Why Alternative Medicine is Bunk

In a post on his science blog, Aardvarcheology, the Swedish intellectual Martin Rundqvist explains, using the theory of natural selection, why alternative therapies have zero or near-zero therapeutic effect.

His thesis is very simple. He points out that alternative therapies that are shown to be effective will quickly be co-opted by the real medical profession, at which point alternative therapists are forced to stop using it because their professional credibility, such as it is, depends on their separation from the mainstream. Meanwhile, alternative therapies that harm patients will (perhaps not as quickly) come to be identified as dangerous and will be abandoned.

That leaves only ineffective remedies — those that have no effect on the sufferer one way or the other.

However, as others have pointed out, the selection pressure against dangerous quack remedies is not really so high, which means that many dangerous alternative therapies survive what Darwin called 'the winnow of Nature' to remain within the naturopathic pharmacopoeia.

Please note that this doesn't prove alternative medicine is bunk. We know that already. But it explains why it is bunk, which is interesting.

a reply to: Astyanax

Generally speaking medicine comes from plants, it seems perverse for me for a pharmaceutical company to be able to patent a plant or a process for making medicines. Our government has helped to make this the standard operating procedure and max profit at all costs explains why medical care is so extreme in its costs.

Alternative medicine is real and works but if a corporation can patent then market a product, they want all the profit available for the so called open market.

I think the premise of the thread is accurate, but not true.

originally posted by: Astyanax
In a post on his science blog, Aardvarcheology, the Swedish intellectual Martin Rundqvist explains, using the theory of natural selection, why alternative therapies have zero or near-zero therapeutic effect.

His thesis is very simple. He points out that alternative therapies that are shown to be effective will quickly be co-opted by the real medical profession, at which point alternative therapists are forced to stop using it because their professional credibility, such as it is, depends on their separation from the mainstream. No. The current situation is that we are in a system of various business cartels. It has nothing to with real medicine or science. It is not about the general health or what really works in the long run. Hey, did you know that you can put vinegar on a mole and it falls off in two weeks without leaving a scar of any type after about a month? No? Why not? Meanwhile, alternative therapies that harm patients will (perhaps not as quickly) come to be identified as dangerous and will be abandoned.

That leaves only ineffective remedies — those that have no effect on the sufferer one way or the other.

However, as others have pointed out, the selection pressure against dangerous quack remedies is not really so high, which means that many dangerous alternative therapies survive what Darwin called 'the winnow of Nature' to remain within the naturopathic pharmacopoeia.

Please note that this doesn't prove alternative medicine is bunk. We know that already. But it explains why it is bunk, which is interesting.

edit on 30-11-2014 by OrphanApology because: (no reason given)

There is quackery on both sides. Question everything. The info is out there.

a reply to: Astyanax
The truth is a very real medicine that logic cannot get its teeth in to, many human illnesses are empowered by a certain mental and emotional response to life. Chemistry alone is insifficient method of healing no matter wether it is pharma or alternative. We are in a worldwide process of recovering our natural ability to heal and that requieres that many stones be overturned. Misstakes will occur, but this is better than staying twiddling our thumbs. Give it all you got and advances will be made.

a reply to: Astyanax

I cant entirely agree with his assertions.

a) As alternative treatments are absorbed by big pharama. - If they do they will still be very expensive and so will still leave a market for alternative practitioners. Also, alternative practitioners will only go out of business if big pharma can pass laws to say they themselves are the only ones who can grow, process, and sell them.

b) as current alternative treatments get absorbed into big pharma medicine, alternative practitioners will recommend less safe treatments. There is no evidence this will happen - I happen to think the alternative practitioners will be happy to go out of that line of business into a related skill area.

If it did turn out to be true does not the same logic apply to big pharma. For example, If nutrition turns out to be a cause or a treatment of cancer will big pharma resort to less safe treatments for patients in order to keep profits flowing?

The article concluded by saying the 'we know alternative treatments are bunk anyway" Is the reason cancer research never includes research into nutrition as either a cause or a treatment of cancer?

