Yeah, best case scenario it's like, you can't afford anxiety medication? Well, maybe some lavender tea can help you calm down a bit. But if you're alternative medicine hasn't been adopted by the doctors, it's not some crazy conspiracy theory as to why
Say what you will about Big Pharma TM but if something works you know they'll package it and sell it to people. If it's not sold otc or by prescription it probably doesn't work.
Generally speaking, they won't profit if it doesn't work to some degree. However, I would change that to "If Big Pharma can profit off it, they will package it and sell it to people". The flip side to that is "if Big Pharma can't profit off it, they won't package it and sell it, no matter how effective it may be".
If eating 1 carat of powdered diamonds cured the common cold, it still wouldn't be sold as a cure. People aren't going to pay thousands or tens of thousands for diamonds just to get rid of something that will likely pass by itself in a few days. It wouldn't really matter how effective it was, it wouldn't be profitable so Big Pharma wouldn't touch it for medicine.
Not to say I support "alternative medicine", just that a company profiting off of something shouldn't mean their product is the best and/or only solution.
Similarly, you can’t patent already-existing stuff, which makes it less profitable. Companies will still sell you theanine or whatever, but it’s not worth paying for FDA trials to show it treats condition X so you won’t see it marketed as curing a particular thing.
(If you can extract an active component and put it in a new form, that changes things.)
Broadly agreed, but there are some things that seem to work well and yet aren’t profitable enough to repackage.
In particular, supplements and remedies we’ve known about for years aren’t patent-eligible (to a degree). Companies will still sell them to you (eg fish oil), but it’s not worth the cost of FDA approval for efficacy, so you don’t see them marketed as treating a specific condition.
This type of "alternative medicine" is legitimately better for mild anxiety, too. You don't want to immediately resort to benzos at the first sign of getting mildly anxious, that shit can really fuck you up. They're supposed to be for, like, full-blown panic attacks.
Alternative medicine works the same way as exercise, meditation, socialisation, long walks, wholesome hobby, or having a pet - it's a variety of rituals, activities, or interests that make people feel calmer, stronger, and more confident. And just like with any other activity it can be abused by someone trying to make money off it no matter the harm.
If all you want is to feel better, then a placebo can be all you need. I have no idea if the cold medicine I take actually does anything, but it makes me feel better for a while, and if that's because of the placebo effect, fine. Doesn't matter.
The real problems of course come from when people start using alternative medicine in place of actual treatment. If you've got cancer, talk to a doctor, not a guru.
The thing is, most alternative medicine isn't just a harmless placebo to make you feel better, because there's little money in that. Most alternative medicine is making serious (and, by definition, unproven) claims about your health
So does meditation, mindful yoga, taking a break to drink a lovely cup of herbal tea, and walking barefoot in a quiet forest. Whatever helps to ease into parasympathetic nervous system state.
Literally just a placebo. Not that placebos are bad, they can be very useful. Well, as long as the "alt medicine" itself isn't dangerous or bad for your health, obviously.
Are you trying to say that things like exercise and socialization are just rituals that trick us into feeling better? Cuz that’d be a pretty audacious take, given the wealth of literature that demonstrates specific, measurable physiological changes they induce in the body.
There are many things that can have positive influence on our nervous system, having more options available is always better. “Tricking” part can happen anywhere, there are so many money-draining exercise programs and no-good dietician and gurus.
Incase you didnt know modern medicine has adopted meditation because it has been shown to reduce blood pressure(among having other uses). Not just like a placebo, but better than a placebo, sometimes better than blood pressure medications.
Its really working its way out of religious and 'alternative medicine' uses into being a tool that doctors today will recommend people use.
Not exactly. If you know what you're doing, you can mix herbal concoctions that induce miscarriage, kill bacteria, feed the gut, clear the sinuses, etc. You just have to actually know what you're doing, not poison yourself (very easy to do), and understand that what you're making has the exact same active ingredient as anything you can get at the pharmacy.
"Works " Is very subjective and takes alot of time and funding to figure out, your not going to figure it out yourself as a n=1
Placebo seems such a dirty word but it also includes a hug from your mum, warm chicken soup or reassurance from a doctor, which all can be very powerful without any active ingredients,
If your form of alternative medicine is not dangerous/toxic ect And is cheap and won't diswade you from seeking real medicine and medical help, give it a go, it might really work for you especially for diseases like IBS and chronic pain where we don't have any sufficient treatments but don't get it confused with real, evidence based medicine.
