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ubs wrote
Nope, nope. The definition of alternative medicine is anything that falls outside the realm of traditional medicine. It includes nutrition, exercise, and meditation - Areas would never have come to light as something worthy of research if there weren't people challenging the establishment.
While I agree that someone who lies about their product - be it medicine or a lawn mower, should be prosecuted, I don't understand the objection to trying new stuff. If it weren't for alternative medicine the only means that we know to extend human life - CRON - would never have come to light.
Incidentally, your doctor is no more qualified to discuss food with you than the lowest nurse. They all take the same one semester nutrition course, and one survey showed that most doctors just quote to their patients what their mother told them. Talk about quackery.
Medical school is difficult to get into, but it is rife with nepotism and has the lowest attrition rate of any graduate program. For fuck sake they're body mechanics that have been working on the same damn model for 6000 years. It's not rocket science.
I'm not saying don't use an MD, but don't understand the reluctance to regard them, and their very narrow area of expertise with a critical eye.
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The medical profession does certainly warrant use of a critical eye. That is the way that it improves.
It is fine and honorable to challenge the establishment, but it must be done in such a way that the results are valid and shown to be beneficial.
I take it that you would not submit to an operation by a guy in a hut in the boonies who does nothing about antisepsis or even hygiene, who pulls pieces of rotting meat from a hole in your stomach made by hand. Many people who have survived such treatment, especially for cancer, while they still live, praise the process and the practitioner in the most glowing terms. Should this be considered an alternative to real medicine, just to rankle the establishment? Or should this guy and the many similar quacks in the third world be jailed for the murders they are committing daily?
Meanwhile, Nutrition has had similar scientific evaluation and its main stream falls into the class of methods and materials that "work" by the definition I gave.
Certainly the only way for a proposed medicine or medical procedure to become accepted is to be put to rigorous trials by people trying to make it fail. It is not a good plan for individuals to attempt to experiment with these modes that have not been scrutinized by medical science. If you do try one of these alternatives your results,however miraculous they may seem to you, have no value for anyone else because you are prone to confirmation bias and the placebo effect and gullibility to fraud (as, individually, we all are).
The willow bark (aspirin) that you mentioned has moved from a folk or alternative treatment to a tested, reliable, safe, effective medication whose benefits and potential risks and side effects have been determined by years of research.
All "alternative" treatments deserve study and testing and analysis and evaluation, if there is a body of evidence pointing to some possible benefit (that is other than word of mouth testimonials) so that it can become part of real medicine. For instance, I do not reject Reiki out of hand because it is weird or alien, only because it has not been properly tested under laboratory conditions and produced statistically significant beneficial, effective, safe results.
I would happily submit to ear candling if it had been thoroughly tested and found to actually work. Same for Feng Shui or primal scream therapy etc.
Therefore I repeat, Medicine is that which is known to work and the other treatments are not Medicine.