All this week, I've been looking at last Sunday's New York Times Magazine, sitting on top of the printer beside my desk. I couldn't summon the energy to pick it up. The story that both drew and repelled me was a medical story, "The Boy with a Thorn in His Joints," by Susannah Meadows, about one of her sons who developed severe arthritis as a toddler.
I thought I should write about it, but I've been sharply critical of some Times magazine stories in the past, and I didn't feel ready to launch another attack. Exposing and trying to understand errors in stories written and edited by smart people at a very good newspaper is hard work.
So I'm happy to report that when I finally overcame my reluctance, I discovered that the story was not what I suspected–a paean to alternative medicine. Instead, it was a moving and thoughtful personal story that was mostly careful about what was supported by data and what wasn't. And which, in the end, did not seem like the kind of thing that would prompt readers in similar circumstances to adopt potentially dangerous alternative therapies.
It's not my fault that I suspected the worst; the Times's editors set me up for it. First, the headline: The boy with a thorn in his joints. It's the kind of metaphor one might expect from an alternative practitioner, and it has an unfortunate Biblical echo of the crown of thorns, at least to my ear. One could easily imagine, as I did, an alternative healer saying that he used salves and extracts to remove the "thorn" and cure the arthritis. (The word "thorn," by the way, does not appear in the story, according to my search.)
The teaser below the headline–which appears in the magazine, but not online–deepened my concerns about this story:
When 3-year-old Shepherd Strauss got sick, his parents turned to doctors and drugs. But they couldn't anticipate that what would make him feel better didn't come with a prescription.
I had every reason to think that this was going to be about the Lorenzo's Oil of arthritis.
Instead, what we get is a story that deals in both conventional and alternative medicine, and ultimately gets help from neither of them. Instead, the parents, working on speculation that their son's disease could be related to some allergy, found relief for him in a dairy- and gluten-free diet. While this was suggested by an alternative medicine practitioner, Meadows reports that some researchers think the use of a gluten-free diet is plausible, if not proven.
And Meadows and her editors are thankfully clear about the basis of the treatment: "There is no proof" that the alternative regimen was responsible for her son's improvement, Meadows writes. "His arthritis may have gone into spontaneous remission, and a study of one is not much of a study at all."
Very nice.
-Paul Raeburn
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