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The Whole Truth by Rosalind Coward, Faber & Faber, pp 216, Pounds
sterling 12.99

CITIZENS of the Western World who are sick (or who think they are sick)
are hedging their bets. While still crowding the surgeries and outpatient
departments and hospital beds run by ‘proper’ doctors, they are increasingly
seeking help from the practitioners of a wide variety of ‘alternative’ therapies,
from acupuncture to radiesthesia, and from homeopathy to Kirlian photography
(which cleverly gets your ‘spiritual’ aura down on pretty physical bits
of paper).

A recent guesstimate claims that one in every three members of our pragmatic,
down-to-earth, materialistic society has looked to the pedlars of irrational
and mystical cures for a treatment of their ills.

Why? In The Whole Truth, which she has subtitled The Myth of Alternative
Health, Rosalind Coward has tried to answer this fascinating question.

As her subtitle suggests, she is no fan of dissident doctoring, but
her book is not a critical appraisal of the many ‘alternative’ therapies
on offer. She doesn’t, for example, explain why there might be a rational
explanation for some of the claims made for the efficacy of acupuncture,
or why ‘cell therapy’ has to be a load of old rubbish. She also devotes
only a three or four uncritical lines to the strange reasoning by which
Hahnemann, the founder of homeopathy, arrived at the ideas that are the
foundation of one of the most widely practised forms of dissident doctoring.

She has, instead, read a lot of books and articles and leaflets, and
spoken to people, in an attempt to discern and describe the philosophy that
has given rise to and sustains the entire alternative health movement.

Her conclusion is that a new ‘religion of the body’ has emerged, founded
on the doctrine that we all harbour ‘internal energies’ which work to keep
us healthy unless their balance is distorted by assault from an inappropriate
life style or set of attitudes (a distortion which might, for example, give
rise to the ‘cancer personality’ or the ‘AIDS personality’). All the dissident
healers, she claims, purport to correct any harmful disproportion of these
vital forces, thus allowing ‘Nature’ to work a cure and fend off further
trouble. Nature, she writes, ‘is probably the most important concept in
the alternative health movement. To claim that a therapy, medicine or food
is ‘natural’ is to validate it instantly.

The implication of this concept of the springs of suffering is that
individuals are to blame for any faults of the mind or body they may experience.
Respect the natural laws, and all will be well, ensuring not only health,
but, probably, wealth to boot. Those who ignore the rules have only themselves
to blame if they languish. This absolves society, and thus politicians,
from any responsibility for the causes of ill health. There is little ‘we’
can do about it. It’s up to the person.

Having, she believes, identified the idea central to the current enthusiasm
for alternative therapies. Ros Coward has decided that it has been engendered
by and reflects the values of a Thatcherite conserv-atism, wherein it is
up to the individual to engineer his or her own salvation, and the devil
take the hindmost.

It’s an interesting thesis, but one that might have been argued adequately
in a review article rather than in a whole book, which largely ignores other
possible causes for the return to the cult of the witch doctors.

She does acknowledge briefly that some of the shift may be due to popular
dissatifaction with the increasingly impersonal delivery of modern high-tech
and drug-dominated medical care, yet makes no attempt to explain how it
is that the practitioners of so many bizarre and wildly different alternative
therapies often seem to benefit their clients.

Perhaps dissident healers do share a common theory of pathgenesis, which
might appeal to the imagination and political bias of their customers,but
how would an awareness of this ideology make invalids feel better after
visiting their friendly neighbourhood crank doctor? I suspect that the dissidents
often score because, lacking physically effective tools (just like the ‘proper’
doctors of half-a-century ago), they make maximum use of sympathy, empathy,
suggestion and persuasion.

It may even be that the very successes of modern medicine have boosted
the trade for the unorthodox. We have been encouraged to believe that there
is ‘a pill for every ill’. We no longer accept suffering as God-imposed
and ineluctable. There has to be a cure, so if it can’t be provided by the
NHS we look elsewhere.

There is also, and always has been, a love of simple magic. When we
find the real world too difficult we like to take comfort in the hope that
there are ‘forces out there’ which can transcend the laws of physics.

Rosalind Coward has illuminated a part of the phenomenon of the current
enthusiasm for alternative medicine, but by no means the whole.