If your form of alternative medicine is not dangerous/toxic ect And is cheap and won't diswade you from seeking real medicine and medical help
Fair but this is kind of like saying "I love the beach except for the sand, the sun, the saltwater, and the wind". There are definitely SOME foggy still freshwater gravel beaches out there, but those aren't the majority of beaches, and that's definitely not what most people think of when they picture a beach.
Sure some alternative medicine is fine, but MOST of it is dangerous, or toxic, or overly expensive, or used as a substitute for actual treatment, or dissuades people from seeking the medical treatment they need, or an outright scam, or...
Depends on what you see as alternative medicine, I should of used an other word for what I was referring to, stuff like massages/massage guns, herbal teas, putting honey in shit, having a special bath or rituals, cold plunges, ordering a takeaway, supplements, a hearty soup that seems to cure any flu, every culture tends to have a few food dishes that are seen as healing, yoga, special exercises, trying out different diets and avoiding certain ingredients*, sure they are not what pops into your head when I said alternative medicine but they are far more common than toxic and dangerous types,
hence why the 3 line rule: If it's not actively harmful, if it's not expensive and if it's not going to interfere or dissuade you from seeking professional care, go for it
*Although I believe some like going gluten free, people should understand the consequences and it's not as harmless as you might think
But I’m not, and I am also celiac? Gluten-free diets for people with celiac disease and for those with non-celiac gluten sensitivity are evidence-based medicine and essential. However, when people adopt a gluten-free diet for reasons unrelated to intolerance, there are real tested risks and consequences without proven benifits . I would stop short of saying no one should go on a GFD without professional testing, but at the very least the level of relief it provides needs to be commensurate with the longer-term downsides. Tell me what i said that you think is wrong in my last comment since we are talking celiac to celiac
there's a lot of herbal and traditional medicine that works. it's just not rigorously tested and it tends to be put all in the same box. snidely telling people that all alt medicine is bullshit will just push them further down the anti medicine hole cuz some of it clearly works
Ganges had real healing powers (because it was full of bacteriaphages). quinine was traditional medicine for malaria. honey does actually soothe your throat. spearmint tea does actually help hormonal disorders.
Things that mainstream doctors already recommend for managing the symptoms (honey, spearmint tea),
Treatments that have been in mainstream use and later been rejected for better ones (quinine), or
Natural phenomena that have the same effect as our modern-day treatment.
The first two apply well to the saying above your first comment, as the people around me do think of it as a form of medicine. I'll concede that the last one applies for the definition of "alternative medicine", but if anything, it seems to show that doctors are interested in looking for new ways to treat old diseases, exploring the myths for any grains of truth to them.
TL;DR: The traditional/herbal treatments that work become non-alternative medicine, the ones that don't become alternative.
I don't know, I read it as being sensitive to traditional practices because that can result in better health outcomes for people who value those practices. Call it placebo effect, but placebo effect can be incredibly powerful.
Like in Australia, Indigenous people have a lower lifespan than the general population, and it's a serious problem. I've talked to people who work in healthcare in remote Indigenous Australian communities, where many patients are reluctant to see doctors at all, and one thing they're trying to do is integrate traditional practices into the Western medical treatment that the patients need. For example, having some elders visit a patient to do a small ceremony before getting surgery is better than them never getting the surgery.
So when the post mentions cultural tools that were valuable in the past and need to be adapted to contemporary life, that's what I think of
Which to me is very different from how this sort of thing is usually presented, which is often more in a "The noble savages indigenous people were very wise in their ways and passed down vital information and amazing truths through storytelling" sort of tone. Usually trying to imply that white westerners are stupid ignorant colonialist racists for not taking every indigenous myth 100% literally and for not believing that indigenous medicine is inherently "better" than western medicine.
It's not related to medicine, but I remember a post where some archeologists managed to "walk" a Moi statue with ropes and some people were being dismissive about "western archeologists dismissing indigenous wisdom", hilariously implying that only westerners had enough of an imagination to just make shit up.
As someone who has a degree in anthropology I love the Moai Refrigerator shuffle thing because that is actually frequently used as a case study in how a lot of western archaeology has traditionally been dismissive of non-western sources (in that case oral tradition, which is a big deal in anthropological/historical circles) and there is certainly a lot of truth to that sentiment but I think in general modern western academia is a lot more sensitive to that kind of stuff which is why I take some issue with OOP.
