RE: Non Traditional Medicine
February 15, 2015 at 5:05 pm
(This post was last modified: February 15, 2015 at 5:21 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(February 15, 2015 at 4:41 pm)Esquilax Wrote:(February 15, 2015 at 4:36 pm)Chuck Wrote: That's too flip, what will prove to work and be called "medicine" sometime in the future can still be called "alternative medicine" today.
Medicine certainly has not clinically tested more than a small fraction of the body of "alternative" medicine today, and amongst the untested multitudes, majority might be bullshit, some percentage could certainly actually work and had been found so through experience by societies without access to modern clincial drug and treatment testing.
Sure. And the time to believe that medicine works is when it has been tested and proven to do so. Not before, on the basis that it hasn't been tested yet, so it might work.
The way to show that any specific "alternative" medicine has been proven to work with a certainty and specificity against a particular ailment equal to a notional modern clincal standards imposed by modern medical and pharmaceutical industry is indeed to wait until modern medicine has gotten around to clincially testing it.
But validity of claims of efficacy is not a binary thing. A entire gradation of differing degrees of certainty, continuous with clincial certainty at the high end, exists below the standard of modern clincial testing. In circumstances where clinically adaquately efficacious medicine is not yet available, and that is In fact true of a large percentage of ailment recognized by modern medicine, then there is nothing amiss with looking at less untested, but not yet full tested, alternatives.