Congratulations to The Guardian for taking on Matthias Rath, the doctor who promoted vitamin pills to HIV patients in South Africa as a substitute for anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs). Its exposure of his activities brought a libel action which cost the paper hundreds of thousands to defend but from which Dr Rath has now withdrawn. It was a brave decision to fight the case and the paper has been vindicated.
But there was one key fact missing from its extensive coverage of the case. The vitamin pills do actually work.
HIV damages the immune system which makes people feel sick. In a country where levels of nutrition are already poor, getting sufficient nutrients into the body presents a challenge. Vitamin pills can help by raising blood levels of essential nutrients and HIV-infected people frequently feel better as a result.
The problem was that Dr Rath did not merely distribute his pills as a supplement to treatment with ARVs, but as a replacement for them. Thus an effective "complementary" medicine became a lethal one.
To suggest that the vitamin pills are useless against HIV would do a disservice not only to the thousands of patients in South Africa who swallowed them, but also to the millions of adherents of alternative medicine. It is not that these remedies don't work – they do, in the sense that they make people feel better. People would not pay for them if they did not get a result (though Dr Rath distributed his pills in South Africa for free).
But that is also why they can be dangerous – because people feel better without being better. If any one doubted alternative medicine could be a killer, here is the evidence, in Dr Rath's HIV patients.
I wish I shared your faith that "People would not pay for them if they did not get a result."
But good to hear the distinction between "alternative" and "complementary" stressed - this is blurred far too often!
Posted by: Lirone | Tuesday, 16 September 2008 at 09:13 PM