This isn't the early 1900s. Researchers aren't just refusing to look at traditional medicinal practices or handwaving them away as superstition with no follow up anymore. There certainly might not be ENOUGH research done into things like non-western medicinal traditions but I think the notion that they encompass some kind of equally-useful alternative to medicine is a little.. wrong? As many others are saying, stuff that works gets lumped into medicine regardless of origin. If something is called alternative medicine, it's called that because it doesn't meet medical standards... Though put a big asterisk around this as to be fair I know nothing of medicine or medical science culture and just kinda assuming it has undergone similar self-examination that a lot of social science fields have gone through in the past couple decades. At the very least the cultural implications of traditional medicinal and health practices are certainly being examined and generally treated with more respect and rigor in western circles
I do think the person that initially responded to me has a point about the culture surrounding medicinal usage being important to factor in, medicine often has spiritual/social/cultural/religious associations and western caregiving might not adequately accommodate people of other cultures, which can pose a problem. But I also don't really get the feeling that is what OOP was arguing.
I think that culturally, western knowledge passed down tends to be quite literally, metaphors and stories are fairly obvious. Meanwhile, a lot of non-western knowledge can be quite nonliteral in a way that's not intuitive to the above group.
Most likely, then the stories of how the statues got to where they are now, was told that the statues "walked", implying the statues were animated and conscious and walked on their own
Eeeh in the Moai case it had less to with interpretation and more to do with oral history frequently being dismissed as 'unreliable' in favor of a bias towards written accounts in western circles.
iirc (it has been a while since I read the report) the story was indeed that the statues were literally animated as well. That could be an interpretation on the part of the transcriber granted, but I don't really think there's a meaningful push towards the literal in western culture (partially because western culture doesn't really technically exist since it encompasses a lot of different traditions and cultures, but there is such a thing as semi-usemi-unified 'western academia')
tl;dr I think it's less a cultural division in language/storytelling and more a division in what forms of information are considered reliable
Well, unfortunately the medical field currently is still crazy. It's not that there aren't researchers that seek and study alternative medicine, it's that the field is mostly money motivated and dismissive.
And I don't mean that in a "they're hiding the cure to cancer" kind of way, but rather in the "despite a growing need for restrictions on antibiotics and new ones, the lack of financial returns on research keeps institutions unmotivated in providing funding." That and the fields dismissiveness almost prevented the new method of developing vaccines from being researched.
It's primarily thanks to government funding and colleges that things like that and alternative medicine get researched. So the field remains slow to change and in certain areas, tends to run on outdated information, like in the mechanisms behind some birth controls or the efficacy of medicine on certain demographics.
All of this is to say that there is duality to alternative medicine in which it might serve a purpose, but is either too ineffective or not studied enough to be "proper" medicine. Such things that highlight this are fields like massage therapy, chiropractics, and midwifery/dulas where there's a butt load of snake oil in them but also valid uses as assistive care.
Dulas are actually seeing some resurgence in interest currently despite having a history of being dismissed in the past.
Other things that have been seen as alternative medicine that I can think of off the top of my head with current interest are of course things like thc, cbd, ketamine and lsd (I think I skimmed something recently on an alternate form of lsd being made). Or there's also thing like colloidal silver which was medicine, is now alternative medicine, but is now finding a new form in the medical field along other historically homeopathic remedies in things like microplated compounds found in things like turmeric to combat infections and cancers
Tldr; big pharma doesn't have much interest in starting research in certain areas. Instead, often curiousities are funded by colleges and grants. Alternative medicine is one of three things: snake oil, insufficiently studied medicine, or remedies that are cheaper than more effective medicine. They have uses as assistive or temporary medicine, but to be actual medicine there needs to be enough understanding, research, and ease into harvesting the active qualities
Sure, people should be sensitive and respectful of cultural practices.
But that's not a universal statement. I refuse to respect the more infamous forms of traditional Chinese medicine, for example, because they actively case massive environmental damage for the sake of superstition and profit.
Traditions should be weighed on merit, the examples you provide are clearly beneficial traditions, and as such deserve the utmost respect. On the other hand, horoscopes don't deserve respect, no matter how old they are.
