Income Tool Time

How to decide if alternative therapys are legit?
Imagine that you would like to try some form of alternative medicine or ar e dissatisfied with the treatment you are receiving from your doctor. How do you decide which form of therapy is appropriate for your illness or condition? What are some steps to make sure your making the right choice?

First you need to think about why it’s not used in conventional medicine in the first place. There’s your first clue. We are only interested in stuff that works.

If it works, it isn’t alternative. If it doesn’t, it isn’t medicine.

However, you also need to look at the evidence behind it. