This reminds me of the Tim Minchin song Storm. "Do you know what they call alternative medicine that has been proven to work?...Medicine."
I've never thought of it that way before but alternative medicine and AI have a lot in common.
I've never thought of it that way before but alternative medicine and AI have a lot in common.
Normally, we would not only want a proof that something works but also verifiable explanation of HOW something works.
Medicine is a problem because we don't understand how many of the chemicals work but the problem is so important (and also it is big business) that we just let it pass and we are happy that we can get some results even if we don't completely understand how we get them.
I don't like this quote. It is mostly true, yet it is not completely true. But because it is mostly true so many treat it as if it is completely true and thus miss the edge cases where it is not true.
Take for example certain substances that are deemed by the US federal government to have no medical value. They cannot be medicines. Yet they are alternative medicines and even prescribed by doctors. Their are even states who go against the federal government by saying these substances do have medical value. And if you go back a few decades, you'll find a time where mainstream science largely ignored any medical benefits of these substances, likely due to pressure from the federal government, and yet at that time those substances were alternative medicines that worked.
That's not same thing as saying that there isn't anything which is currently considered "alternative medicine" that works. Rather, once an alternative medicine has sufficient evidence going for it (and is better understood), it becomes less mystical and is accepted as mainstream medicine.
Does the DEA and the FDA not play a role in what is considered a medicine or an alternative medicine?
>The fact that the medical establishment now accepts marijuana as a therapeutic tool is evidence of the quote: it was "alternative medicine" until there was sufficient evidence that it worked.
This is effectively making the claim that while there were problems in the past, the fixing of past problems can be taken as evidence that current problems do not exist. I'm arguing the opposite. That problems in the past, without fixing the systematic causes of those problems, is a reliable indicator that we are still at risk of those same problems.
Think of it like code. If your code had bugs but you fixed them, should you assume that A: my code had bugs but now they are gone and my code is bug free or B: the process by which I write code allows for bugs, and while I have fixed those bugs I haven't fundamentally changed how I write code so I am still at risk for having bugs. I find the latter the more reasonable approach.
>That's not same thing as saying that there isn't anything which is currently considered "alternative medicine" that works.
When people use that quote, I find that this is exactly what they are saying in the majority of cases. That if something is currently considered alternative medicine, it doesn't work because otherwise it would be considered medicine.
A claim that as our knowledge progresses alternative medicine that works becomes medicine is a much more reasonable claim, because it recognizes there is a timeline and since we aren't at the end of that timeline we allow for some alternative medicine actually work with the recognition in the future it will be refined into medicine.
And if someone wanted to make the claim that the majority of alternative medicine doesn't work, I would also fully agree. My issue is people taking a guideline that is generally true and applying it as if it is always true.
You mean 9 minute beat poem.
I mean if I take some herb and (successfully) use it to treat abdominal pain without knowing what that herb is or how it works, would that herb be classified as medicine or not?
I have read description of many medicines and found out that we still don't know how those medicines work. But they are still called medicines.
So what is medicine?
Of course, alternative medicine proponents rarely do randomized controlled trials.
If it can't, then frankly, you don't really know it works.
As for the opposite case - if there was a thing you wanted to test that had a strong effect, then the company that owns the current treatment would happily fund you the tests in exchange for dibs if the tests pans out.
Edit: Since people are bringing up ancient examples and kind of missing the point of the question: I'm not looking for examples from the Roman Empire here. Let's stick with the past < 50 years. Maybe something your parents might actually remember being dismissed as "alternative medicine" (whatever that meant at the time) but which now is clearly just accepted "medicine". Basically, try to find something that's in the spirit of the question. The goal is obviously to find things that modern medicine actually previously dismissed and later accepted, not to find a loophole in the question.
Not all hyperbole are straw men, the original question was about how the current distinction between medicine and non-medicine works. Historical examples are relevant, but not what intended in the question.
Does rely on accepting "cleaning things" as medicine. It's certainly a great way to prevent disease. Does it count as "alternative preventative medicine"?
AI doesn't have such an authority. New AI methods can be deployed without asking for permission from a governing body.