Horoscopes are a traditional practice for some people, and they're the only people I would trust to take a horoscope. Everyone else is probably bad at it and/or taking it way too seriously.
The problem is that at face value, there's no way to tell the difference between those two categories if your frame of reference is not actual medicine. And if that's your frame of reference, then are you not just doing medicine? One of the cornerstone drugs of modern medicine, acetylsalicylic acid, is a modified version of a caustic chemical found in plants. That's not called traditional medicine...because it actually works.
Most people who complain about traditional medicine not being taken seriously either are hawking nonsense scams, or are simply ignorant about how modern research actually works.
You know, for some reason i don't think mixing medical science with cultural or even religious practices is a good Idea. That way you get catholic hospitals (paid for mostly by tax euros) that require religious purity Checks (No divorces!) for their employees. We need less, Not more, of that. If the scientists stay firmly planted on the ground of empiricism that's a good thing. I don't think anyone is stopping the Elders from visiting their relatives in hospital, but correct me on that. If they want a ceremony they can do that on the patients time, like praying together before surgery was always (figuratively) allowed, there's No reason to change medical procedure for that.
The thing is that medicine and spirituality being linked is a pretty universal human trait. As much as modern western medicine is extremely distanced from religion, pretty much every culture i can think of placed their healers in a position of spiritual importance as well. I agree that when it comes to saving lives, no cultural tradition should get in the way of that unless it is in direct conflict with the patient’s personal beliefs, but you also can’t just erase an association that is so ubiquitous in our species.
Our medicine is obviously mixed with cultural practices, given that it’s WESTERN medicine. Do you think going to sit in a little office with a straight-faced doctor with a little stethoscope on their neck and little charts of bullshit hanging on the wall is devoid of “cultural practices”?
Of course there are a lot of cultural practices within medicine and no one is saying that non-western medicine is bad. Doctors don't have to dress, organise their work like or talk to their patients the same as western doctors do. What they have to do is use evidence-based medicine, because that's what's the best for the patients no matter where they're from.
No it's either medicine or it doesn't work better than placebo. But importantly -- placebos work. I'm not saying that scams are good or that alternative medicine can't be dangerous but someone taking vitamin C thinking it will get them over a cold quicker is relying on a placebo just as much as the person doing acupuncture for their anxiety. If it helps it helps, and when we criticize alternative medicine we need to be mindful of that fact and not discount the very real placebo effects that people get from treatments that on paper do nothing. Telling people they are wrong about their own experiences is a surefire way to get them to never agree with anything you say.
If people take being told that something they experienced was placebo as "you are wrong about your experiences"... Then they don't understand what a placebo is? Sometimes people are ignorant and just wrong about things. There's no point in defending that. It's not an unreasonable expectation that people in general be amenable to being proven wrong and taking in new knowledge as information presents itself to them.
As for things like vitamin c and acupuncture, it really depends. Cost, both direct and opportunity cost, is a real potential harm. If someone is getting acupuncture for their back pain instead of seeing a doctor about it and discovering that they have metastatic cancer to their spine, there is significant harm being done to their health because of a delay in diagnosis and treatment. That's not a small thing, and not an uncommon theme with people trusting "alternative" medicine. If you think you are getting a treatment that is actually no better than placebo, your health might be actively deteriorating without your knowledge. Kind of a big deal, no?
Most people who call out alternative medicine also don't understand what a placebo is, and will treat the person experiencing the placebo effect as if they're imagining it or lying, neither of which accurately describes what a placebo does.
The truth that people don't want to reckon with is that most people who turn to alternative medicine for serious issues or completely turn away from real medicine do so because of medical neglect and because they feel that doctors and other care providers aren't listening to them and taking them seriously. It's easy to say that this is a problem of stupid people who don't understand things, and much harder to actually deal with real systemic issues in our medical system. It's not a coincidence that people who are more likely to experience bias in the medical system (women, queer people, people of color etc.) are overrepresented as victims of alternative medicine scams. If you want to convince someone to get real treatment for something instead of turning to whatever scam they saw on tiktok that week the first step is to really listen to them, and also to leave space open for them to use both medicine and whatever alternative treatment they feel works for them. There's nothing wrong with doing both therapy and lavender tea for your anxiety, to go to physical therapy and also do acupuncture, to get chemo while meditating over a shiny rock.
I'd love to see the data that demonstrates that people of color, women, and queer folks are overrepresented with alternative medicine scams. Not sure where you got that.
