It seems that complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) researchers are always running into the same dilemma, whether they study acupuncture or Reiki, meditation or healing touch. It is certainly not easy to measure things that aren’t readily quantifiable, or that don’t have a fully understood mechanism of action.
The same problem crops up when one tries to pin down diseases that don’t present themselves physically. If you can’t reliably establish its existence, how do you measure severity or improvement in a malady that isn’t as obvious as, say, a broken leg?
It’s not hard to see parallels between these issues and the Pentagon’s recent decision not to award the Purple Heart medal to soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). According to a Pentagon spokesperson, “Current medical knowledge and technologies do not establish PTSD as objectively and routinely as would be required for this award at this time.” In other words, the lack of a tangible, measurable diagnosis puts PTSD in another category of war wound.
My aim is not to advocate for or against awarding the Purple Heart to PTSD sufferers, but to illustrate yet another way that the lack of a definitive method of measurement affects policy decisions. Although things are changing (just having the Pentagon acknowledge the toll PTSD can take is a step in the right direction), there is still a pervasive feeling that if something can’t be measured, seen, or quantified, then it’s too amorphous to handle in the policy arena. Until science advances to the point where we can start to truly pin down some of these diseases and treatments, or we as a society develop more tolerance for ambiguity, some conditions and therapies may be left out in the cold.
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