19th century views on medicine is actually a better comparison than something from the last fifty years, because advancements in modern medicine is largely shaped by governing authorities.
I also vaguely recall that the doctrine of signatures wasn't a complete and abject failure, but some cursory Googling indicates that maybe it was after all.
Effective treatments as been subsumed into "mainstream" medicine, perhaps with a bit of purification/standardization along the way, while the ineffective and unproven stuff remains "alternative medicine".
If it somehow turns out that homeopathy is an effective therapy for something (besides dehydration), it'll end up with a procedure code, the hospital pharmacy will stock 10x tincture of whatever, and eventually it will be just another mainstream medical treatment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisinin
"It was discovered in 1972 by Tu Youyou, who was co-recipient of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Medicine for her discovery.[2] "
There are "scientific/medicine" results these days what it even works against cancer, for example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6347441/
There's things like "gargle with salt water to cure a sore throat". That's commonly done remedy that was done forever and we now understand the science behind it. This page[0] labels it under an "alternative medicine" tag, as does this page[1]:
[0]: https://www.webmd.com/cold-and-flu/features/does-gargling-wl... [1]: https://www.sharecare.com/health/alternative-medicines/artic...
The conclusion then is that there are things we consider medicine today that used to be alternative medicine.
That would imply examples from 400 BC would have the same relevance as examples from 50 years ago. I assumed it was obvious that that's not the case, but it seems I was wrong.
As long as pain and death exist our medical knowledge is incomplete. That doesn't mean it isn't the best we have or that the process isn't the best we are capable of, it just means the job isn't done (or, in some cases, mistakes or oversights occurred).
The saying is also intentionally provocative, and in my interpretation is meant to promote curiosity and open-mindedness rather than an interest in any specific alternative therapy.
An example of an alternative therapy gone mainstream (among many others in the thread that I think fit) is folic acid supplementation for those who many become pregnant. It was not universally practiced even after some physicians had linked it to spina bifida prevention (this is my layman's understanding of history, not medical advice or judgment): https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/106/4/825
I would say many alternative therapies revolve around some supplement or another. Only rarely does the medical community agree that it is of high importance (if they do, again, I'm not a doctor I might be very wrong) and the previously alternative therapy become mainstream.
St. John's Wort started out as alternative medicine but is now officially approved and prescribed for treating depression in many European countries -- I believe this got started in the 1990s.
I think this kind of thing is quite rare in medicine, though. Whereas it's not hard to find stuff that was done by AI researchers that somehow no longer counts as AI.
> Complementary medicine refers to therapies that complement traditional western (or allopathic) medicine and is used together with conventional medicine, and alternative medicine is used in place of conventional medicine. Alternative medicine refers to therapeutic approaches taken in place of traditional medicine and used to treat or ameliorate disease.
The difference (as I've understood it anyway) is "alternative medicine" implies you contradict modern medical practices, which was the basis for the comment I replied to. And which (I guess not surprisingly) medical experts recommend against. So I think the kind of example you'd want is a medical treatment that modern medicine previously recommended against, but that ended up vouching later. Because this was all a response to a comment that suggested people had a double-standard and were moving the goalposts or something like that (hence the AI comparison). Merely showing the science went from "we don't know if X is a good idea" to "we know X is a good idea" isn't finding an inconsistency.
Exceptions may be in mental health. Somebody else mentioned psychedelic drugs, which might be FDA-approved for some conditions soon, but all official medical sources currently treat them as extremely dangerous.
However, I do think cherry-picking the effective treatments from naturopathy and TCM and turning them into mainstream medicine is similar in spirit to cherry-picking the successful approaches from 80s and 90s AI research and turning them into "just algorithms". But there are a lot more successful old-school AI techniques than there are effective alternative medicine treatments.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank...
Trump was mocked in the media for asking if getting UV light inside the body was a possible treatment for covid19, as if he was suggesting an alternative medicine treatment. And light therapy does have that long a history.
Thing is, this is not only a known treatment used in the past (only falling out of favor in the 50s), there are studies from the past few decades about how well UV light works on viruses, and it really is being investigated today for use on SARS-CoV-2.