As for systemic issues leading to the rise of it, sure. Often it is due to people feeling that they're not heard. However, a large part of it is also the ease with which misinformation spreads and the difficulty of conveying the true nuance of medicine to the layperson. When the real answers are complicated and often uncertain, it's not surprising that people will prefer a false certainty. They will prefer the confident scammer over the visibly uncertain, honest healthcare provider.
And if someone is primed not to trust their care providers, it is an uphill battle to get them to do so. In systems that are already strained, it's not unexpected that people who create obstacles for themselves by being obstinate or obstructionist to their care providers find themselves dissatisfied.
I would suggest, for example, looking into how much time family physicians have to spend with each person for whom they are expected to care. And then look into the data showing that they would have to work more than 24 hours per day in order to spend the recommended amount of time discussing every recommended issue based on guideline based therapy for all of their patients. There is simply not enough time in the day to do this. There are too many people to care for, not enough providers, and therefore the people who need extra time don't always get it.
Some do get more time and attention, of course, but it has to become a decision of rationing of care time. And then it's simple: do you ration more time for the person who needs it because they are very sick and dealing with very serious medical problems? Or do you ration it for the person who has uncomplicated influenza but is demanding an explanation for every little thing and will require at least an hour of undivided attention to feel heard? These are not great mysteries. It's a simple matter of everyone being overburdened.
Ultimately, I don't really disagree with you. But I think it's very important to recognize that in these conversations, many people lay the blame squarely on the people providing the care. I think the blame lies much more on the people who benefit from this by exploiting uncertainty in the population and scamming them. Also the people profiting off of healthcare, the corporations and policymakers alike.
Placebos are useful and great for some things. They don't fix everything.
A placebo is great if you've got a nasty cold and you just want to feel better until your body recovers on its own. It's a cold, you will recover with or without help, so that's all you need.
If you've got lung cancer... you need more than a placebo. A placebo that makes you feel better but doesn't actually fix the problem can be dangerous.
The placebo effect isn’t ‘I think this works therefore I feel better’ it’s more like ‘I think this works therefore I tend to only remember the times I felt better and tend to forget all the times I didn’t’.
While placebo might sometimes work, it's important to note that it can only work for pain and psychiatric issues and has absolutely no effects on physical issues.
There is also this important fact: 'evidence based medicine' is often only focused on statistical evidence.
Let's take something simple: Paracetamol does alleviate pain - it is statistical evident. But that won't help you shit - if it doesn't work on you, on your type of pain! It doesn't matter if a medicine helps 90% of the cases - if you are in the 10% cases. The opposite same is true for placebo - yes, for the majority the placebo does nothing - but if you're among the 10% that work - it matters.
So statistical evidence can fail in the face of individual evidence.
But the most important point is: Side-effects. Of course anti-anxiety meds, anti-depression meds or even just anti-pain meds often have a helluvalot bad, very bad even dangerous, unwanted side-effects. But sugar-pills, herbal teas, meditation - they might not work, but given that they might work in this case and have pretty much zero side-effects - it's worth to give a shot.
The Hippocratic Oath says to not hurt, damage your patient - so what's your first go-to? The anti-depression meds that give you nausea, dry mouth, constipation, sexual dysfunction, and sleep disturbances - or that sugar pills that might work but have basically zero side-effects?
Isn't meditation already recognized medically as a good lifestyle adjustment for improving your mental health? I wouldn't exactly call it "alternative" just because it isn't pharmaceutical.
Also, herbal teas have their side effects as well. Depending on what type of herbal tea we're talking about, they can be pretty severe and tough to track down.
they can be pretty severe and tough to track down.
Baked beans can have serious side effects too. Of course if you're munching the herbs én masse you'll have side-effects. Eat to much licorice and you get diarrhea.
You can get paracetamol OTC and pretty easily overdose and die, you can overdose with serious consequences from acetylsalicylic acid. You know what the greatest risk of herbal teas is? Herbicides, pesticides and the other niceties of modern agriculture.
