Alternative medicine is not total quackery, but it isn't scientific either. When someone discovered in the pre-scientific world that a leaf had medicinal properties, that was a major discovery. Most pharmaceuticals were discovered that way prior to computational chemistry. Then a chemist would figure out what molecule was responsible for the beneficial effect, a second chemist would come up with a synthetic means of production, and a chemical engineering team would develop a scaleup plan. Now, it is more advanced, but not so much as you might think.

"traditional" medicine was taken over by the pharmacutical industry decades ago..."traditional"medicine no longer exists and is truly the "alternative" medicine of today... that is scary and dangerous...and the pharma industry funds the pacs of the politicans it controls to maintain their control of modern medicine (crony capitalism)...hospitals are the 3rd leading killer behind heart disease and cancer...be very afraid...

20 years ago I had a cold when I was in the Netherlands, and I went to a pharmacy for cold medicine. When I was there you could not buy aspirin without talking to a pharmacist tech about your pain, but you could buy marijuana and some other so-called "soft" drugs.

Anyway, when I explained my cold, the pharmacist asked in a Dutch accent if I wanted conventional or "nonsense" medicine. I asked him to repeat it. It clearly sounded liked he was saying nonsense. I just said, "Uhh, I guess I'll take the one that's not nonsense." I later asked some Dutch friends. They said there was a popular brand of homeopathic remedies branded non-essence, which in French or some language implies diluted down beyond its essence. The brand was so popular that Dutch people call homeopathic medicine non-essence medicine, apparently not considering how similar it sounds to English "nonsense".

Alternative medicine has nothing to do with any State Science Institute. If anything, they are revolting against a few large firms that might as well be marketing patent medicine.

Follow the money. I have a somewhat unique medical history. I haven't experienced even a mild cold in over 30 years, I take no medicines of any kind, and my family history has no indication of cancer or heart disease. I'm over 70, and healthier than anyone I know in my age bracket. I thought that the medical field would be eager to perform a genetic study to determine how someone my age could be so healthy, and if genetic engineering could help others achieve what came naturally to me. When I approached the NIH and private medical study centers, I was told they only studied sick people, in order to find cures for their illnesses. I wondered why they weren't interested in healthy people, and then I found that most of the money for these centers come from "Big Pharma." Then it made sense: if my genes could make most of the population become disease-resistant and free of genetic disorders, it would blow a hole in the pharmaceutical industry - no disease, no pharmaceutical market.

After that, I tried centers for gerontological study, with almost the same response, except they were also interested in stem cell research. Guess what? Part of their money came from Big Pharma, but the rest came from companies invested in fetal stem cell research, who were tied to Planned Parenthood. Again, healthy seniors would dry up the market for fetal tissue, killing the profit from abortion mills.

Unfortunately, unless someone can direct me to any research agency that can make use of what I have to offer, anyone who wants to be as healthy as I am just has to hope they chose the right parents.

All the time, you will see 'scientific' news announcements that results from a particular survey indicate that [eating meat causes cancer]. People forget that the correct progression for scientific study is: anecdote ->survey -> experiment. This leads to Science.

The flip side of this is that you need anecdotes and surveys in order to generate possible entry points for experiments and hence scientific medicine. I agree with jbrenner, mcnab, and michaelaa in that 'alternative' does not equate to 'does not work'. But if there is a successful therapy in scientific medicine...eh - go with it!

Insofar as alternative medicine 'not working', please remember that in clinical trials you need a control group to which you can compare the results of your pharmaceutical - because that is the only way to distinguish between chemical results and the noise produced by the placebo effect. Please see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWQfe... for some additional comments (though there are some logical holes in the presentation, too). All you would need to do is increase the feeling in the patient that they were going to be cured and a certain percentage of cures will happen. And those cures will be real.

I am currently involved in helping a doctor investigate whether or not EM radiation has a detectable effect on the human body. Jury's still out on that one.

Jan

There is a massive gulf of difference between a treatment being "unproven" versus a treatment being "ineffective".

"Unproven" means it hasn't passed around $1billion worth of rigorously controlled, multiply-repeated double-blinded studies which are demanded these days. "Ineffective" means the treatment simply doesn't work.

To say a treatment is "unproven" (by medical standards) is fair and reasonable. To jump from this to saying the treatment is "ineffective" reveals an embarrassing intellectual deficiency and a lack of ability for critical, logical thinking.

