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Comment by riantogo | Hacker News Reader

Do you know what qualifies as alternative medicine? Anything that is not medicine.

What is medicine?

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?

If your herb was shown to improve abdominal pain in a certain population through use of well-executed, replicated randomized control trials, I think it would count as medicine, yes.

Knowing how something works is better than not knowing. But you can still have a pretty good idea that it does have the desired effect (i.e. verify cause and effect) via randomized controlled trials.

Of course, alternative medicine proponents rarely do randomized controlled trials.

If the alternative medicine is widely known, you won't be able to get a patent on it. Without a patent you won't be able to make a profit. Without a profit there's no incentive to spend the enormous money required for a randomized controlled trial.

But if the alternative medicine is widely known to work, it means the effect is powerful enough that a cheap RCT done at a local medical university should be more than enough to demonstrate it.

If it can't, then frankly, you don't really know it works.

The point is that without a monetary payout at the end, you're going to have trouble incentivizing someone to do the study no matter how cheap it is. And don't forget the opposite, if there's a current medical treatment for the condition you're testing they will try to block you at every step.

You can pester scientists, they have their own separate set of perverted incentives - academic status - which, in this case, works in your favor.

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.

Did you read my GP comment? The dibs don't do you any good unless you can get a patent on the new treatment.

Countries with socialized healthcare would be well incentivized to fund these studies.

And PhD students need to write papers.

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