Alternative Medicine

I'm not antifa you cuck, go back to Holla Forums.

Stop with the liberal buzzwords. They're just capitalists. Putting "Big" in front of something doesn't make it a whole new thing.

To answer your question, alternative medicine is mostly pseudoscience.

It's mostly new-age crankery. "Traditional" medicine that is proven to work (aspirin, quinine, etc.) is used by modern medicine to this day – and why the fuck wouldn't they?

Just because somebody in a bright white lab coat tells you something is “good” on day time television doesn’t make it so. Alternative medicine has been suppressed by the pharmaceutical industry just as alternative energy technology has been suppressed by the oil industry.

Be specific. Name the medicine being suppressed.

Kratom and weed are two obvious ones, also mushrooms too for treating depression and anxiety. I support pharma and 'alt medicine' but only 'at' in the sense that the medicine has some proven history behind it and not junk like crystals or energy healing.

Sometimes bullshit sometimes not.
Those are two that I know to be fake.

You gonna have to be more specific. There's a million things that count as "alternative medicine". For example, you might have access to "cures" to depression, autism and possibly borderline right now if you know where to look, and they're legitimate, chemically active substances.

If alternative medicine worked, it would just be medicine. It's mostly bullshit. Bigh pharma fails to produce solutions, not because they're unkown or suppressed, but because they are not profitable. However, if you could just drink tea for cancer or other such things, your doctor would tell you to do exactly that.

You just showing how lost you really are. I’ve seen things they told you were impossible. I’ve seen elder Soen Masters lay hands on a dead dog, and fully resurrect it just by using the material energy in the air around us. Keep taking your manufactured poison by big pharma like the naive fucks you really are.

If by "alt meds" you mean herbal remedies, I prefer them when at all possible
(Recall that medicine is just derived from plants and herbs to begin with, herbal remedies are just less processed)
For example: I had a lot of strep throat growing up and I've formed an immunity to amoxicillin. When I get strep throat now, I gargle a concoction of 1 part apple cider vinegar, 5 parts water and it takes care of the bacteria
Now obviously herbal or other natural remedies aren't always an option of course, and in those cases pharmaceuticals are preferred to some mystical cure all magic beans or whatnot
Anyways, I guess my point is that some herbs and etc. do certain things which may help with less serious conditions

There needs to be a distinction between time-proven natural remedies (incorporating cumin and peppermint into my diet brought my raging IBS under control where "real" medicine failed) and "alternative medicine," which thrives in paranoid right-wing conspiracy theorist circles, strips idiots of their money, and actively harms those who use it (bleach enemas)

You've seen things because you're off your rocker, hippie scumbag. Keep drinking your teas for cancer and share the same fate as Steve Jerbs, retard.

Alternative medicine has either not been proved to work or been proved not to work. Or been proved a threat to big pharma's profits.

It's a dumb name. It's what happens when you let the FDA decide what's medicine and what's not. Especially because medicine is defined as substances that can be patented and substances that cannot.

Basically if it's natural, it's hard to make billions off it because a company can never sell it exclusively.

health.howstuffworks.com/wellness/food-nutrition/vitamin-supplements/fda-regulate-herbal-supplements.htm

io9.gizmodo.com/5844482/why-are-some-antidepressants-more-expensive-than-others

io9.gizmodo.com/5865283/three-sleazy-moves-pharmaceutical-companies-use-to-extend-drug-patents

Interesting

wut?

If someone's pushing "alternative medicine", there's an ~80% chance they're liberal hippy types

Alright, just suck pharma porky's dick some more. That's totally Leftist/Marxist/Leninist/Stalinist/Anarchist/Communist or whatever the fuck belief system you subscribe to.

But what gives you cancer?

Where do you live that most "alternative medicine" advocates aren't hippy vegans with a kneejerk opposition to anything associated with science or big business, and are instead far-right loons that think cultural marxist 🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧corporations🇬🇧🇬🇧🇬🇧 want to corrupt their precious bodily fluids as part of a vast jewish conspiracy…

Just because someone's argument is poor doesn't mean the position is wrong.

They probably DO want to poison people or at the very least don't give one flying fuck if they do.

Why do you have such a hard on for big business? Are you just into 'leftism' because you think it's your best shot and joining the ranks of the upper classes or something?

Look user, I'm not disputing that pharmaceutical corporations are a big problem, I just criticised that user for stating that "alternative medicine" is mostly the domain of far-right types, and not hippy liberal vegans with an instinctive disgust towards anything they consume that is "modern"

mostly faulty cell division due to old age and bad luck

But what makes your cells divide faultily?

What is asbestos and a raft of other substances known to fuck your body up.

Might as well say people get rich through good luck and poor through bad luck. Why such a naive and and anti-science viewpoint user?

Random chance during the process of copying dna. You can't avoid it.

Luck of birth circumstance is a significant role in getting rich.

So that's the power of alternative medicine uh…

Some herbal medicine is proven to work. Even acupuncture has been proven to work for some things. Homeopathy I think the term gets misused a lot for any natural treatment when that's not what it means but i haven't seen a lot to back that it works but u haven't looked into those cures since the concept of homeopathy makes little sense since the sides they use are too small to do anything and it's designed to make symptoms worse to try to make your body fux it. Some illegal drugs make good medicine too. It just really depends on what you're talking about. It differs by the ailment and type of medicine.

lol what a cuck I've been taking dietary supplements for decades with no rpboelsm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

If you believe in alternative "medicine" , go ahead and slit your wrists for me.

Don't worry, it's based on ancient wisdom :^)

Cancer has risen up due to the dying out of the wise and ancient practice of sticking knives up your ass.

This is the cure Big Pharma doesn't want you to know about.

