In a bio class a professor summed it up with "the hardest thing about medicine is being able to tell whether anything actually works."
I told a friend of mine who's into alt.med once that yes I think a lot of alt.med is bunk but percentage wise it's probably not that much more bunk than "mainstream" medicine.
It's easy for emergency medicine. Customer comes in with bullet wound, leaves alive and healthy and without bullet wound. But outside of domains like that it's crushingly hard to tell the difference between treatment and noise. Compounding the fact is that humans aren't a standardized item that can be compared against reference performance metrics. We're all different and our genome and environment are constantly changing.
I told a friend of mine who's into alt.med once that yes I think a lot of alt.med is bunk but percentage wise it's probably not that much more bunk than "mainstream" medicine.
It's easy for emergency medicine. Customer comes in with bullet wound, leaves alive and healthy and without bullet wound. But outside of domains like that it's crushingly hard to tell the difference between treatment and noise. Compounding the fact is that humans aren't a standardized item that can be compared against reference performance metrics. We're all different and our genome and environment are constantly changing.