Alternative Medicine FAQ
What is it?
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The term "alternative medicine" is really rather vague. The sorts of things it can include are acupuncture, aromatherapy, biofeedback, chiropractic, herbal medicine, massage, naturopathy, reflexology, touch therapy, yoga, faith healing, prayers, and many others.
What is it that unites so many disparate - and often mutually exclusive - health or medical practices? For the most part, a medical practice will get the "alternative" label if it is based on untested, untraditional or unscientific principles, methods, treatments or knowledge. Usually, "alternative" treatments are founded upon various metaphysical beliefs which are typically incompatible with known science and scientific standards.
One category of treatment is anything that comes from the traditions of a non-Western culture. There seems to be the attitude that anything which has been practiced through the ages should simply be labeled "different" or "alternative," rather than simply ineffective. Thus we have the strange experience of people supporting the use of acupuncture because it has "worked for thousands of years," but not the use of tiger parts to treat male impotency.
Unfortunately, critiques of "folk" remedies and treatments for other cultures are sometimes labeled as being racist. Barry Beyerstein has pointed out that a truly racist attitude would be to hold empirically testable claims from other cultures to a lower set of standards. This would, then, amount to the assertion that they are inferior.
The National Institute of Health's Office of Alternative Medicine currently offers financial and research support for many studies of unorthodox cures, regardless of whether or not the philosophies behind them contradict each other.
Isn't it rather odd to see some people specializing in acupuncture, some specializing in homeopathy, others specializing chiropractics, and still others specializing in some different form of alternative medicine when the (anecdotal) evidence for all is equal?
If the evidence were as good as claimed, wouldn't it make more sense to find practitioners sometimes offering acupuncture, sometimes offering homeopathic remedies, etc. - always depending upon the patient and, most importantly, the nature of the problem? Actually, yes.
The reason you don't find that is because, as Saul Green has argued, is that the use of these treatments is not based upon evidence of their effectiveness with particular illnesses. Instead, practitioners hold to a belief system they find compelling and use whatever treatment method that system dictates - regardless of the evidence for the effectiveness of other treatments.
This, then, is one of the principle characteristics which binds together "alternative" medicines and which differentiates them from more traditional scientific medical practice. Scientific medicine should be willing to test anything and make use of it based solely on how well it performs in clinical trials. Alternative treatments are not held to such standards by their advocates.
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