I’ve heard it said a few times that alternative medicine that is proven to work is just called medicine. Medicine is by nature a conservative field, they have to be since people’s health and very lives are at stake. However, if a treatment is proposed that has a plausible mechanism for how it works then it’s not that hard to start clinical trials and show that it is safe and effective,  but if a treatment has been around for decades and it doesn’t have the scientific backing of real medicine then odds are pretty good that the reason is that it would or has failed the efficacy trials. In other words, it’s because there is no evidence that it works.

Fortunately most people won’t turn to alternative medicine most of the time, but there is a definite temptation to do so if medicine has failed to correct an issue or has failed to identify the core issue behind it. What I wonder though, is when the magic herbs, water, sticks, and touch have failed, what’s left for the desperate to turn too?

If anecdotes are good enough for you then you just might be gullible to trade in the magical treatments for an invisible magical healer.  Oh, what’s the term for that….that’s right it’s faith healing. They’ve got lots of anecdotes for that as “evidence” of it’s effectiveness, they just probably won’t tell you about how the “genuine successes” still relied on real medical treatment. The really cool thing is that when that treatment fails, they have these awesome platitudes to “explain” why you died.