Alternative medicine – RationalWiki

"By definition", I begin "Alternative Medicine", I continue "Has either not been proved to work, Or been proved not to work.

You know what they call alternative medicine Thats been proved to work?

Alternative medicine is any medical treatment that is not part of conventional evidence-based medicine, such as one would learn in medical school, nursing school or even paramedic training. Much, if not most of the "alternative medicine" world lacks any scientific proof of its effectiveness, and that which does have real effectiveness, tends to be palliative[note 1] rather than curative. Any alternative medicine with scientific evidence behind it is simply called medicine.

The term "alternative medicine" is also a politically correct term for medical marijuana.

Alternative medicine includes "traditional medicines" (i.e. "medical" systems developed prior to or outside of "Western Medicine", such as traditional Native American remedies, or traditional Chinese medicine), "folk remedies" (e.g., herbalism, tinctures, and rubs that were common place "treatments" often passed around via urban legend), and an ever growing class of "religious" or "spiritual" treatments that have their sources in Eastern Religions, but are filtered through a pay-as-you-go, for-profit (see "New Age") mindset. These terms are still used today to describe the various substances of unclear efficacy sold for a profit through advertising. These cures are not always sold by malicious, deceptive con-men. Many promoters are true believers, making their claims even more convincing.

And if you don't think it's real, or don't think people who have funding to spend notice it, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine is run by the National Institute of Health.[2]

The rebranding of alternative medicine is analogous to the endless rebranding of creationism to try to evade the First Amendment, or the renaming of racialism to try and avoid the status of "racist". The original term, alternative medicine, was trivially unmasked as alternatives to medicine, and emphasized its being outside of scientific medical practice. There are many legitimate complementary therapies such as massage, counselling and so on, and by claiming to be part of this, rather than acknowledging its status as being apart from medicine, these rebrandings hope to gain a halo effect and imply legitimately place in medical practice. The purpose is to gain greater acceptance, and hopefully funding, for pseudomedicine - a stalking horse for woo.[5]

Critics of alternative medicine have come up with some of their own terms for it:

Often holistic healers will convince their patients to forgo proper medical care, usually combined with misrepresentations of studies or emotional appeals, to undergo holistic therapies. Since there is no valid evidence to support holistic therapies being capable of curing deadly ailments, this kind of malpractice is dangerous to offer patients.

All alternative medicine, even the "effective" therapies have the danger of convincing an unwell person to forgo actual medical treatments because they think they are getting better (which can happen with palliative remedies and placebos) or they choose to trust their alternative practitioner who is offering a "cure". For example, a person with cancer may convince himself to try a homeopathic remedy. Also, many herbal remedies can actually interfere with prescription drugs, lessening their effect or even causing dangerous side-effects. Since almost all alternative medicines are unproven; many advocates (known to some as "alties") tend to appeal to "health freedom," rather than actually try to prove that their nostrums work.

Many practitioners exploit vulnerable patients. They give false hope to people who are incurably sick and frequently charge high prices for useless treatments. The belief that alternative medicines are somehow "less risky" or "less harsh" than conventional medicine has led some to take alternative medicine over conventional medicine. While this may often be true (though don't say that to someone who's lost skin or body parts to black salves sometimes used for skin cancers), the potential health risks of not taking conventional medicine for an illness far outweigh the risks from the side effects of these medicines.

Often, alternative medicine practitioners claim that, unlike "allopathy", they help the body's natural self-healing powers. Yet many of them will describe anecdote after anecdote showcasing medical recoveries (involving such transitory things as colds) while seemingly refusing to believe that the disease could ever have gone away on its own. These recoveries must be due to whatever remedy they used. So on the one hand, they extol the healing powers of the human body, while at the same time denying that illnesses could ever go away by themselves or in other words, that the body could actually heal itself.

Alternative medicines or therapies range from being scientifically provable to scientifically disproven, and can be benign (and often ridiculous) all the way to downright dangerous. Medical science has only recently started to do quality and quantity research into alternative medicine. With the exception of some surprising and exciting treatments that have true medical potential, the vast majority of the therapies do little if anything beyond the placebo effect. Even when the treatment actually does something, the reasons given by practitioners for why the treatment is effective are almost never based on correct scientific information. Benign treatments have the advantage of not directly injuring a patient, other than money and at worst precious time going out the window. The ridiculous cannot possibly have any medical effects (beyond that of the placebo effect at the least), or may be actively dangerous to the patient.

Holistic medical practitioners defend their treatments to the general public that there is documented proof that they work, but when faced with empirical evidence that does not support their claims, certain practicioners often state that holistic medicine cannot be readily tested by scientific means.

In other words: if it's not tested, then they think it works. Once it's tested, they'll tell you the test is wrong and it works.

When a student wants to become a physician, he or she must attend a certified medical school, pass rigorous medical exams, and participate in carefully monitored and regulated internships all regulated by the governmental bodies who license the doctor. For the majority of alternative medicine, no such regulation is in place. For a few specific alternative therapies like chiropractic work and massage therapy, regulatory bodies do exist. However, pretty much every other field of alternative medicine has no regulation at all. Call yourself a color therapist, and lo and behold, you are one.

There is also a lack of regulation in the products sold as "alternative" or "herbal" medicines. You cannot, for example, know what is in a "sleep healing tea", how much of each ingredient, how potent the pills are, or even whether it contains the listed ingredient(s) at all (many herbal products, in fact, do not contain the herb(s) listed on the label).[9] Also, as there is little scientific research, "doses" are always a guess. "Try one pill. If that doesn't work, take two."

Sometimes an alternative medicine supporter will present a scholarly work as "proof" that the alternative medicine works and is being suppressed by "regular" medicine. The problem is the work is either outdated, has been refuted by later research, or (worse) is misrepresented.

Weston Price's work on focal infection and nutrition is a prime example of this type of handwaving. Given what was known at the time his work was perfectly valid...for its time which was 1939 . The thing is the world as well as our understanding of both focal infection and nutrition have changed so drastically that Price's work would have to be reevaluated in a modern framework... something that really hasn't been done. The fact Price himself questioned the focal infection theory is also not brought up by either side or that what Price actually did and what his supporters claim he did (and was) are so different that it is a clear misrepresentation.

Homoeopathy serves as another example as supporters can point to K. Linde, N. Clausius, G. Ramirez, et al., "Are the Clinical Effects of Homoeopathy Placebo Effects? A Meta-analysis of Placebo-Controlled Trials," Lancet, September 20, 1997, 350:834-843...while ignoring the refutiation in "The end of homoeopathy" The Lancet, Vol. 366 No. 9487 p 690. The Vol. 366 No. 9503 issue (Dec 27, 2005) and by 14 studies from 2003 to 2007.[10]

Colloidal silver was used as an antibiotic, germicide and disinfectant clear into the 1940s. Publications such as New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal (1907), The Journal of the American Medical Association (1918), The Journal of the American Dental Association (1934) all had articles regarding the uses and limits of colloidal silver. Antibiotics were far more effective (and safer) so the use of colloidal silver effectively ended.

In many respects this is the most dangerous form of alternative medicine as it cloaks itself in the garb of genuine medicine using scholarly publications to support its claims.

You can't neatly brush it all into the quack corner. Some of them work, but not all of them.

Manheimer 2003, which studied IV drug users, found that:[17]

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Alternative medicine - RationalWiki