These days, the standard of "proof" of a medicine's effectiveness is the double-blinded study, repeated numerous times by numerous teams in numerous locations.

One single study, even with great protocol design and done at scale, convinces virtually nobody. The best outcome you can expect from a single study is that someone might stumble over your abstract on a scholarly or medical/psychological research site and get inspired to repeat your study themselves, subject to funding. To be certified as effective, it takes hundreds of mullions of dollars, even billions of dollars, worth of repeated studies.

For a treatment to pass these criteria, it must be capable of blinding. This means that (a) it must be possible to administer the treatment without people's knowledge, and (b) it must be possible to trick people into thinking they're receiving a treatment, while not actually receiving it.

For a treatment to receive funding for large-scale repetition of studies, it must either go viral throughout the academic research community, or it must have a patentability incentive.

Therefore, the types of treatment most likely to travel the full pathway to recognition are those which can be patented and administered or not administered without people's knowledge. These criteria screen out almost everything except synthetic pharmaceuticals.

From this I'm saying there are entire classes of treatments which may well be highly effective but, due to lack of research support, commercial incentives or experimental blinding capability, will always remain (by today's medical standards) "unproven".

I think Dawkins (and ever so many others) deals with this question adequately. Just search YouTube for Dawkins Alternative Medicine for some good lectures such as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlb4s...

As to whether the government is pushing anti-science, of course it is. Those in power would not like anyone to think on their own and are constantly doing as much as possible to create dependency and to prevent critical thinking. Government schools have now produced so many generations of “absorb and regurgitate” students, only those who go out on their own to learn how to think have even a rudimentary understanding of the cognitive processes.

Bill Maher in his documentary movie, Religulous, presented an interview a U.S. Senator who claimed you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to be a Senator. In the OP's video, Senator Tom Harkin representing Iowa testifies in such a way to leave little doubt of the truth embodied in the Maher interview. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjR7A...

What I see are a number of claims but no proof or documentation. No study was identified nor any research methods explained or enumerated or specific. No results were quoted only summations or one line conclusions. I think they may have done a better job of debunking. There was one sign that said Chiropractry was not proven. Actually my direct experience indicated that Chiropractic care was an alternative that's not to say that it is always an alternative, but it is sometimes. Does that mean the entire film is bogus?

I think the comedian Tim Minchin put it best in his comic poem 'Storm'.

"By definition, alternative medicine has either not been proved to work or been proved not to work. Do you know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? Medicine."

I think the whole 'alternative medicine' argument is part of this new movement brought about by the advent of the internet. Previously, when people had a discussion that had a science basis, they used the same set of facts and could debate effectively with one another. Now everyone has their own set of facts and talk past each other. That how global climate change and intelligent design have become battlefields for various factions to line up upon. And I fear is leading to the dumbing down of science discourse.

While big pharma are trying to replicate medicine by doing chemistry, they don't understand how the body processes the medication, and that's why there are lots of side effects with big pharma medication and not with natural alternatives such as eating right or using homeopathy. The major problem is the commercials pushing food like McDonalds or Burger King or the morning cereals. Any processed food is bad for us and we need to become un-lazy and start eating right as a society.

RE: big pharma. Diabetes II is a result of overloading the pancreas. The only way to do that is to bombard it with sugars, primarily, refined carbohydrates. Eat right, the problem goes away. I makes me sick (!) and disgusted when I see a "medication" advertised designed to lower blood sugar when the answer is eat right.

Most people in the world who can afford it buy scientific medicine. People who can't afford it or for whom medical science has no treatment turn to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Most people are smart enough to not even consider CAM as a first choice for a serious problem. I suspect it's something people turn to in desperation or for the little aches and pains of life. It's nonsense.

Alternative Medicine is the same or better as the medicine that was practiced before the 'Allopathic perversion in the 20's and 30's where the treat the symptom but not the cause.

Natural or alternative medicine tries to find the cause and fixes the problem.

There are Charlestons out there but not as many as with lamestream practitioners.

Old Dino gets miracle cure pill for this or that paper "booklets" in my snail mail all the time.
My usual procedure--
1. Cut it open with my letter opener.
2. Flip to the order page usually at the back behind much hype.
3. Read something like $199.99.
4. Laugh
5. Toss it in the trash.