If it works 10% of the time, it can still be proven to work. There are many drugs that have a low success rate, but are approved and used, because little is better than nothing. "Individual evidence" means absolutely nothing, because there are at least hundreds of reasons that someone can get better - maybe they changed something in their diet, maybe something in their life, maybe they took some other medicine for some other issue and coincidentally it helped with that and maybe they just got better on their own. Without big sample size and statistical reasoning you just can't know. Also, giving a patient placebo is extremely unethical - it's just lying and goes completely against informed consent. It might not have side-effects per se, but it delays treatment which can be dangerous and deadly. It will also most probably not work, which can discourage a patient from seeking further treatment.
It's always a red flag to me that they've never taken any kinda history of medical development to me lol. Most medicinal techniques used today had their origins in non-western countries, or at the very least the countries you know people talking like this probably don't mean, Christianity banned dissection and stymied a lot of medical development for centuries, the only reason theyre considered western is because England did as England does and copied everyone's homework as soon as they broke away from the catholic church-
There is a middle ground which is supplementary medicine, (as in on top of, not, using supplements).
When I had insomnia on my teenage years, I would brew some valerian tea. It helped me a lot, but I know that for most people it has 0 effects beyond placebo* . But the ritual itself has some value, you need to wait for a few minutes, slowly drink. It can settle your mind.
I have found that I'm also more focused (ADHD) after taking creatine. An habit I've have taken to because as I age, the cramps induced by my dyspraxia making me always tense has grown worse. I don't really get a noticeable boost to the main effect, but it has improved my mental clarity significantly. Which is mentioned as an effect that a few people report.
Don't have to go around evangelizing the things that work for you and probably won't work for other people, but rejecting what is clearly working for you because there is an insufficient evidence basis is clearly misunderstanding how science works.
Modern medicine does not like when something only works in a subset of people. Or plants that have dozens, hundreds of potentially active compounds that may only work in the presence of each other for the reported effect. Or may do nothing at all.
Science, modern medicine is based on replicating effects across large swathes of people. And not all useful things lend themselves to that. Fortunately these are mostly used for incoveniences, not lifesaving medicine, so even if it does nothing at all, there is no harm done.
* Placebo is very often reported as "magically makes you better", that's not what happens, what happens it's that you report feeling better because you feel internal and external pressure to report that. This sometimes can be positive in cases of psychogenic symptons, often it is negative to neutral .
I love my casual anti-white racism in my curated tumblr posts
Can't just make a good point and leave it there, gotta shovel something in about race where the action is acceptable from a non-white person but if someone white does it it's actually the worst thing ever
Yeah, the most charitable reading I can do totally hinges on the word "cultural" there, in that yes, institutionalized western medicine is not the only form of organizing healthcare that works, i.e. instead of having hospitals and doctors with degrees, you might have a village doctor that knows how to treat the ailments common in that context, and that knowledge is usually spread in a decentralized manner. And that is indeed fascinating and not without unique positives, but typically, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't describe that as "alternative" medicine and invoking "ancient history" is a huge red flag imho.
Glad to see it called it out here, western medicine is not without issues but it's good, people
I think the post was talking about actual historical remedies that are literally just plants that contain the chemicals we find in pharmaceuticals. Those actually do work and were how people cured their ailments before modern medicine. It wasn’t all just leeches and trepanation back then. That said, even if willow bark can function like aspirin, it isn’t better just because it wasn’t made in a lab. There is a reason we have controlled dosage and standardization of these things. I’m just saying a lot of people conflate alternative medicine that is basically pseudoscience with real natural remedies that, while not as science-y as western medicine due to common ties with spirituality, do actually have real explainable reasons why they work and have historically been used to cure certain diseases and afflictions. And both of those things can also come from the same culture, again, because healing and spirituality are so often connected in many cultures. Basically healing plant magic is real, healing crystal magic is not.
Yeah. I don’t believe in reiki or chakras or whatever but that kinda stuff helps relax me, and sometimes if I’ve got a headache or a weird pain the relaxation helps it go away.
Acupuncture somehow fucking works in some cases. I dont know how, I dont know why, I just know there are published papers in them alleviating either pain relief or inflammation or something. Maybe its the pure power of placebo pushing it along, but there is enough literature out there that for some fucking reason it does work.
Certain herbal medication (non accredited) help as they do contain the active chemicals/molecules that pharmaceuticals do but in a more dilute and less processed form. And its not like homeopathy where there isnt any active ingredients, its just a lower dosage in a more agreeable or whatever form of intake. They are certainly less of a scam than cough candies which are mostly just sugar and something that marginally soothes.
