"Alternative Medicine"

There are only THREE types of medicine:

1.  Medicine that's been tested and proven to work.

2.  Medicine that's been tested and proven to NOT work.

3.  Medicine that has not yet been tested.

There are truly no other options.

Claims of "alternative medicine" all fit into category 3, "Medicine that has not yet been tested".  That doesn't mean that all "alternative medicine" claims are false.  It means that no one knows if they work.  And let me be very clear when I say, "no one knows":  I mean, regardless of how adamant proponents of a claim are, their self-righteousness and intense belief does NOT make a provable claim.  Just keep in mind that there are people that are absolutely convinced that the world is flat.  Stubbornous has zero effect on the physical reality of a claim.

The ONLY way to know for sure if a medicine works is to test it.

Testing:

Let's be clear of what we mean by "tested" by first listing some things that are NOT "testing":

1.  Anecdotal claims:  "I tried it and it worked for me".

2.  Time-lapse claims:  "The Chinese have been using the 'cure' for thousands of years".  (Isn't it interesting that it's _always_ the Chinese?)

3.  "Science doesn't have all the answers".

4.  "They" don't want you to know.

5.  "Big-Pharma spends money to scare you to spend money on THEIR medicine".

None of those are proofs.  Those are plees to emotion and are unscientific claims.

What testing actually IS:

The following is the ONLY way to truly test a medicinal claim...

Double-Blind study

In a double-blind study, 2 large groups of test subjects are used.  1/2 are given the claimed medicine.  The other half are given a placebo (fake medicine that's usually just a sugar capsule that's known to have zero effect).  No one in either group is told whether they're given the real thing or the placebo.  Not even the doctors that administer the the trials with the patients know which they've given the patient.  This is critically important so that the patients and the doctors recording their medical progress over time are not injected with prejudice and bias for or against the claimed medicine.  The ONLY thing known by the doctors and the patients is what the patients report after taking the treatment.  The study authors do know, but have no direct contact with either the doctors or the patients.  After a set period of time (could be years) of monitoring both groups' health, they can compare the two groups against each other... the control group (that got the placebo) against the test group that got the real treatment.

This is when they start to find out:

1.  Whether or not the treatment had any effect vs. a similar group that only got the placebo.

2.  What, if any, side effects the treatment has.

After multiple trials, and usually years of testing, they will either find that the treatment WORKS or that it does NOT.

This is how science works.  It eliminates bias, prejudice, wishful thinking, and the placebo effect (BELIEVING it works and REPORTING "success" because you THINK it's supposed to).

It doesn't matter how many years, decades, centuries, nor millennia a claimed remedy has been used.  Until it's been double-blind tested, it can't be truly known to work or not.

Dangers

One other thing to consider before consuming untested and unregulated claims of cures is that much of it has unknown chemicals and/or biological materials in it.  And yes, even the "organic" and "100% natural" stuff.  And, on top of that, if there are any active ingredients, they're frequently not in consistent amounts.  One pill could have significantly more of the chemicals or biological material than the next, or differ significantly by batch.

Medicine that's been approved by the FDA has gone through years of double-blind tests and has regulated manufacturing to ensure dosages are consistent.

"But sometimes they find out that even those medicines are harmful!!!"

Exactly!  And they were tested and regulated for years before making it through the tough filters to get to you.  If those safeguards were NOT in place (which is the case with "alternative medicines"), just imagine how many of the rejected ones that were found to be dangerous during testing would have made it to you?  THAT'S what you're getting when you go _around_ the system.

So, before you go injecting or digesting untested substances into your body, make sure it's been thoroughly tested in a large, double-blind study.

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