In recent days, the pages of Corriere della Sera have featured an extensive interview with Massimo Melelli Roia, an expert in what he himself defines as “biological medicine”. What does it consist of, and why would it be more “organic” than the traditional one? Melelli Roia’s specializations include fasting therapy, acupuncture, iridology, homotoxicology, oligotherapy, phytotherapy, mycotherapy and colon hydrotherapy, branches that make up a biological approach to treatment as they prescribe therapies “free of side effects and therefore combinable with each other”.

It is worth saying straight away that this is a rather strange interview. Because it offers an uncritical showcase for positions and ideas that official, scientific medicine has investigated, denied and archived for some time. When talking about health, we should instead carefully distinguish facts and opinions, and at least place the “alternative” theses alongside those – much less debated – of the scientific community. Even the Corriere understood this, which in fact in the following days published the intervention of the neurologist Giuseppe Lauria Pinter, to clarify some of the most bizarre theses put forward by the “colleague”. Let’s try to do it too.

Early diagnoses by looking yourself in the eyes

Iridology is a discipline of alternative medicine that claims to be able to diagnose the general state of health and disorders of the organism through the observation of the signs, chromatic shades and structures present in the iris of the eye. To explain its effectiveness, in the interview Melelli Roia cites the example of his teacher, the Russian Eugeni Velkhover, claiming that through observation of the eye alone he was able to identify breast cancer six years before diagnosis or predict a myocardial infarction two years in advance. He also mentions the ability to see hereditary pathologies in the iris dating back up to six previous generations.

The birth of iridology dates back to the late 1800s, and with decades of time to test it, the scientific community has now reached a single conclusion: it doesn’t work. A famous systematic review of the scientific literature conducted in 1999 by complementary medicine expert Edzard Ernst examined all the available controlled and double-blind clinical studies, arriving at the conclusion that iridology has no diagnostic accuracy and is not able to distinguish healthy patients from those suffering from specific pathologies. The review concluded that the discipline lacks clinical validity and that patients should be broadly discouraged from relying on it.

More recent research has investigated the possibility of identifying tumors with iridology. Published in 2005 in the Journal of Complementary Medicine, the study subjected 110 patients, including 68 cancer patients and 42 completely healthy, to an iridologist, asking him to make up to five possible diagnoses for each. Result: 3 correct diagnoses, for a sensitivity (the ability to correctly identify a disease) of 4 percent.

Electrodermal diagnoses and colon hydrotherapy

Another passage of the interview deals with Voll’s electroacupuncture, a technique that involves the use of a device that measures the electrical resistance of the skin at meridians and other points of the body derived from traditional acupuncture, and which should thus diagnose allergies, food intolerances and other disorders.

Several studies, including randomized double-blind trials, have investigated the diagnostic efficacy of this technique. Research published in 2001 in the British Medical Journal, for example, tested its verdicts against traditional skin tests, demonstrating that the electrodermal test is unable to distinguish allergic subjects from healthy controls, resulting in it being completely ineffective for diagnostic purposes. And it is no coincidence that it is included by the main international scientific societies among the unreliable diagnostic tests in the allergy field.

Another rather controversial aspect concerns colon hydrotherapy, a technique that has been quite popular in recent years, which involves washing the large intestine by introducing filtered water through the anus. In itself, it is a recognized medical procedure, which can help treat constipation, and cleanse the colon of bacteria and other recurring infections. In alternative medicine, however, it is attributed much broader capabilities, due to the presumed systemic effects of the toxins produced by the bacteria of the intestinal tract, and the harmful presence of fecal residues which can remain encysted for years, or decades, in the austratures of the colon.

As Enrico Bucci recalls in Il Foglio, the idea that the colon hosts years-old fecal deposits (as stated in the interview) is a revival of the theory of intestinal autointoxication, a concept from the early 1900s widely refuted by modern physiology. Literature reviews published in journals such as American Family Physician indicate that colon lavage offers no proven therapeutic benefit for general health and instead carries non-negligible risks of intestinal perforation, electrolyte imbalances and alteration of bacterial microflora.

Is Melelli Roia wrong in proposing these alternative practices to his patients? Who can say. Being a doctor, he has every right to propose the practices he deems most useful, as long as he does so in good faith and without causing harm to their health. However, it is important to underline that science has not yet found proof of their effectiveness. And it probably would have been appropriate to write it, for completeness, also in the article published by the Corriere.