Anecdote vs. Science

It is common in the supposed fight of eastern vs. western medicine for the former to blame the latter for lacking faith and missing the underlying cause of the disease, and being impotent in an effective treatment until a material target can be identified and destroyed. Meanwhile, the latter blames the former for being “anecdotal” and medieval and lacking any comprehensive power. In a recent review of the book The Horse Boy the tired argument continues, to the delight of the institutions that protect their ideologies and to the detriment of patients, and families who suffer from recalcitrant disease. The Horse Boy is a book about a father who tries to treat, if not cure, his son of autistic characteristics including “demonic tantrums, speech delays, and incontinence.” The father takes his son to Mongolia to learn to ride horses and be healed by traditional practitioners of shamanism. The result is that much progress was made, including the disappearance of the maniacal tantrums and increased verbal directions to the horses the boy was riding.

However, in the press, the story was not about why this therapy may or may not work, but how this was an “anecdotal story” and should not be the purveyor of false hope. Because it was not part of a randomized controlled trial, no conclusions could be drawn. But can we honestly say this is the case for this father and son? That no conclusions can be drawn? Hardly. The positioning of this story as “anecdotal”, as some “scientific” commentators have dubbed it is actually misleading. The term anecdote is defined in Webster’s as: “a usually short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident” the etymology of which includes the greek root anekdota which means unpublished. Herein lies the problem. So-called “anecdotal” stories are dubbed by the gold-standard scientific community as “unpublishable” so their relevance is instantly mitigated. Instead of spurning ideas for research, an idea such as giving horseback riding lessons to an autistic child is deemed “anecdotal” (which has the hint of implausible) by the scientific community to avoid any sort of general recommendation for the public at large. In a way, this is the stalwart western doctor’s job: to give advice that benefits the average. For example, if you have cancer, chemotherapy and radiation and surgery are likely to help you out, but there is nothing to say you, the patient, fall inside or outside of the standard deviation that they are using to make the recommendation. This is why all decisions for treatment are up to the patient themselves. The doctor makes their best guess and the rest is entirely left to something outside of their control. This is because medicine is hard work. The body constantly proves to be too complex to apply our reductionistic materialist models.


In Chinese Medicine we can understand instantly why horseback riding would be beneficial for those suffering from autism. The Horse is the animal that goes with the Heart, and as such rules the mental-emotional lives of our patients. Horses are used in crowd control because they have a pacifying nature to them. They instill peace in their riders. Horses understand the spirit of their rider: if the rider doesn’t have a good heart, they disobey. Born wild, they need to be trained to be useful just as we all must learn how to love. The Heart itself sounds like a galloping horse. Horses are used often in therapy to teach troubled youth how to care and love something beyond themselves. Their hoofs, legs, shoulders, skin, hair, blood, and fat (donkey hide gelatin) are useful in treatment, especially in regulating female hormones.

All this being said, it is important to realize that treating all autistic children with horse therapy will not cure all children who suffer from this ailment. However, what is clearly needed is more research and exposure to this potentially promising treatment modality. What is not needed is fear about what such a treatment may mean to the establishment.