Science Based Medicine Please.

[LillyPons]

If alternative medicine worked, do you know what it would be called ?

"Medicine."

[Paxiled]

I think you're right about the product aspirin, which is a synthetic form of the acid found in willow bark, but I heard recently on an NPR program, I think, that the Greeks isolated the natural acid through alcohol tincturing centuries before that.  Of course, the current product is far more effective than willow bark, but far more toxic.

[gymdandee]

http://umm.edu/health/medical/altmed/herb/willow-bark

[Paxiled]

I'm afraid you don't understand medical history.  By the way, gymdandee cited Hippocrates using willow bark.  My understanding is the ancient Greeks isolated the ingredient that came to be aspirin, so it goes a long way back to before the 1800s.  Anyway, "medicine" was what we now call "alternative" medicine and homeopathic medicine for most of human history.  Few people trusted modern medicine because it would usually kill you -- think of leaches, bleeding, not sterilizing tools, experimenting on people without their permission.  So what we have really is allopathic medicine, which has come a long way from its early days of barbarism but is still grossly ineffective and produces as many unwanted side effects as it does effects, and "alternative" medicine, which is the older of the forms of medicine and has a much longer history of use and safety.  At the end of the 1800s in the US the most commonly trusted doctors were homeopaths, with herbalists next, and allopathic physicians killing people right and left (they killed one of our presidents, or at least one).  At that time, a group of robber barons, having bankrupted the railroads to fund their banking endeavors, got together to decide which form of medicine would yield the best monetary rewards.  Obviously, that would be allopathic, with the ability to patent procedures and develop monopoly treatments and information that were allowed to be kept secret from the public and therefore you could charge a whole lot more for the service.  So they funded that form of medicine and put on a propaganda campaign against some very tried and true treatments that, in fact, doctors used and still use today.  This froze out money for research on any other form of medicine and it became the more common form of medicine used in the US.  The older and more widely used form became less used as fewer people knew how to use it properly, and is now called "alternative" only because the extreme failures and pain caused by allopathic experiments gone bad brought back a search for more benign forms of treatment.  If they don't work, you can always turn to allopathic treatment.  Now let me list just a few "alternative" techniques that have become incorporated into allopathic medicine -- the overuse of antibiotics (and its corollary the importance of probiotics), the ones mentioned above by gymdandee and many many others, the importance of a strong immune system (most people don't know that Pasteur disavowed the germ theory of disease, the foundation of allopathic medicine, before his death, determining that germs would always adapt to attempts to kill them and that building a strong immune system was the way to go), the importance of an antioxidant-rich diet, the importance of environmental toxins to causing disease and weakening resistance to disease, especially cancer and autoimmune disorders, the extreme toxicity to health of too many medications and surgeries (most people on addictive pain killers are there because of botched surgeries, mostly by orthopedists, that didn't have to be done in the first place) -- the list just goes on.  So there really isn't "alternative" medicine, there really is just medicine if you wipe away the propaganda meant to increase income.  Sometimes allopathic is the best way to go, sometimes not.  Everything needs to be in the tool kit.  And just to tell you, the longest contribution to longer life span was the result of allopathic medicine -- when physicians in the 1800s started blowing up waste holding pools forcing the creation of the modern water treatment system.  It is the availability of clean water that is responsible for 70-80%, depending on who you read, of our extended life spans.  The rest of allopathic medicine is responsible for just a bit more.  Use it all -- don't have biases that just limit your choices.

[gymdandee]

If clinical trials show that a therapy works, it’s good medicine. And if a therapy doesn't work, then it’s not an alternative.
For example, Hippocrates used the leaves of the willow plant to treat headaches and muscle pains. By the early 1800s, scientists had isolated the active ingredient: aspirin. In the 1600s, a Spanish physician found that the bark of the cinchona tree treated malaria. Later, cinchona bark was shown to contain quinine, a medicine now proven to kill the parasite that causes malaria. In the late 1700s, William Withering used the foxglove plant to treat people with heart failure. Later, foxglove was found to contain digitalis, a drug that increases heart contractility. More recently, artemisia, an herb used by Chinese healers for more than a thousand years, was found to contain another anti-malaria drug, which was later called artemisinin.
Source: Paul Offit

complementary, or holistic medicine!