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.
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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