The Physician has but a single task: to cure; and, if s/he succeeds, it matters not a whit by what means s/he has succeeded. Hippocrates (400 BC)

Questionable and Deceptive Health Care Practices

In the position paper entitled “Questionable and Deceptive Health Care Practices (1),” The Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB) suggests that Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) (2), or that CAM practitioners themselves, provide medical care which is “unproven, unsafe, worthless, incompetent, unprofessional, improper, unlawful, fraudulent and felonious.” The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) (3) with a budget in 2010 of $128,791,000, “conducts and supports basic and applied research and training and disseminates information on complementary and alternative medicine to practitioners and the public.” In essence, the FSMB (4), an organization which governs the standards of care and licensing of all US physicians considers a 130 million-dollar-tax-payer-financed division of the NIH to be “unproven, unsafe, worthless, incompetent, unprofessional, improper, unlawful, fraudulent and felonious.”

This rift between large organizations which set policies as to what constitutes “accepted standards of care” is prototypic of the raging conflict between conventional and non-conventional or complementary and alternative medicine.

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), being the “new kid on the block,” apparently treads lightly and seeks to merely “complement” conventional medicine in order to avoid a confrontation with conventional medicine, which sees any challenge to its supremacy as “unproven, unsafe, worthless, incompetent, unprofessional, improper, unlawful, fraudulent and felonious.” Most of NCCAMs projects and grants are aimed at research into indigenous healing practices such as herbal medicine, and very little is focused on functional medicine (5), the author’s field of expertise.

Functional Medicine

Functional medicine is defined as “personalized medicine that deals with primary prevention and underlying causes, instead of symptoms, for serious chronic disease (6),” and functional medicine is popularly classified as a type of Alternative Medicine (7). Functional medicine relies heavily on investigating biochemical, nutritional, metabolic, toxicological, allergic, immune, hormonal, neurotransmitter and genetic variables using diagnostic laboratory testing of stool, urine, saliva, blood and hair samples. Thus functional medicine seeks to determine the underlying causes of chronic disease, rather than palliative treatment of symptoms with medications or herbal products (see Diagram below, Conventional Medicine vs Functional Medicine Method of Establishing a Diagnosis).

The accepted standard of care in functional medicine for establishing a diagnosis represents a radical shift away from conventional medicine’s accepted standard of care (see Diagram below). That shift may appear so radical in fact to those who are schooled only in conventional medicine that it may appear to be a Questionable and Deceptive Health Care Practices (8) ,” or even “unproven, unsafe, worthless, incompetent, unprofessional, improper, unlawful, fraudulent and felonious.” Based on applications of biochemical science which are alien to most conventional practitioners, the prospect of “curing” chronic disorders, which until recently could only be managed with palliative, symptom-suppressive, drug therapies, is understandably a threatening prospect.

Conventional Medicine vs Functional Medicine Method of Establishing a Diagnosis

Note: The complete article (with chart) is available as a PDF download at the end of the article below. You are invited to download and distribute it to the world.

The American Medical Association defines seven “Principles of Medical Ethics (9),” one of which states that “A physician shall deal honestly with patients and colleagues, and strive to expose those physicians deficient in character or competence, or who engage in fraud or deception.” Despite the passage of state laws to protect CAM- or functional medicine-practicing physicians, when physicians are suspected or reported to be using so-called “questionable” practices they are often investigated (10). After a period of investigation by their State Medical Board, CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicine) physicians are then often charged with negligence, incompetence and fraud for having violated certain ill-defined, conventional medicine “accepted standards of care.”

Because of revolutionary scientific advances in laboratory science which can define the unique biochemical, nutritional, metabolic, toxicological, allergic, immune, hormonal, neurotransmitter and genetic causes of medical and psychiatric disorders, conventional medicine’s accepted standards of care, intended to enhance quality of care, are in fact increasingly obsolete and threaten to destroy quality of care.

Who is Guilty of Negligence, Incompetence and Fraud?

Definitions:
neg•li•gent adj. 1- habitually failing to do the required thing; neglectful 2- careless, inattentive, etc. – neg’li•gence n.
in•com•pe•tent adj. without adequate ability, knowledge, fitness, etc. –n. an incompetent person – in•com’pe•tence n.
fraudulent adj. 1- deceitful; using trickery 2- Law intentional deceptiveness

A critical phrase in the definitions listed above is “the required thing” used to define the term negligent. “The required thing” or “things” which functional medicine (11) physicians do which are guided their potentially curative standards of care are entirely at odds with “the required thing” or “things” which conventional physicians do which are guided by their palliative standards of care. “The required thing” guiding the practices of functional medicine physicians is “personalized medicine that deals with primary prevention and underlying causes, instead of symptoms (my underlining), for serious chronic disease.(12)”

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