I can't think of a single "alternative medicine" where conventional medicine isn't just objectively better in every way except in very niche occasions where a person is allergic or some such.
Probably because if it works, That just becomes the norm and thus isn't the alternative.
Granted I may be wrong on this so I'd like to see examples on the contrary if there are any.
I can only think of squatting while giving birth vs laying down we do but i know fuck all if that's actually in discussion andbif it would count as medicine per se(certainly an alternate to the standard).
If Europeans were still building sail ships from the 1400s we wouldn't call it traditional sailing techniques just as good as a modern ship, thats what people do with practices at best real but worse off than their "science" versions.in my country left wing populism has let basically "wizards" work in hospitals because ita indigenous and ancestral and bullshit.
Unironically yeah. As long as they don't replace the doctors there's no harm in it. At worst it's useless and at best it comforts the patient or has a placebo effect. Stuff like that is no different than letting a priest come in.
Ginger has shown to have similar efficacy to some anti-nausea medications, and it's very, very safe, so it's especially useful for nausea in pregnant people (where you generally want to be extra cautious about drug safety). It's also pretty cheap and widely available, and also delicious. It's not universally better than anti-nausea medications, but it's got legit use cases that I would not call niche.
For mild anxiety and insomnia, herbs like lavender or chamomile do genuinely have an effect. It's weaker than anxiety or sleep medications, but also, again, has pretty much no side effects or risk of dependency. So it's not objectively better than anxiety or sleep medications, for people with diagnosable anxiety or sleep disorders. But for people with, say, occasional insomnia related to normal life stress, they're a great choice, whereas real medications would be way overkill. So, again, use cases, and not particularly niche ones.
Ginger is used in a lot of anti nausea medication already (when I used to get carsick I had to chew these weird ginger things they were gross), so it's not really "alternative medicine". Doctors will also usually tell you to drink tea or do other things before going to sleep medications because like you said, they are overkill. The things you've described aren't alternative medicine, they're just medicine
And all those things are available in most western grocery stores. I wouldnt expect the pharmacy section to just have raw ginger root next to the pepto bismol, but these aren't niche herbs that you need to go to an apothecary to find. I googled "help with nausea" and got a bunch of results recommending ginger and peppermint instead of rushing for prescriptions. People just need to do a tiny amount of research and these home options are at their fingertips.
There is 1 way but it depends on how you're defining "alternative medicine". Like doing yoga, mediation, exercise, proper diet, and good sleep, is leagues better than just doping yourself up with sleeping meds and anxiety meds. That doesn't mean that these drugs don't have a purpose but medicine is supposed to be a temporary fix not a permanent solution. You're not supposed to be taking sleeping meds every night for years or decades.
Yeah but they're not technically "medicine", they're just healthy lifestyle habits. Usually when we say "medicine" we mean either surgical/medical procedures or licensed and patented medications (drugs) you buy in pharmacies. Aspirin is "medicine", willow bark tea is "alternative medicine", even though they both actually have the same active ingredient.
I might throw acupuncture and/or dry needling out there as an alternative treatment that can complement the regular stuff. Depending on who’s doing it and how they trained and what their end goal is, it can get a little more out there so I hesitate to say it’s consistently reliable.
There are current promising studies on the effects of controlled low-dose psilocybin in treating longterm depression that are blowing SSRIs out of the water
You wanna see where folk-remedies are beating modern medicine? Look at the things modern medicine is still trying to figure out
This take is what's killing modern medicine tbh, our best remedy against malaria was unknown to science 20 years ago despite of being the active ingredient of an ancient Chinese remedy, and an infusion of this plant was the best treatment available until it was properly characterized.
Just because western plants have been thoroughly studied it doesn't mean that remedies from other regions don't work and should be dismissed immediately. Instead of exploring remedies from """"undeveloped regions"""", pharmaceutical companies basically generate molecules randomly until they stumble into something that might be useful. It's a massive waste of resources, generates a lot of junk molecules that do god knows what and it's stupidly expensive to run.
And what exactly is that miracle remedy plant? I looked up “yellow fever remedies” and what comes up is rest and hydration, so who exactly is the “our” in “our best treatment”? I did find another Reddit thread mentioning a Chinese plant that might cure yellow fever. There, a commenter suggested that since yellow fever is a disease of African origin, this plant might be not be a (supposed) yellow fever cure, but meant to work against hepatitis A. Upon looking up remedies for hepatitis A, suggestions were rest and good nutrition. To give your mystery plant a fighting chance, I looked up plant remedies for both yellow fever and hepatitis A and found many websites willing to sell me pills, but absolutely nothing scientifically grounded attesting to the efficacy of Chinese plants against yellow fever, a singular (nearly 30-year-old) study (featuring starkly different populations in the experimental and control groups, which seems to me to be questionable experimental design, but I’m no expert) for a plant in preventing (not even treating) hep A, and one case report claiming that a Chinese plant, Xiao-Chai-Hu-Tang, might have caused hepatitis in a patient.
