TV: Alternative Medicine
Authors: John Garrow
Journal: BMJ (2006)

The three programmes in this series investigate acupuncture, healing, and herbal medicine. The investigator is Kathy Sykes, professor of public engagement in science and engineering at Bristol University, who has an inviting manner, a polite scepticism, and friends who give her access to expensive equipment, such as the powerful magnetic resonance scanner at the University of York. She speaks enthusiastically, direct to camera, as she strides through the crowded streets of Shanghai in search of a master acupuncturist who will explain to her exactly how acupuncture works, or driving (apparently alone) across the deserts of Arizona to test the theory that gifted healers really can heal.​heal.



Figure 1

At the sharp end: presenter Kathy Sykes gets stuck into acupuncture



The trailer to the series on the BBC 2 website promises that she “begins her journey in China where she hears and sees powerful evidence that acupuncture works. The most astonishing is a scene in a Chinese hospital in which doctors perform open heart surgery on a young woman using acupuncture instead of a general anaesthetic.” Well, yes: the patient is a conscious 21 year old factory worker who has had sedative drugs, and her chest is “numbed” (presumably by local anaesthetic), so it is difficult to assess the contribution the numerous acupuncture needles make to her calm compliance.

We see patients whose pain from osteoarthritis of the knee was relieved by acupuncture; Dr Brian Berman, director of the Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, testifies that the benefit of true acupuncture is significantly greater than that of sham acupuncture; and Edzard Ernst, professor of complementary medicine at Peninsula Medical School, agrees that acupuncture seems effective in treating osteoarthritis of the knee.

The grand finale is Professor Sykes and colleagues showing that when a needle is pushed through the skin of a volunteer whose head is in a brain scanner there is visible activity in the limbic area, but when it is pushed further, and the volunteer experiences a change in qi (a sensation related to energy running through acupuncture meridians), there is a change in brain activity. It is claimed that this observation may fundamentally change the way we think about the ability of acupuncture to relieve pain.


It is easy to criticise programmes of this genre, because all the scientific niceties are not, and cannot be, fully explained


The third programme, on herbal therapies, taps that part of alternative medicine in which important advances in therapy are most likely to be found. Of course, plants have been the source of many conventional drugs of proven value, but perhaps herbs containing several active components might make them more effective (or more harmful) than pure synthetic drugs. Simon Mills, a herbalist whom Professor Sykes consults, diagnoses her condition as “hot damp,” and says he would treat it with herbs that tend to “cool and dry.” There is little to be said for this, and Professor Sykes's expression of disbelief is an adequate response.

It is easy to criticise programmes of this genre, because all the scientific niceties are not, and cannot be, fully explained. If they were, many viewers would be bored and simply switch channels. Yes, Professor Sykes overstates the significance of studies which, she says, “proved” something worked, when to an academic audience she might have said they supported that hypothesis. She is not, however, addressing academics, but BBC 2 viewers, and she shows them that it is possible to apply properly designed clinical trials to alternative therapies, for which she deserves congratulation. Even some of our own profession need tuition in that field.