All anti-science shills must be gulag'd

It's a bit short to assume that medicine is pure science. Doctors have three apects, we have the scientist aspect of course, but also a healing aspect and, dare i say, a shamanic aspect.
Some of thoses alternative medicine can have some kind of effect, if only for the placebo effect.
As long as it doesn't cause harm, i see no objection to prescribe some forms of alternative medicine if it helps the patient feeling better.

There's value in some of it, especially stuff that works but is unprofitable.
A lot of it is pure snake oil though.
I wouldn't trust it for anything more serious than a bad headache though.

"What's the harm", uh? Well, the harm is that stuff like homeopathy often ends up being used as a substitute to legitimate treatment. Yes, the sugar pills won't cause anything by themselves but the fact that the patient is likely not to seek proper care can be as dangerous as consuming poison.

"Alt"-med porky is a blight on the sick and suffering of the world. In the US alone, it's a multi-billion dollar industry with its own lobbying arm and special legal protections:
sciencebasedmedicine.org/repealing-legislative-alchemy/

Even worse yet, however…

Did you know that there is a special carve-out against the FDA just for "alternative" medicine, dietary "supplements" and "homeopathy"? Due to their special status, they're classified separately from food or medicine, and as such are subject to the regulatory requirements of neither! That's right, alt-med horseshit is literally LESS SAFE THAN FOOD:
sciencebasedmedicine.org/supplements-are-the-wild-west-of-health-one-attorney-general-is-out-to-change-that/

This. The idea that "science" is somehow aloof from "tradition", in spite of most of science's initial jumpstart during the Enlightenment coming from the rapid fallout of sifting through millennia of chaff for the few grains of wheat collected in the wisdom of the ages, is ludicrous.

Oh look, a pothead with delusions of grandeur. You do know that everything from opium to cocaine has been isolated and characterized for use in "conventional" medicine, right? One of the primary reasons herbal medicine is bad for you, is because it almost always lacks purity (nothing but the therapeutic agent is present), efficacy (the exact right amount of the therapeutic agent is present in a metabolizable form), and safety (the substance is prepared and administered in a manner suitable for testing and compliance with a fixed standard). If THC has medical merit, it will be produced industrially as a pure, effective, and safe medicine.

Seriously a lot of you nay sayers are morons. There has been loads of studies that support certain natural treatments. That's not saying that there isn't also bullshit out there in other tires of alt meducune just saying you shouldn't write it off because if the arbitrary label of alternative

I know, right?

Shiggy diggy

>but not, y'know, proven proven. Like, falsifiable, replicable, peer-reviewed proof enough that it could be certified for the treatment any of illnesses.

...

This. Pretty sure cancer was more frequently the cause of death in 1980 than in 1950, but you have to figure in people having longer lives.

...

give this a read;
rationalwiki.org/wiki/Alternative_medicine

A warning for anyone unfamiliar with RationalWiki:

Tl;dr: The site has been massively pozzed, but there's a lot of good stuff from its neghole days.

Before about mid-2011, RationalWiki was a high-quality resource for debunking common forms of quackery, crackpottery, superstition, conspiratardation, and other forms of kookiness. After that period, however, an early instance of SJW cooption occurred within the skeptic community, calling itself Atheism+. There was an immediate and violent split between actual skeptics and A+, with old skeptic venues ultimately ending up dominated by either skeptics, or in the hands of A+ers who became increasingly distant from any pretensions of skepticism.

As a result, all newer and many older RationalWiki articles are full of SJW nonsense including a substantial amount of pseudoscientific or anti-intellectual content, but (thanks largely to A+ disinterest in skepticism) many older articles concerned specifically with subjects outside the obsessions of SJWs are mostly or entirely unblemished. However, also as a result of the SJW t(y)ranny overwhelming the wiki and driving off decent users, such articles tend to be neglected and outdated.
RationalWiki, but

It has been peer reviewed. Where the fuck do you think medication comes from? For a lot of it they find natural sources then isolate and modify it so they can copyright it. Aspirin is just artificial compounds of Willow bark. Ever heard of penicillin?

what does the term mean? certainly not tinctures and plant-derivatives, which are all we ever had before synthetic pharms? you mean reiki and chakra shit?

like which?

I obviously wasn't saying that the only form of medicine proven to work springs fully formed from the brains of labcoat-wearing robots like Athena. But unless you're trying to lump together things proven to work (not "alternative" by any stretch of the imagination), with things not proven to work by any valid standard, what was your post saying?

Just because something is proven to work doesn't automatically make it part of mainstream western medicine. A doctor isnt going to tell you to take some herb, at least not most the time. They want to prescribe what gets them those free gifts the pharmaceutical companies give them. Most of them dont even know about this stuff even if it's proven to work.

My girlfriend believes in this shit and it really worries me. I love her but she’s talked about studying it and it’s mental. She doesn’t make spiritualistic claims but she’ll say “naturopathy is a holistic medicine that tries to treat the source of the illness, not the symptoms like regular medicine.” I don’t get where she gets this idea from that mainstream medicine doesn’t treat the source of the illness but alt medicine does.

A doctor isn't going to prescribe you an herb (at least anything more powerful than peppermint as a digestive aide) because they're unreliable and/or dangerous compared to prepared medicine, even medicine prepared from the same herb, for reasons I stated upthread.

If it's just that I personally am fine, especially if it's reliable remedies with a long history and actual results (TCM and the like, at least, the kind practiced here)

It means anything the scientific consensus hasn't positively proven to be effective and safe for the treatment of a given ailment, and especially anything proven to be ineffective and/or unsafe.

Modern medicine has stripmined TCM for anything of actual worth decades ago.