrate more on therapy.

As well as ear candling and Indian head massage, between them they practise and teach emotional therapy, animal healing, laughter yoga, hypnotherapy spiritual healing, holistic massage, and kinesiology.

Mr Woodgate is not against modern medicine, he cautions – that's why he prefers the phrase "complementary therapies". He would never, for example, tell someone to stop taking medication.

"It's just a different way of looking at things," Mr Woodgate says. "Modern science has only been around for the last 200 years. A lot of the [therapies] have been done for thousands of years."

Scientists cry that doesn't equal proof. But he says "everyone's different".

"There'll always be the guys I come across who say it's a whole heap of rubbish and that's cool. That's their life," Mrs Woodgate says. "But there are people who get to a point and say `Is this all my life is about? Is this it?' And they start to question. They're much more inquisitive and are looking for different ways and things to excite them in their life."

To charges of "show us the proof", Mr Woodgate says it's frustrating when people blindly believe science, "when it's all run on theories".

There's one easy question to ask people who demand evidence, he says. "You ask if they're in a relationship. They might say `Yes'.You say, `Do you love your partner?' They say `Yes'. You say `Can you measure it'?"

His point is, "there are things we can't measure and we know they exist and we know they're there".

And modern medicine fails people's expectations sometimes. Nelson medical massage and BodyTalk therapist Beth Beauchamp treats sceptics of complementary medicine. Ms Beauchamp worked in sales in the United States until an interest in health and fitness spawned her new career, which eventually led her to Nelson. She's been here for three years, working out of her practice in Bank Lane.

BodyTalk, of which Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey are reportedly fans, is based on the belief that the body knows how to heal itself, but gets overloaded and then malfunctions, causing complaints. A BodyTalk practitioner rewires the body by using muscle testing and light tapping on the head and sternum to open up communication and get the body functioning again.

"I will often get people who've gone through the [mainstream] model ... but not completely got to the root cause of the issue," Ms Beauchamp says. They don't want to give up on trying to fix it.

She can't understand why people put up with pain and limited mobility, such as a shoulder that's been bothering them for decades. "My philosophy is: We'll find something that works."

At Being on Nile St, Anna Szefczyk-Moore believes Nelsonians are a pretty accepting bunch. With a background in sexual abuse and other counselling, she now practises lymphatic drainage, massage and cranio-sacral therapy. Over the last 32 years, she's watched alternative treatments in the region grow from a few massage therapists, frequented mostly by Europeans and sportspeople, to today, when masseurs have just about reached saturation point. She thinks complementary therapies are a part of Nelson's fabric now. "You still have a wide variety or range of people here who [have] the alternate flavour as well as some of the [conservative]. But because we have that blend there's a little bit more tolerance," she says.

She feels it would be helpful for all body workers to have some counselling background. "There's a lot of emotional release that happens on the table."

Still, she says that throughout history there's always been charlatans. "In one sense, I feel sad that there are people out there on the bandwagon and coming from a money point of view ... you do need to make money to pay for your bread and butter and I don't like seeing people ripped off. There's got to be integrity there."

Perhaps complementary therapists are simply peddling time and attention to what's been dubbed the "worried well" – those with ongoing niggling health issues and money to spend on seeking a cure.

Nelson GP spokesman Graham Loveridge believes that's a big part of complementary medicine, and modern medicine isn't necessarily opposed to it. Indeed, lines are blurring on some.

"Therapies involving touch, human contact and empathy improve immune and body function," he says. "A lot of it is about the magic of having a person focusing just on you, hearing your story, paying attention to you.

"If you're sleeping better, moving better, exercising better, then your immune system is going to be more effective than if you're lacking sleep, stressed, depressed and not eating well."

Some conditions can certainly help, such as yoga, lymphatic drainage for swelling, the Alexander technique for posture, regular meditation to lower blood pressure, and the balanced diets recommended by most therapists.

Yet he also cautions there's a strong placebo effect, and anecdote – those dinner-time testimonies – does not equal evidence.

"Some of the stuff like prolotherapy, honey bee sting therapy, homeopathy – it's very hard to find a rational scientific explanation that would give anyone with a scientific background reason to believe that would work," he says.

