Some great insights.
My difficulty is in the gross generalizations that are taking place.
I do what some people call "alternative" medicine. I don't necessarily take exception to that title given the state of western medicine.
Growing up with a scoliosis I searched for different approaches to fix the problem, and eventually ended up practicing and teaching manual therapy from a neurological model of the body, focusing on rotational distortion. It is essentially cutting edge, and i can do things with a spine that would make a western neurosurgeon question his approach.

However I may not stand up to scrutiny by western standards, since I essentially view the body in a much different manner, and certainly work with it in a much different manner.
Tomorrow however, may be a different story, as it has been with acupuncture, massage, osteopathy, non-freudian psychology, or any number of treatments that have made their way into the mainstream. Scrutiny is often the court of public opinion, although this court of opinion is greatly effected by what we have been brought up to believe and who we automatically give status and credibility to.

I think it is essential that all practitioners of the healing arts, including western medicine, realize that our actual knowledge of the human body, it's functions, and it's abilities, is very small. And it is exceedingly important to keep those doors to possibilities open.

At the same time, it is incumbent upon us to heavily scrutinize the current accepted treatments which are more often than not inadequate, reliant upon drugs, or are barbaric in nature. At the same time we must heavily scrutinize an overall system which is premised on the industry making a profit, which lends itself to indefinitely treating symptoms rather than preventative medicine.

In reply to this comment by gwiz665:
Scientific method.

"Alternative" medicine wants to do the same thing as Intelligent Design, it wants to take the easy road. ID wants to be in the class room without having sufficient evidence to support its claim. Alternative medicine wants to be sold and used to heal sick people. The latter is fine and even admirable, if it works, but there is insufficient evidence to support the claims that alternative medicine makes.

If you buy a service from me that I cannot provide, then you have been scammed and my claim was bunk. This is what alternative medicine does.

Defining alternative, it's medicine that hasn't gone through thorough scrutiny and does not stand up to it. It is medicine that doesn't work.

Pick your poison: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_medicine Homeopathy, Chiropractic, energy therapy, crystals all that stuff.

Regarding massage and acupuncture, I'm in a more relaxed approach, because they don't promise magical solutions. Massage works at healing muscle pain, certainly, and it certainly relaxing. Acupuncture, I don't have sufficient knowledge about to make a definitive judgment about. Naturally, I'm skeptical, because as far as I know, it has not been tested to the proper extent that it should to be called medicine. When I read about more details of it "Qi" and whatnot - I get more skeptical.

It may work, but it should be tested experimentally, before making claims of healing.

People are allowed to use their money as they want, but these things should damn well not be able to call themselves medicine. Relaxation, sure, therapy, perhaps, healing - no.

In reply to this comment by criticalthud:
would you care to define alternative? do you mean non-american, non-western?
does acupuncture stand up to western scrutiny? how about manual therapy? who's scrutiny are you talking about? Tell me how you measure what people FEEL with a machine, or a bloodtest.
how well does typical western medicine deal with back pain? - drugs, drugs, more drugs?
how about a scoliosis? neurological strain patterns? any chronic pain issue?
western medicine, relies on over-drugging it's patients, treating each as a number. What and how they practice is often completely controlled by insurance companies.
perhaps your statement doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
sure there is crap out there, but lets not pretend that western medicine is immune. far from it, it's peddling a good portion of the stinkiest garbage.



In reply to this comment by gwiz665:
Alternative medicine is bunk. Like alternative math or alternative reason.

If there was any truth to it, it would stand up to scrutiny and it would be used as proper treatment. Homeopathy especially is downright fraud.

*debunked

Scientific method.

"Alternative" medicine wants to do the same thing as Intelligent Design, it wants to take the easy road. ID wants to be in the class room without having sufficient evidence to support its claim. Alternative medicine wants to be sold and used to heal sick people. The latter is fine and even admirable, if it works, but there is insufficient evidence to support the claims that alternative medicine makes.

If you buy a service from me that I cannot provide, then you have been scammed and my claim was bunk. This is what alternative medicine does.

Defining alternative, it's medicine that hasn't gone through thorough scrutiny and does not stand up to it. It is medicine that doesn't work.

Pick your poison: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_medicine Homeopathy, Chiropractic, energy therapy, crystals all that stuff.

Regarding massage and acupuncture, I'm in a more relaxed approach, because they don't promise magical solutions. Massage works at healing muscle pain, certainly, and it certainly relaxing. Acupuncture, I don't have sufficient knowledge about to make a definitive judgment about. Naturally, I'm skeptical, because as far as I know, it has not been tested to the proper extent that it should to be called medicine. When I read about more details of it "Qi" and whatnot - I get more skeptical.

