OK, what? The author completely lost me at this point. This seems like a very reasonable definition of the term 'alternative medicine'. If it was tested and/or proven effective then it wouldn't be alternative - it would be just medicine.
Plenty of approaches practiced by "alternative" medicine practitioners are biologically plausible, but haven't been tested in randomized controlled trials, because nobody has the incentive or the resources needed to conduct one. (Trials that require many millions of dollars and several years to conduct only happen if a multi-billion dollar return is likely, or if there is a clear and achievable political incentive.)
The most significant category I'm familiar with is emotion/stress-relief-based approaches for treating non-lethal but chronic and debilitating pain/fatigue/inflammatory/autoimmune conditions.
In other discussions here on this site, when I've bothered to fully articulate the basis for the notion that emotional issues and stress can cause these physiological illness, I've found the response to be something like "yeah of course, that's uncontroversial".
And sure, any good mainstream doctor, on recognising their patient is suffering a stress-related illness, will helpfully suggest reducing stress.
But if the patient wants a comprehensive program that can identify and heal all the stress/trauma/held emotion that is keeping them in chronic illness and pain, practitioners that offer this are generally of the kind that is categorised as "alternative" – or, what Wikipedia defines, unconditionally, as "biologically implausible".
Another example is naturopathy, which seeks to improve patients' health mostly through the adoption of an optimal diet and nutrition program. Not much is more biologically plausible than this, but, hey, Wikipedia knows best.
My basis for knowledge on this is over a decade researching and experimenting with approaches to overcome my own chronic illness, finding that those based on emotion and nutrition were the most effective, and finding material from highly-credentialed scientists explaining down to the fundamentals of cell biology, why it is plausible.
As a result, whilst I still turn to Wikipedia routinely as an info source for general topics, I've come to regard it as largely useless for medical topics that veer even slightly from the middle of the road.
That description sounds a bit biased itself. You're describing a dietician, but the Naturopathy umbrella (and practicioners) also covers unproven herbal remedies, homeopathy, acupuncture, belief in 'vital energy,' etc.
The wording of the Wikipedia article is that anything considered “alternative medicine” is by-definition “biologically implausible”.
But plenty of what is central to what naturopaths do - i.e., nutrition - is plainly biologically plausible. That naturopaths approach nutrition differently to mainstream dieticians doesn’t make the approach by-definition “implausible”. And the “unproven” herbal remedies they may use are not “implausible” (herbs are made up of molecules and thus can quite obviously influence physiology).
“Unproven” and “implausible” are not the same thing; that’s my central point.
If some naturopaths also practice homeopathy, that doesn’t change the biological plausibility of the nutritional aspect, which in my experience, is the vast majority of the practice (at least here in Australia).
For what it’s worth, your assertion that naturopathy is an umbrella term for those other modalities isn’t correct. Sure, some of them are also homeopaths, but not the majority in my experience. And of course acupuncture is from Traditional Chinese Medicine, which is a separate system again.
Speaking of which, in just the past few years we’ve seen Nobel Prize awarded to a Chinese researcher for “discovering” artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin in the herb sweet wormwood, which had long been used as a malaria remedy. She found this by scouring 1600-year-old Chinese medical texts.
So by Wikipedia’s definition, this remedy was “biologically implausible” right up until the moment someone completed Nobel Prize-winning research to suddenly make it plausible.
Fabulous logic. How lucky the researcher hadn’t read Wikipedia beforehand and learned her proposed research was implausible.
Let's try from a couple angles.
First, just the accuracy. Are there any alternative medicines that are effective? I'm fairly prejudiced against many alternative medical approaches (especially homeopathy) but within the wider field seems likely that at least one alternative approach somewhere actually works for some patients. I don't see how it can "actually work" while being "biologically implausible", which makes this a poor defining characteristic. Second, there are many people who describe themselves as practitioners of or believers in alternative medicine. Would any of them come up with or even recognize this definition? Doubtful, which means that at best this is a biased definition believed only by people with a particular preconceived view.
I'm mostly OK with this excerpt, because in this case I'm on the side that shares this bias. But even if it's "right", one should recognize that this still makes it a biased article. There's nothing inherently wrong with propagating this bias, and I prefer it to an uncritical acceptance of alternative medicine, but it's hypocritical to call it a "neutral point of view". The bigger question is whether it's possible or desirable for Wikipedia to actually have a "neutral point of view" while remaining useful, or whether it should adopt an "experts' point of view" and strive for accuracy. I'm unsure --- I think there is probably room for both approaches, but probably impossible for a single resource to serve both roles.
If Wikipedia wants to claim neutrality, it needs to write articles that all sides agree offer accurate summaries. But it can be very difficult for people who are certain they are right to neutrally present things they feel are wrong, which means that to achieve this goal Wikipedia may need to increase the ideological breadth of its base. Or it can give up on its claims of neutrality. Or it can continue to be criticized by people who correctly point out the hypocrisy of claiming to be neutral while producing ideologically slanted articles.
that's not enough. what is needed is the ability and willingness of editors to have an open mind and actually consider opposing views. to many times such clashes just end up in editor wars instead of a neutral text.
I think this is the origin of the issue people are having.
