This is true for any medical treatment. You weigh up the costs, risks, benefits and then you decide if you want to go ahead with it.
There are also numerous examples of normal medicine cures that have been dreadfully harmful. Thalidomide and SSRIs to name a couple off the top of my head,
I also want to say that this is pretty disingenuous as a statement because I named harmful CAM treatments in response to your question "if you have heard of a treatment which anecdotally works, and has no reported side effects, then why wouldn't you try it?". I was pointing out that alt med really cannot claim to have no side effects. It often does claim this, but it cannot.
Many medicines have dreadful side-effects, yes, even the ones we still use, but these are measured and quantified and (in theory) the treatments are only used if the main effect is worth it.
With alt med there often are side effects and there is no proof that any of it works, by definition.
Absolutely, but medical treatments should have reliable data available (not saying they always do). In contrast alt med never does (that's what makes it alt), but instead has cheerleaders and woo.
"There are also numerous examples of normal medicine cures that have been dreadfully harmful. Thalidomide and SSRIs to name a couple off the top of my head,"
Yup, and now we know the harms and don't use these things. (What's your point?). Whereas with alt-med this doesn't seem to happen.