As Tim Minchin said, do you know what alternative medicine that works is called? Medicine However, there are people who continue to trust alternative medicines more generally than medicine, perhaps because they need to believe in something more. Maybe because they haven’t read the statistics.
Like those found in a recent study on people trying to cure cancer with alternative medicines: they double the probability of dying .
Cancer and alternative medicine
A team of researchers from the Yale University School of Medicine has limited itself to analyzing cancer cases registered in the National Cancer Database and screening them based on those who opt for conventional medicine (radiotherapy, chemotherapy and surgery). ) and alternative medicine.
The latter, those who opt for therapies not scientifically proven, have more than twice the chance of dying in the first five years after diagnosis . Depending on the type of cancer, the mortality rate is higher: for example, for breast cancer, up to 5.68 times more mortality.
The results are significant, but even if people treated with natural therapies survived longer than those treated with conventional medicine, it would mean nothing more than that the demands of clinical trials must be raised to approve a new medicine. .
Once done, what has been tried will always be more effective than what is not proven by these kinds of essays that want much more than simple intuition, arguments from authority, beliefs, traditions or the "it has worked for me" (or it has worked for me). it has worked for people I know).
Contemporary and scientific medicine has a level of rigor that traditional medicine has lacked : experiments of considerable sample size, control groups, multicenter studies, randomization, double (and triple) blind, statistics, etc.
Or put another way: the content of contemporary science does not matter so much to evaluate its effectiveness as its epistemology or its methodology. However, there will continue to be people who prefer the exotic and alternative to the conventional and proven because they believe they know more than the scientific community. You can read more about it in: Why is alternative medicine, traditional Chinese medicine and others qualitatively inferior to conventional or allopathic medicine? (I), (II) and (and III).