But it completely fails to fully cure many chronic conditions. They just give you a pill.
Eastern medicine is more hollistic (meaning it fully address chronic conditions by finding the true source so that not more pills are needed).
So for this statement above: what he was trying to say is that western medicine labels any healing methods that try to use natural remedies or hollistic healing as "alternative".
Or in other words: he is trying to show you that big pharma is controlling everything to such extend that even just trying any hollistic (permanently curing by finding the real cause) medicine is being ignored in favor of permanent pill dispesing.
Why cure it permanently if you can profit from symptom management :)
There’s plenty of scientific support for treatments other than drugs and this idea is compatible with the definition from Wikipedia.
If we put something through that process and find that outcome, we classify it as medicine. My understanding is that tests of some Traditional Chinese Medicine (which I assume is what we're talking about here when we say "eastern medicine") aren't able to replicate successful outcomes and so we therefore don't classify those things as medicine in the west.
That's not to say they don't help trigger the placebo and so on, just that we haven't proven it through double blind studies and so on - which is my understanding of what OP means by "empirical".
If you have any relevant sources that prove other wise I'll be happy to change my mind.
I find it quite frustrating that placebo can be observed to be effective in many scenarios but many scientist seem to dismiss it out of hand.
People who are practiced in eastern medicine don’t bother with rigorous scientific studies as much anyways. What’s the point, you can just see the reasoning and common sense yourself without needing to look at a study, not to mention the countless anecdotes they’ve collected from people they’ve met and who’ve found healing
I remember once when a test result got close to a threshold, I was told, "this test result is a little high, we should work at getting that down, and if it stays high we can pursue medicine to bring it down."
Could this merely be part of some non-confrontational advice? Maybe waiting for me to ask about exercise before answering?
On the other hand, I have had two friends whose relationships soured with their doctor by giving unwarranted advice.
One friend smoked. The other was overweight.
The doctors pursued the smoking/weight issue to the exclusion of what they were coming in for, and neither friend went back to that doctor.
There is a huge issue that there is no feedback loop when doctors are incompetent or cannot be bothered to actually engage -- as your friends' experience suggests, the doctor has no way (or incentive, really, if they're just trying to satisfy a metric) to find out if they actually helped or not. The only filtering mechanism seems to be either a) passed medical school, or b) gross incompetence which gets reported to an authority, but patients themselves (by definition) usually cannot judge if a doctor is giving them actively bad/dangerous advice.
Metrics are becoming a plague in and of itself... I live somewhere in Scandiwegia, and when I reserve a time slot with my doctor, the biggest time slot I could get was 10 minutes. That's 10 minutes to discuss a complex lifelong pain-related issue which may have genetics playing into it, etc. etc. It's absolutely insane for complex issues, but I'm betting a lot of these issues are essentially invisible to the system because people just give up and take (too many) painkillers. Trying to get a referral to experts in the type of pain I experience is of course heavily gatekept, and means I have to face a whole battery of other non-specialists (neuoroligists, etc.) who can only give wholly inconclusive answers as to whether I'm "worthy" of getting to talk to the specialists who could probably give me a proper diagnosis pretty quickly.
Of course, most things (general practitioner) doctors see are probably pretty simple and can handily be handled in 10 minutes, but it just gets very frustrating when it isn't that simple.
EDIT: Just wanted to add that none of this means that TCM (or alternative medicine in general) necessarily has any worth. The science of 'Western' medicine is overall really solid, but the systems around engaging with patients is really screwed up right now.
banyanbotanicals.com has some great articles about this, check out their six tastes article for example
Studies of Aromatherapy have found nothing statistically significant though, so that’d be down as “alternative medicine”. In the same way as “alternative facts” are not facts. “Alternative medicine” is not medicine. The nice thing about alternative medicine is that there’s a pretty clear and simple path to getting an alternative medicine to become actual medicine if it works. Have it studied and tested using the rigor of the scientific method.
Due to the replication crisis, I imagine it's actually much more difficult to get non-standard treatments in now than it was to introduce treatments last century.
Not that I'm disagreeing with you - I'm fully in the Ben Goldacre 'Bad Science' camp - I just wanted to highlight that these things sometimes take generational and cultural change, and for some classes of treatments, it's not always a case of taking something from the 'not yet proven to work' bucket and putting it in the 'proven to work' bucket (both buckets are somewhat leaky anyway).
That sounds a lot like the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. If you define "medicine" as "anything that works", then of course "alternative medicine" is crap, by definition.
One big problem with being this dismissive is that a lot of medicine started out as "alternative" and then was scientifically confirmed over time.
On second thought, thinking how Steve Jobs died I think it is quite apt.
Even smart people can have stupid and ignorant opinions.
Also there is no such a thing as Eastern Medicine, at best you can call it Eastern Pseudo-Medicine because if it worked it would just be Medicine.
There’s a reason why it’s still to this day a huge tradition and there’s countless stories you can read about people benefiting from eastern medicine
As an example... reflexology. All the parts of our body get grounded through our feet into the ground. That’s why touching different parts of your feet can affect different parts of your body
Holistic ways of thinking are extremely alien and foreign to western medicine
Edit: I don’t understand