And yes, it is a special Nelson phenomenon. "Nelson and Golden Bay probably have a greater number of people who are interested in these alternative treatments."

That interest affects our uptake of immunisation and fluoridation rates. "That's a good example where medicines made a lot of effort to get evidence where the counter arguments run on anecdote.

"The problem occurs when some of these therapies draw too long a bow. [If] it's not threatening them getting other appropriate treatment then that's fine.

"The concern would happen if someone was seeking an alternative treatment for a condition that's potentially dangerous and if left unmanaged in other ways is going to have consequences for them."

He's seen one or two turn up including a woman who was trying to control cervical bleeding with natural therapies, and ended up having major surgery for cervical cancer.

"As a doctor you feel a mild sense of frustration that you can see people believing things that as a scientist you can't possibly see it would work."

Meanwhile, Ms Beauchamp believes the region should be promoting itself as an alternative destination, taking advantage of its inbuilt reputation as a healing enclave.

"There's so much opportunity to market this region as an active, adventure, holistic, healing, health centre," she says. "Come. Get healthy. Refresh."

HEAL ME

Naomi Arnold throws herself into the healing hands of some alternative remedy practitioners.

Energetic Healing

Marcus Taylor became a devotee of energetic healing after a diving accident shattered his spine and left him paralysed. "I had to put my money where my mouth was and walk the walk," he says. The method he uses is "revolutionary". "It's leading edge: quantum physics, quantum mechanics."

He's now broken into "semi-mainstream" after treating a burnt-out GP who walked away saying "unbelievable". The GP now refers patients to him.

He explains that I'll be on a massage table, and he'll sit at the head, drop into an alpha state, and the process begins. I might fall asleep. Some people even snore.

The music is soothing and there's a heavy smell of lavender. He does not touch me once, and during the lavender-scented hour I drift in and out of consciousness until the music stops and I emerge. Apparently, and somewhat disappointingly, he's found not much out of balance with my energy.

"I definitely expanded your energetic field," he says as I leave. "I think you'll be feeling a bit floaty and blissed out for the rest of the day. You're topped up to 100 per cent energetic-wise."

I do indeed feel very refreshed and happy. Still, is one man's trance another man's afternoon nap?

Kinesiology

Motueka. Another table. Peter Woodgate is giving me a short "human warrant of fitness" using applied kinesiology, which involves me offering up my right arm. He holds it and uses tapping and bending motions to read my body, listening to what it has to say for itself on a "physical, electrical, emotional and nutritional level".

He 'scans' my body through my arm, and quickly picks up an ongoing sciatic problem. "It's working with the body rather than on it," he says, and presses into my lower back, giving my body a reminder to heal itself. I hope it listens.

Shen

My third table. Laura Campbell, of Kina's Life Design, is one of just four Shen practitioners in New Zealand. "There are more therapists [in Nelson] than people coming to see them," she says, joking: "We need more ill people!"

Shen was discovered by "a deeply unhappy scientist" attending a natural therapy workshop, who began investigating that most elusive of terms: "energy".

Its practitioners believe that by using the body's electromagnetic biofield, emotional blockages and psychological distress can be resolved by touching and "unlocking" areas where emotion is held in the body.

I lie on the table and drift off again as she works on me. When I awake, I am again refreshed – although it takes several sessions to feel results.

Emotional Freedom Techniques

Horrors. Five minutes after interviewing Anna Wilde about EFT, I am bawling like a teenager, somehow having linked what I thought were normal adult issues to my childhood inability to do long division. In my worst professional nightmares, I didn't think it would come to this.

But Anna Wilde is very kind. I sob messily for an hour while she talks and taps acupuncture points, and I eventually feel better. I go back to the office and dodge questions about my blotchy eyelids and puffy face. I never did learn long division.

Swedish Massage

I thought I was going to Stoke's The Life Centre for reflexology, but I end up on a massage table while Kerry Clark begins a relaxation massage. This is more like it. Bliss at last.

Until I get back to work and two hours later find my right hip has seized, with pains shooting down to my knee. Has my week released some evil demons?

That night, I lie awake until I seek relief in a tube of arnica. Is it proven? Not sure. If it works, do I care what the scientists say? Not one bit.

- © Fairfax NZ News