Secondly. will crowed funded cancer research remain in the hands of the crowds or will the patent magically appear in the ownership of some big pharma member.

a reply to: Astyanax

The natural selection point is an interesting one, and it reminds me of a Tim Minchin skit (which I will return to post later) where he more or less says "you know what they call alternative medicine that works? MEDICINE!" Which not only takes the piss rather effectively, but make a similar point to your OP.

Trouble is from my POV, is that the medical community is slow to recognise that natural selection has happened and they have not caught up. Now I'm pretty grumpy and cynical, and when I'm all grown up maybe I'll be up to your level but I have to admit that I believe I've seen result from what is still termed alternative medicine in others, specifically homeopathic remedies in Autistic teenagers. And I wasn't expecting that.

ETA: This may slightly amuse you, i hope so

FYI, the REAL frauds and quacks AKA 'Medicine Doctors' are the third leading cause of death in the United States...

Nearly everything that conventional medicine is telling us is unsubstantiated claims AKA fraud.

"The chief cause of so-called quackery outside the medical profession is the real quackery in the profession." ~ James A. Smith, M.D.

"Most of the everyday practices of modern medicine are unproven if we go by the government's own standards. In 1978, the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), an arm of the United States Congress, issued a major research report that concluded "only 10 to 20 percent of all procedures currently used in medical practices have been shown to be efficacious by controlled trial." In other words, 80 to 90 percent of what doctors do to you is scientifically unproven guesswork. By this government-supported definition, most of modern medicine is quackery."---Richard Walters

"Over 100,000 people are killed each year by prescription medications and another 2.1 million are injured. More people die each year at the hands of prescription medications than suicide, firearms, homicide, illicit drugs, or alternative medicine. Conventional medicine has no right to point the finger and call anyone else a quack!"
Source

"Quacks, just plain quacks, whether we are willing to admit it or not, for are we not doing the very things for which we condemn those who we are pleased to call by this opprobrious name?" W.H. Hay, M.D.

I will expose the real quacks: the doctors, the hospitals, and the pills that kill 225,000 trusting souls every year. That’s like killing the entire population of Caldwell County (38,442) about SIX times. I got the stats, I can back up my claims.

This is the point at which medicine crosses over the line of anything scientific and becomes a dangerous form of dogma known as "scientism." Modern medicine is not a scientific debate, folks. It's a system of control. Doctors, judges and courtrooms are simply tools of oppression to manipulate, poison and exploit a diseased population, all while isolating them from the natural cures that really work.

Chemotherapy Stickup

a reply to: Murgatroid

Perhaps it's not just medicine and doctors in the US that is the issue, rather that people cant afford decent access to it.

Maybe you could start a thread on the subject of

Nearly everything that conventional medicine is telling us is unsubstantiated claims AKA fraud.

and bring a range of stats and sources.

Or perhaps you wont lol

I have studied nutrition and food properties at LENGTH through my life. Have also helped others as well as my OWN ailments using food based science in healing.

Is that considered "alternative" or "quackery"? Curious.

a reply to: LDragonFire

What exactly is perverse about removing impurities and ensuring a consistent dose?

a reply to: BatheInTheFountain

Proper nutrition is not quackery. It's also part if mainstream advice and treatment.

a reply to: Astyanax

Surely allopathic medicine has also gone through a stage of trial and error also. Back in the 1950's virtually every child had to have its tonsils out, now we know that the tonsils are a major part of defence for the body against infection. So allopathic Nil.

If you look at the electric shock treatment allopathic medicine literally tortured many victims. the dietary advice from the doctor in the 1950's was very different to today - eat lots of diary - - -

Fine to make sweeping statements but you need to think about many methods of treatment as well as the mistakes we have today, especially with the financial interests and fixed trials for new drugs and vaccines etc.

It was not that long ago that a law by henry 8th allowed a herbalist to overweight a prescription by an allopathic practioner. This has now been changed and herbal medicine has now been, like aromatherapy and other alternative cures, taken over by the big pharma in order to make a few bucks and get rid of their competition eg the alternative practitioners.

Today's idea is to bombard the ill part with an expensive chemical bomb whilst the naturopathetic method is to help the body to fight the infection and defeat it if possible, thereby building up immunity. Surely it should be a choice of the individual as to which method they choose - some may wish to try an alternative method first with the allopathic secondly if necessary - but surely it should be a personal choice as illness is a personal thing concerning the one thing that truly belongs to us, our body - however much medicine has been made into corporate profits with the rights of the patient virtually the last to be considered.