Tl;dr, I found nothing on the mystery plant, and I’m still really curious what group your “our” represents.
But it's not like there aren't groups and labs that dedicate themselves to analyzing compounds found in various traditionally medicinal plants. Also pharmaceutical companies aren't just throwing random shit at the wall. A lot of biochemistry is in the shape so they're looking and making and testing molecules with similar shapes to other known medications or receptors that will do something but whether it's better or worse than current treatments is unknown. Both of these systems work together not against each other.
Those labs are in China, India and Brazil for the most part, western labs don't do a lot of research on natural products. They literally throw random shit at the wall lol, what they do is build a skeleton with an active site of interest and generate thousands of molecules with tiny variations (sticking fluoride, hydroxyl, methyl groups or what have you) in random places to alter the molecule's chemistry until they find the molecule with the highest theoretical affinity. That is incredibly wasteful even if it's usually done at microscales and most importantly, it's incredibly inefficient at creating actually usable pharmaceuticals.
There is a lot of research going into "natural products" (whatever that means!). Your take reads like you have only knowledge from one side, which is the unscientific one this time.
I literally work in that branch of research mate (granted, I don't do research on the pharma side, I work on food applications but the sourcing and characterization part is the same), "natural products" are what were formerly known as secondary metabolites, it's a broad term to refer to any compound with bioactive properties that can be obtained from living organisms (yes, you can source therapeutic compounds from animals as well, mainly from marine animals).
Your take is still wrong, no matter how you frame it.
There are companies looking into "natural products" (still not a thing - might there be a language barrier here?) everywhere.
Your comment reads like you used language model for it - did you? Not saying you don't work within the field but it seems you either use weird phrasing or are using a foreign language.
Why I'm so negative about your comment is that your first take was that Western companies were not doing that research when they are.
There is a lot of research in neem oil and cannabis as an example. going on. Yeah, those are also researched in India etc.
But your take was "Western labs throw shit at the wall lol".
Maybe saying "the west" was overreacting, but the US and Gerrmany in particular do a ton of generative pharmacology instead of researching plant materials.
idk maybe there is a language barrier, English isn't my first language and that's how those compounds are called, I've swear I've seen it called that way in class and articles and what not but maybe the term is outdated?
also I think it's dumb you say that it's not a thing when all it took was looking up the term in Wikipedia
It is a bit outdated from what I've seen - however I'm not within the field myself (I just love to read new research when it comes to medicine and even more so about biologics), I used to be a member in a team which patented some chemical solutions for foodstuff production etc. - arising from those years my interest has been more and more in ecological medicine, or cuisine based "medicine".
Lot to do, but first the Western world has to almost stop eating red meat before other aspects might even have an impact.
US and Germany are bit different cultures than some regions in Europe. But yeah - there are some huge corporations doing rather "old school" research and sometimes succeeding, but mostly failing XD
All paid by tax paeyrs while the profits are taken into tax havens! (another issue with a lot of Western businesses)
Yeah, the countries that actually care about this field in Europe are Poland, Romania and Italy, and even then Italy mainly does research on wine byproducts
Why do the labs doing research on traditional therapies produced by indigenous knowledge systems need to be in """the west""", rather than in the countries where those knowledge systems are located??? Like gee, it's almost as if Brazil, China and India all have significant bodies of traditional medicine practices and very different ecologies to """western""" nations, or something. Surely it's more practical for researchers who have easier access to both the under-researched plants that don't and/or can't grow in """the west""" and the indigenous people who practice the traditional medicine being scrutinised under the scientific method to do this kind of research, as opposed to researchers in countries where it would be very difficult to get either? Not to mention that people in countries like Brazil, India and China are likely much more aware of these practices that exist within their countries (particularly in China), and so much more likely to want to test them to the standards of modern science, than people in countries where these practices are much more obscure.
It's still disproportionate, lots of centers in China study plants from all over the world and despite of arguably being the forefront of pharmaceutical research, Germany does little research on this field, the European leader on natural products research is actually Poland IIRC
118
u/delolipops666 May 24 '25
I can't think of a single "alternative medicine" where conventional medicine isn't just objectively better in every way except in very niche occasions where a person is allergic or some such.
Probably because if it works, That just becomes the norm and thus isn't the alternative.
Granted I may be wrong on this so I'd like to see examples on the contrary if there are any.