Feature

Medicine in a spin

The proliferation of alternative therapies, in reality, implies a conservative co-existence with existing structures of society, not a challenge to them, says Ros Coward. Here we publish extracts from her new book The Whole Truth

Who could have foreseen, 15 years ago the current popularity of ‘alternative ‘ medicine and therapies with all that they imply about attitudes towards health, the body and the emotions? There was nothing to indicate that the 1980’s would see an extraordinary proliferation of so-called fringe therapies. Who could have foretold that reflexology, aromatherapy and the Alexander technique would no longer be the pastimes of cranks but treatments for bodily and mental well being recognised by large sectors of the population?

In the 1950’s and 1960’s, the concerns about health and the body were very different from our own current obsessions. Then was a period of basic optimism in the medical establishment. Most infectious disease were under control; indeed an effective vaccine against poliomyelitis seemed to spell the definitive end to disastrous epidemics. Improved hygiene, the triumph of medical cures and developments in surgical techniques, suggested that a very few illnesses would be without any kind of treatment. And, in Britain at least, health was a right, for the first time available to the ordinary person.

For most people, health was something which only became an issue when they were ill. Health and illness were beyond control. Health was something dispensed by doctors. Illness was down to chance — either in the form of contact with an external virus or some genetic predisposition to a particular disease.

Of course there were always groups who challenged the scientific orthodoxy and who viewed the body, and the individual’s role in health and illness, differently. Herbalism and homeopathy are old-established practices, offering quite different forms of treatment from the medical establishment. In fact most of the alternative therapies currently enjoying vogue are based on ideas originating somewhere in the 1880’s and the 1930’s.

But all these views had the stigma of ‘unorthodox’, and carried connotations of the unscientific or mystical. What they had to say about the body and health was regarded as belief rather than science and they were relegated firmly to the fringe.

Yet conventional medicine in the post-war period was ripe for criticism. There was a growing awareness of the ‘inhumanity’ of conventional health care. Increasingly, people realised that some of the major events of life-birth, illness and death have been horrendously mismanaged in a society where status and profit predominated. People have found themselves caring for sick and dying relatives and friends without support from the medical profession. Perhaps medical institutions actively contributed to the horrors of illness and loss. Increasingly, the attitudes of male professionalism have seemed outrageously at odds with a supposedly caring profession. At the same time, conventional medicine carried a message that disease and illness were arbitrary, having no meaning in terms of the quality of a persons life. For the first time in Western history disease was separated from any moral or religious discourse.

These two developments in conventional medicine are not in fact necessarily connected with each other. Allopathic medicine is based on philosophies of the external causalty of illness. There is no necessity that such a philosophy should produce impersonality in care and a disregard of people in favour of profit.

The humanity of the medical profession doesn’t arise directly out of the notion of disease in allopathic medicine. This inhumanity is much more likely to be explained by the professional hierarchies, the unequal division of labour between men and women, the prevalence of professional attitudes and the pursuit of profit by pharmaceutical companies. Yet these two elements were seen by many as one and the same thing. Indeed, exponents of alternative medicine often blame conventional medicine’s inhumanity on the fact that it refuses to see the connection between illness and the individual’s life.

What happened with alternative medicine was symptomatic of what happened in many areas of society at the same moment. People blamed everything that was wrong on ‘materialism’, on philosophies which argued that individuals were not responsible for the good and evil that befell them. Thus instead of criticising the structures of work, or the failures and neglects of conventional medicine, there evolved a full scale attack on the way personal responsibility for health has been played down.

Alternative therapies came to be viewed as something more than complementing or supplementing the failures of allopathic medicine. They became a place for a new philosophy of personal responsibility. As with other social developments, lack of personal responsibility became an easy way of describing all the complicated reasons why institutions and practices had evolved in certain ways.

Many practitioners of alternative medicine will doubtless be angered to find themselves linked to conservative views of society. For them the movement is giving voice to a social discontent with the social status quo. Yet these criticisms almost invariably slide towards a polarisation between the generations of ‘the modern’ on one hand, and ‘nature’ on the other. It is rare for these criticisms to join up with a more thorough-going challenge to the structures of a capitalist society.

Frequently the criticism of society expressed in alternative therapies turns into a nostalgia for an imagined wholeness and health, for what has been destroyed by modern society. The health of the body is presented as the vital front line by which the individual can counter the excesses of ‘modernity’, of ‘industrialization’ and impersonality.

Becoming healthy has become synonymous with finding ‘nature’ and a ‘natural life style’ and this is to be the route by which advanced industrial society will be resisted. The resistance does not rest on the analysis of social structures, of social divisions, of unequal control of resources. Instead it is a vision of personal resistance, of making oneself ‘ immune’ to modern life.

The alternative health movement has become a place where the individual can play out, in a highly personal way, a sense of the corruptions of modernity and the struggle against these corruptions.

Now the corruptions are no longer the religious sins of greed, sex and envy, nor the economic sins of capitalism but rather bad parenting, bad diet, bad posture, the abuse of food and nature. The solution to these are rarely political. They are individual. It is up to individuals to transform themselves, to deal with the pain and suffering imposed by modern life.

The emphasis on personal responsibility rarely generates political empowerment. It may generate a sense of being able to accomplish things within the existing status quo, but it rarely promises the ability to transform social structures.

The crucial aim in all this work is that the individual should feel better, less in conflict and less dragged down by the horrors of modern life. The rewards of this are very often rather paradoxical. The individual will be able to do better, to achieve more and live in greater ease in society. Very often the aims are explicitly conservative. They are aims of harmony, order, balance, the end of struggle, strife and ‘unproductive’ conflict.

The possibility that there are very real objective interests governing the form of society in which we live is erased in these aims. The healed individual is one who can have and be anything in the existing society.

It is a potential misrepresentation of alternative therapies to concentrate on the philosophies of personal resolution. Many people within the alternative therapies movement are concerned in active ways with anti-nuclear and ecological politics. And it would also be extremely foolish to challenge some of the hopes of this health movement. Who wants to be miserable and in conflict, and possible even ill if you can be well and contented? And what’s wrong with starting with the individual and then looking for wider changes based on a community of changed individuals?

The problem is that the aspirations of this self-transformation are rarely limited just to feeling in optimum good health or empowered. To achieve this state of well-being the individual will have to transform his or her personality. And this transformation has very definite goals, the individual without conflict, the individual who is no longer up in arms about society, the individual who has expressed and got rid of anger and envy, the emotions which might lead him or her into conflict with society.

You will only be well if you can achieve this emotional state. This is truly the route of being ‘alternative’, for alternative implies co-existing with existing structures not challenging them. And action simply becomes a matter of personal choice between two routes, rather than a matter of creating a different society with different values.

Extract from The Whole Truth by Rosalind Coward, published by Faber and Faber, June 1989. £12.99.