It may work, but it should be tested experimentally, before making claims of healing.

People are allowed to use their money as they want, but these things should damn well not be able to call themselves medicine. Relaxation, sure, therapy, perhaps, healing - no.

In reply to this comment by criticalthud:
would you care to define alternative? do you mean non-american, non-western?
does acupuncture stand up to western scrutiny? how about manual therapy? who's scrutiny are you talking about? Tell me how you measure what people FEEL with a machine, or a bloodtest.
how well does typical western medicine deal with back pain? - drugs, drugs, more drugs?
how about a scoliosis? neurological strain patterns? any chronic pain issue?
western medicine, relies on over-drugging it's patients, treating each as a number. What and how they practice is often completely controlled by insurance companies.
perhaps your statement doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
sure there is crap out there, but lets not pretend that western medicine is immune. far from it, it's peddling a good portion of the stinkiest garbage.



In reply to this comment by gwiz665:
Alternative medicine is bunk. Like alternative math or alternative reason.

If there was any truth to it, it would stand up to scrutiny and it would be used as proper treatment. Homeopathy especially is downright fraud.

*debunked

Scientific method.

"Alternative" medicine wants to do the same thing as Intelligent Design, it wants to take the easy road. ID wants to be in the class room without having sufficient evidence to support its claim. Alternative medicine wants to be sold and used to heal sick people. The latter is fine and even admirable, if it works, but there is insufficient evidence to support the claims that alternative medicine makes.

If you buy a service from me that I cannot provide, then you have been scammed and my claim was bunk. This is what alternative medicine does.

Defining alternative, it's medicine that hasn't gone through thorough scrutiny and does not stand up to it. It is medicine that doesn't work.

Pick your poison: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_medicine Homeopathy, Chiropractic, energy therapy, crystals all that stuff.

Regarding massage and acupuncture, I'm in a more relaxed approach, because they don't promise magical solutions. Massage works at healing muscle pain, certainly, and it certainly relaxing. Acupuncture, I don't have sufficient knowledge about to make a definitive judgment about. Naturally, I'm skeptical, because as far as I know, it has not been tested to the proper extent that it should to be called medicine. When I read about more details of it "Qi" and whatnot - I get more skeptical.

It may work, but it should be tested experimentally, before making claims of healing.

People are allowed to use their money as they want, but these things should damn well not be able to call themselves medicine. Relaxation, sure, therapy, perhaps, healing - no.

In reply to this comment by criticalthud:
would you care to define alternative? do you mean non-american, non-western?
does acupuncture stand up to western scrutiny? how about manual therapy? who's scrutiny are you talking about? Tell me how you measure what people FEEL with a machine, or a bloodtest.
how well does typical western medicine deal with back pain? - drugs, drugs, more drugs?
how about a scoliosis? neurological strain patterns? any chronic pain issue?
western medicine, relies on over-drugging it's patients, treating each as a number. What and how they practice is often completely controlled by insurance companies.
perhaps your statement doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
sure there is crap out there, but lets not pretend that western medicine is immune. far from it, it's peddling a good portion of the stinkiest garbage.



In reply to this comment by gwiz665:
Alternative medicine is bunk. Like alternative math or alternative reason.

If there was any truth to it, it would stand up to scrutiny and it would be used as proper treatment. Homeopathy especially is downright fraud.

*debunked

would you care to define alternative? do you mean non-american, non-western?
does acupuncture stand up to western scrutiny? how about manual therapy? who's scrutiny are you talking about? Tell me how you measure what people FEEL with a machine, or a bloodtest.
how well does typical western medicine deal with back pain? - drugs, drugs, more drugs?
how about a scoliosis? neurological strain patterns? any chronic pain issue?
western medicine, relies on over-drugging it's patients, treating each as a number. What and how they practice is often completely controlled by insurance companies.
perhaps your statement doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
sure there is crap out there, but lets not pretend that western medicine is immune. far from it, it's peddling a good portion of the stinkiest garbage.



In reply to this comment by gwiz665:
Alternative medicine is bunk. Like alternative math or alternative reason.

If there was any truth to it, it would stand up to scrutiny and it would be used as proper treatment. Homeopathy especially is downright fraud.

*debunked

being compensated for your work is a far different thing than structuring your entire business according to the bottom line.

>> ^FlowersInHisHair:

>> ^criticalthud:
Western medicine tends to be really good in one area - trauma.
guess where western medicine learned most of it's trauma skills...? yes indeed, the battlefield.
For other things such as chronic pain, western med generally sucks. Partly because you have a for-profit system that makes far more money treating than through prevention or cure.

And alt med isn't "for profit"? Bwahahaha.

