Private health insurance forcing all customers to pay for pseudoscience alternative therapies


An article in this morning’s paper has raised the issue of alternative therapies being covered by private health insurance, such as iridology, homeopathy etc.
Alternative therapies are those that have either not been proved to work, or been proved not to work. If anyone needs reminding that alternative therapies that have been demonstrated to work by evidence are called ‘medicine’, then watch the Tim Minchin comedy skit →
There were some arguments for including alternative therapies in private health insurance in the article:
Mr Farnsworth, a director of the Australian Traditional Medicine Society: “We’re into health maintenance and prevention,” he said. ”We have a very stressed society and people are loading themselves up with caffeine to cope with the day. They should have a massage on a regular basis to take the edge off. I think that can be preventative.”
They’re  right that spending time talking to people and giving them useless therapies can help – it’s called the placebo effect. Effectively what they’re arguing is that people paying for health insurance should subsidise other people’s sugar pills that trick their minds into thinking they cured them.
Massage might provide temporary relief or prevention and there may even be some evidence base for this (I don’t know, and I don’t have time to research it), but the more serious health problem is all the pseudoscience, like homeopathy and iridology, that  gets included in ‘natural’ therapy’s evidence-free club.
iridology chart iris pseudoscience woo
Iridology: until recently I didn't know about this branch of crazy. It's like forecasting the weather by spotting a cloud shaped like an elephant, except it's your health from your iris.
There’s also the problem that practitioners of alternative therapies that have a limited evidence base for treating specific conditions often make claims far beyond that, and their representative bodies fail to regulate this, as the British Chiropractic Association infamously did with infant colic and asthma.
Bupa Australia (Mutual Community and MBF) regional general manager Eric Granger said Dr Sharley’s suggestion that natural therapy cover be offered separately went against the basic principle of insurance, which was spreading the risk.
Yes, the whole point of health insurance is to spread the risk of needing to pay for treatment if we get sick. Treatments that have been shown to improve people’s health better than a placebo. We don’t take out health insurance to gain risk – effectively under the current system of covering alternative therapies we’re gaining risk, because we risk having to subsidise sugar pill therapies.
natural remedy homeopathy therapy
If it's natural/traditional it must be good for you and have no side-effects, like: deadly nightshade, arsenic, blue-green algae, tiger snake venom, smallpox and trepanning.
Also, there’s the insinuation that it’s all about the AMA ensuring doctors are the only ones who are allowed to treat people. Well, sure the AMA could give the wharfies and dockers union a run for their money, but the Australian Traditional Medicine Society is also lobbying for its members. In a he-said-she-said scenario we have to look for what the evidence supports. It’s the fields that practice some evidence-based health, including: dentists, physios, occupational therapists, pharmacists [who aren’t prescribing Blackmore’s fries & coke deal], speech pathologists, dietitians, psychologists, etc.
This is not about saying people can’t take alternative therapies if they want to. Go ahead. Spend your money. You could even have private health insurance policies that explicitly include alternative therapies as an optional extra, so people can spread the risk of being credulous. Just don’t force everyone else’s private health insurance premiums to subsidise woo.