The secret behind alternative medicine

If all goes well — which is to say if you are generally healthy — you mostly experience the doctor’s office as an inconvenience, going to primary care appointments that are an hour of waiting for 20 minutes of care.

If you’re ill, you fall into a Kafka-esque labyrinth of specialists, waiting rooms, and prior authorizations. You will be held tightly by the medical system, but you are unlikely to feel good.

For many people who can afford it, it is not their doctor, but an acupuncturist or massage therapist who will make them feel held, who has a 90-minute intake visit slot available to hear if you’ve ever gotten into a car crash, to find out how heavy your periods are and how you feel about them.

Helping people to feel good used to be well within a doctor’s purview. For millenia, being cured was synonymous with feeling better. In the 19th century, doctors offered cocaine for depression and toothaches. In more recent history, medications like steroids, which quickly increase energy and reduce symptoms like a runny nose or aching joints, were regularly prescribed for the common cold. But they come with many possible side effects: psychosis, brittle bones, diabetes. So licensed practitioners now suggest “waiting it out” for a run-of-the-mill upper respiratory viral infection.

Similarly, doctors are reluctant to prescribe opioid pain medication given the high risk of addiction, too long ignored. Antibiotics are also prescribed less as they are known to be ineffective and breed resistance in the case of viral illnesses (the cause of most “colds”), but going to the doctor and coming away “empty-handed” feels bad. Doctors think about appropriate treatments at the level of a person (does it treat the disease?) and the population (what is the risk of giving lots of people this treatment?). But appropriate antibiotic stewardship on a population level does not help you when you are sitting in their office, feeling like crap.

There are those, however, who will step in to make you feel better. There are incredible acupuncturists, massage therapists, and body workers — overlooked for years by the American medical establishment — with skills only recently appreciated for how they can improve symptoms and overall quality of life. Randomized controlled trials have shown that massage can help with rheumatoid and osteoarthritis. Acupuncture has been shown to help significantly with fatigue and abdominal pain.

Even without the evidence, the treatment can just feel good. These professionals are “doing something,” laying hands on the patient with intent to heal. Even this act may have a strong therapeutic effect. Ted Kaptchuk, an acupuncturist and leading scholar of the placebo effect, has described this phenomenon in detail. Placebo treatments are not just “in your head.” The idea that you are being treated may cause the release of real endogenous painkillers in your body, truly making you feel better. So what if a therapy is no better than placebo? The placebo effect may work wonders.

Alternative health clinics, for which patients often pay out of pocket, capitalize on the real demand for feeling better by creating the possibility of a pleasant experience for the right price. At one such clinic outside of Boston, I saw a blend of craniosacral massage, primary care with a focus on herbalism, and a clinic where people received IV infusions of unregulated medications such as ozone and N-acetylcysteine.

Some of these interventions are harmless and many can be quite helpful. Herbal remedies are the basis for many medications, and in certain situations may be efficacious (though dosing is much harder). I wish I could spend two hours with a new patient in clinic; I can only imagine that a two-hour long intake session has serious and quantifiable therapeutic benefits.

But some of these interventions are likely to be harmful. For example, the injection of ozone, a known toxin, into blood that has been taken out of the body then pumped back into a patient’s arm, can cause side effects like fluid in the lungs and possibly even death. This clinic wasn’t a one-off — practitioners around the country offer ozone therapy. A 2024 article in the New Yorker profiled Sat Hari Khalsa — celebrity ozone therapist and ex-girlfriend of Brad Pitt — as a healer. (She also co-owns a company with Brad selling $2,000 sweaters).

Ozone therapy preceded the Make America Healthy Again movement, but the two are spiritual twins. It is a highly technological promised panacea whose main benefit seems to be the intake visit, the relationship you have with your practitioner, and the beautifully lit, incense-scented office you visit. These practitioners have opted out of the mainstream system by not accepting insurance—but it’s a privilege that few patients can claim.

Ozone is a good symbol for health grift, as its practitioners also seem to believe deeply in their product — though it is hard to separate belief from the economic incentives. It is hard for practitioners of Western medicine, taught not to overpromise and often faced with unfixable cases, to counter that confidence. It is true that doctors can misdiagnose or undertreat, but it is also true that, sometimes, people cannot be cured. There is not a fix for everything. But this truth is anathema in a culture where billionaires expect to live forever and encounters with disease are wars to be fought and won.

The sense that something is making us sick is not wrong. Microplastics in our ocean and brain and our fruit — to name just one such potential source of ailment — are terrifying to confront.

But dismantling polluting industries, trying to clean up our air and our water, and imagining a health care system not driven by profit would take coordinated, radical restructuring. As social theorist Nima Bassiri described in a February 2025 article, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has effectively tapped into real anger about unequal health metrics and the unpleasant experience of accessing medicine through the insurance bureaucracy. But he is working on the wrong axis. He has chosen to target experts, scientific methods, and effective public health measures as the enemy, not dynasty and industry.

I could never tell you that the American health care system is not broken, that patients don’t get hurt as a byproduct of painful treatments, errors, and a lack of access to care. But the Trump administration misdiagnoses and misdirects. Taking away NIH funding and sowing doubt in effective vaccines and doctors working long hours to diagnose and treat patients will not make us safer.

Choosing alternative therapies like ozone, with a known risk of death, is hard to fathom, but wanting control and wanting to be symptom-free is not. The medical system must meet this moment with clarity about effective, well-studied treatments and humility regarding the ways the health system has and does hurt people. To pretend that we have done no harm is dishonest and only furthers resentment. We must call out the obfuscation and confused motives of Kennedy and push for a health care system where people can feel seen and held, where doctors attempt to treat the whole patient, not just the disease, and where health care is a right for all, not something that can be bought by the few.

Hannah Kerman, M.D., is a physician in New York City who believes in the power of placebo.