>> ^criticalthud:

Western medicine tends to be really good in one area - trauma.
guess where western medicine learned most of it's trauma skills...? yes indeed, the battlefield.
For other things such as chronic pain, western med generally sucks. Partly because you have a for-profit system that makes far more money treating than through prevention or cure.


And alt med isn't "for profit"? Bwahahaha.

>> ^criticalthud:

Western medicine tends to be really good in one area - trauma.
guess where western medicine learned most of it's trauma skills...? yes indeed, the battlefield.
For other things such as chronic pain, western med generally sucks. Partly because you have a for-profit system that makes far more money treating than through prevention or cure.


I spent years trying to get something done for my cluster headaches. Eventually, a pain clinic helped me the most. Small amounts of long-acting narcotics for the "leftover" headache, but high-flow oxygen (12-14 L/h) kills it dead in it's tracks, assuming I stay on it for about 30 minutes or so. I requested that, not the doctors...

Otherwise, I would be playing merry-go-round with anticonvulsants, narcotics, and antidepressants. I would also be very pissed as cluster migraines hurt like nothing else. Even pulled muscles/tendons, broken bones, appendicitis, etc... got nothing on that pain level. (It can radiate as far as my lower thigh and cause me to keep my eyes closed due to the pain from light--it feels like someone is stabbing a needle through/into your eye, even with an extremely small light, like a power-button LED...)

Alternative medicine is bunk. Like alternative math or alternative reason.

If there was any truth to it, it would stand up to scrutiny and it would be used as proper treatment. Homeopathy especially is downright fraud.

*debunked

>> ^bareboards2:

Besides, even if you don't subscribe to the possibility of change on an energetic level, you must know about the power of placebos. Just think of alternative medicine as Structured Placebo. Placebos work. It has been proven.


The measure for medicine that works is that it exhibits a response significantly stronger than the placebo response. Some placebos exhibit stronger responses than others, e.g. using larger sugar pills over smaller ones, using toothpicks instead of acupuncture needles. But the differences are only a few percentage points, not enough to qualify as a working remedy. Alternative remedies are all about how you administer the placebo, not what you're giving them, just making people feel better so that their body has time to heal naturally over time. So long as the body is capable of recovering on its own that is.
If gullible people are willing to pay over the odds for something they could live without, there will be an industry selling placebos. But unregulated, greed tends to prevale and wild claims abound of placebos that cure e.g. cancer, can prove tragically fraudulent.
There is room for the unknown in medicine, undiscovered natural remedies that actually work, but that place is in medical trials. Alternative medicine that refuses to submit to such trials isn't worth the sugar it's coated in.

@enon.

Please read the quote below from ryanbennitt.

As a scientist (I presume you have a scientific frame of reference) you should know that we don't know everything. When I was in elementary school, there were no quarks. Now there are quarks.

You must know that there are things we don't yet have the ability to measure.

Besides, even if you don't subscribe to the possibility of change on an energetic level, you must know about the power of placebos. Just think of alternative medicine as Structured Placebo. Placebos work. It has been proven.

>> ^ryanbennitt:

As has been said on many occasions, alternative medicine that has been proven to work is just called, yep, you guessed it, medicine. The alternative to taking medicine that works is taking something that doesn't work.

So then she refers ALL her patients to "real" doctors?

>> ^bareboards2:

I'm not sure what you mean, but I am 99.9999% sure it was meant to be sarcastic.
My best friend for the past 20 years is a homeopathic physician. I know for a fact she refers patients to "regular" doctors.
She is, as I originally said, a responsible alternative health practitioner.
So yeah. It happens.
And this vid is hysterically funny.
>> ^rottenseed:
>> ^bareboards2:
Responsible alternative health practitioners understand that there is a time for allopathic medicine.
And this is hysterical.

Yea: Always.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Alternative, medicine, sham, snake oil, medic, battlefield' to 'alternative, medicine, homeopathy, sham, snake oil, medic, battlefield' - edited by calvados

I'm not sure what you mean, but I am 99.9999% sure it was meant to be sarcastic.

My best friend for the past 20 years is a homeopathic physician. I know for a fact she refers patients to "regular" doctors.

She is, as I originally said, a responsible alternative health practitioner.

So yeah. It happens.

And this vid is hysterically funny.

>> ^rottenseed:

>> ^bareboards2:
Responsible alternative health practitioners understand that there is a time for allopathic medicine.
And this is hysterical.

Yea: Always.

As has been said on many occasions, alternative medicine that has been proven to work is just called, yep, you guessed it, medicine. The alternative to taking medicine that works is taking something that doesn't work.

>> ^bareboards2:
Responsible alternative health practitioners understand that there is a time for allopathic medicine.
And this is hysterical.


Yea: Always.