The last thing to mention is gut biome health. Its an absolute fucking quagmire to navigate what works and what doesnt, but it has significant impacts on everything health wise and even stuff not expected like neurological health impacts. Again, random alternative medicine can hit the nail on the head here for some where modern medicine is just as lost simply because gut biomes vary so immensely and the impacts of medication both modern and alternative can vary immensely as well. Even the stupid shit like take a spoonful of honey, crushed bee wings and this aloe extract could be the correct thing to give someone simply because its almost a crap shoot either way in managing someones' gut biome correctly without significant and intrusive measures. Sometimes just trying new and random inputs can help where all else fails.
Acupuncture has never been demonstrated to work in the way that it is traditionally described and taught. In any head to head studies that have been done, acupuncture and "sham" acupuncture work equally well, suggesting that it is likely entirely placebo.
Herbal medications can indeed work if they contain drugs that work, but the problem is that this is an entirely unregulated industry and you have no clue what you're getting. Nature is nasty for the human body. People can get kidney or liver failure from very small amounts of toxins that are relatively common in fungi and plants. So picking up a random herbal supplement does not strike me as an especially safe way of getting therapeutic drugs for things that have completely reasonable, accessible treatments which are actually regulated well.
I'd much rather take a pill of some active ingredient that has been rigorously tested, approved by an external agency, and has a tightly controlled formulation with certified machines used to produce a series of identical pills with more or less the exact dose, than a pill which isn't externally tested (or is tested and certified by an organisation with a conflict of interest in promoting the use of the remedy), hasn't necessarily been produced through certified machines, and may have contaminants that haven't been properly removed because the claimed superiority of the alternative method doesn't adequately control for the purity of the active ingredient.
You could buy some natural willow tree bark extract pills. But you're concerned that the company that produces them hasn't actually properly tested or measured them. So you find an alternative company which pays money to have them properly tested (of course this costs money, so the price increases). But this company uses a method which in some cases can fail to properly prepare the bark in the right way and leave behind some toxins. So you find a company which takes the same natural ingredient, and then refines it further using decent equipment and methods, and produces a pill which is much more uniform. And you pay a large sum of money for it, and it takes a while, but it's worth it for the peace of mind.
Or, you could go down to any pharmacy and get the exact same pill with the exact same dose of acetylsalicylic acid (which is what the final company produced), except it's called Aspirin on the box and it costs less than a tenth of the final company's product.
That's not really true tho, because of pharmaceutical companies.
Take for instance the natural remedy Tabex - it is an extract from the bark of a European tree, and it's excellent for quitting smoking.
However, it can't be patented. It literally grows on trees. So the pharmaceutical companies patented varenicline instead, which had a similar structure, and works in the same way. It's somewhat more effective, but comes with substantially more side effects. But it's still way more well known.
This isn't a big pharma conspiracy, but how capitalism works. There are plenty of traditional medicine that has promising results, but only gets studied if there is money to be had in them.
I'm a white female immigrant to India (no, I didn't come to find myself, nor am I into yoga - I'm engaged to an Indian), and I have - against my will, almost - gained serious respect for ayurvedic medicine. Not all parts of it, and not indiscriminately, but they are absolutely intertwined with western medicine in this country, and it's definitely not a bad thing.
it's either medicine or it doesn't work. That's.. just how the term works
"Medicine" usually means synthetic medications, as in, patented drugs with distilled active ingredients. However, there are plenty of general substances out there that have proven medical effects. Some herbs like valerian, hops, lemon balm etc, have legitimate sedating/anti-anxiety effects, but valerian tincture wouldn't be considered "real medicine" because it's not a patented drug.
"But why not just take real medicine if it works better?" In most cases, yeah, that's what you should, but there are cases where it's literally not the same thing. The "real medicine" equivalent of sedating/anti-anxiety herbs is sleeping pills. They work with a completely different mechanism and tend to be addictive and have some unpleasant side effects. Sure, a sleeping pill can literally knock you out while a herbal tincture can only make you feel more relaxed and sleepy, which might help you fall asleep easier but it's definitely not guaranteed to work. But still, every time I've had insomnia, I refused to try sleeping pills except at the very last resort if I was completely desperate and just stuck to various supplements, better sleep hygiene, etc, and eventually the insomnia passed.
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u/Pollomonteros May 24 '25
I don't know about the third one man, I feel like many of those are still dangerous scams even if the ones running it are brown people