This thread should be closed as a HOAX.

a reply to: Astyanax

What a load of horse manure. Only the ones that are co-opted by the death dealers are considered real???? Modern medicine is the sham friend. Check it out, the evidence for the vast majority of medical procedures is ridiculously small. The 4th leading cause of death in the US is iatrogenic injury.. death by medicine. Now only 10% of those errors are actually reported according to a study at Harvard, not a "quack" school by any means. What this means is that Iatrogenic injury, or death by "real" medicine is the leading cause of death in the US, far surpassing all other causes.

And to assume that the system will take on all real therapies is naive to say the least. Yes they will try, but they will continue to promote fake therapies, like Spinal Fusions, prophylactic aspirin, flu shots, Tamiflu, antibiotics for viruses, etc.

What a friggin joke. The end point of the vast majority of modern medicine is not health, but sickness, disease, dysfunction, and becoming a slave to pharmaceuticals. How many drugs have any testing on cross reactions? NONE. How many people are on multiple pharm.'s?

CDC

Percent of persons using three or more prescription drugs in the past 30 days: 21.7% (2007-2010)
Percent of persons using five or more prescription drugs in the past 30 days: 10.6% (2007-2010)

The natural selection argument is just plain silly quackery!

It is stupid to the extreme and requires only a trifling of common sense to see straight through it.

By the time quackery comes anywhere into the picture, the vast majority have already had children and influenced them.

All quackery, whether it be Alternative, Big Pharma or Government, can do in reality, is shorten our life spans.

That whole blog was itself, the highest form of quackery.

P

a reply to: Astyanax

Most cures and therapies exist only in the minds of the giver and the receiver. --Which given the human mind and how it may work, does not negate such cures and therapies except to allow it to be said that they work not on everyone.

We have no better proof of that than the famed placebo effect that medical science itself cannot fully explain.

Well then, I guess I'd better die then, as medical doctors cannot explain my condition, nor help me.

About a year ago I developed an unoperable brain tumor. A couple of months later my eyes closed by themselves, and I couldn't open them again. Still later I couldn't breathe when I move my arms. Saw (and still seeing) lots of neurologists, ENT's, neuromuscular specialists, in the best hospitals in Scandinavia, but nobody can help me.

Left to my own devices, I started my own research and came up with electrotherapy devices that allows me to open my eyes, breathe, and be in a much better shape. The specialists are fascinated by it, but doesn't want to touch it with a long pole, guess it is because their fear of loss of reputation. According to one neurologist, I should just stop using my gadgets, and sit home, unable to see, and most probably die from a breathing arrest, or go mad by the inability to cope with my condition, and then they can help that....

So, here I am a year down the line, suffering from a condition where the medical profession are totally helpless, and totally dependent on 'quackery'. If I were not an electronic engineer with additional studies in zoology and human physiology, and were totally dependent on the traditional medical system, I don't even want to think in what state (both mental and physical) I would have been in by now. Sure, my brain works slower, and I have lots of other issues, but I am totally independent and functional.

So, medical profession, you cannot help me, but my own version of quackery does.... is it bunk then?

While the hypothesis makes sense and I agree with most of it, unfortunately we/science do/does not know everything yet.

I periodically get a bad rash. Cause unknown. Could be any one of a million things out there causing it. I have been to doctors over the years and been prescribed every know cream/pill/steroid/treatment/you name it. None of it works.

I turned to alternative medicine. What did I have to lose? I tried Apple cider vinegar. It worked! ...and it tastes good

My guess is there is a scientific explanation for it but there is little money to be made in vinegar so no pharmaceutical companies will bother.

When our bodies do not get the required nutrition, Disease and illness will set in. Modern medicine Does nothing to address that problem, it only deepens the problem. Drugs create a more acidic PH range in the body driving it closer to cellular degradation. When the body is given the proper nutrition it WILL heal its self. Has been proven over and over and over. Big Pharma and the old school medical society will refuse to admit that. Also most doctors are not trained in nutrition and will refuse to believe in anything other than what they were told to believe.