49er wrote:If anyone thinks that convention medicine is safe, you might want to look at this synopsis of a play by a woman telling her story of harm. Her story is not unusual:
That's all irrelevant. The alternative medicine stuff is almost all either useless or outright dangerous. 99% of the natural medicine practitioners make the rest look bad.
As much as I hate the medical mafia, they're not usually improperly suppressing valid medicine. Occasionally, there is some "alternative" medicine that turns out to actually be useful. If so, It eventually becomes "standard" medicine.
Opium, cocaine, aspirin, digitalis, nicotine, caffeine, and insulin are all "natural" materials. Many plant chemicals are useful cancer treatments, but are also toxic. All of these "natural" things have useful medical properties, but have side effects. Some are miracle cures for some things, but they'll harm you if used improperly.
There's almost no known "natural" plant medicines that are effective that don't have side effects and risks.
For every "alternative" medicine that is found to be useful, a dozen are found to have side effects that are worse than the beneficial effect, and a hundred are found out to have no benefits at all.
We've been using and investigating natural and alternative cures for centuries. The ones that work are now mostly part of conventional medicine.
The medical mafia is bad in a lot of ways. The "alternative medicine" crew is worse. It's a bunch of deluded "true believers," people dazzled by the money and drinking the Kool-Aid, outright scam artists selling stuff they know is bad or ineffective, and a very small number of people actually doing good stuff.
The odds of some piece of alternative medicine being beneficial is really small. Even the "science based" medical compounds with very promising properties often turn out to be more harmful than good when we go through the drug approval processes. Just imagine the odds that some chemical a plant makes being good for humans to consume.
Just because your heart medicine had some bad side effect doesn't mean the benefits didn't outweigh the risks in the first place. It also doesn't mean Dr. Feelgood's organic free-range weasel liver extract is safe or effective. Insulin is a horrible drug with lots of bad side effects. Used carefully, it's probably saved as many lives as almost any any other drug.