Quackwatch, Alternative Medicine, and the Search for "Truth"

The National Center for Alternative and Complementary Medicine, a somewhat remote wing of the National Institutes of Health, has a series of even-handed fact sheets on some alternative treatments based on research.

I suspect this posting will extend the discussion, which is good. There are many good arguments why alternative treatments won't, and even can't, be subjected to gold-standard scientific trials:

• Lack of funding to study natural products
• The fact that they do not have to be approved by the FDA
• The fact that many treatments can't be regularized for study due to variability of herb and supplement formulations
• The wide variation in alt-med clinical skills
• The good possiblity that there are bodily mechanisms that Western medicine is willfully blind to
• The suspicion that Big Medicine and Big Media are in the pockets of Big Pharma [as I write this post an ad for a pharmaceutical company appears at the top of the page]. . .the list goes on.

The point is: More information is good. Gather it all and your choice, whatever it is, will be an informed one. That's never a bad thing.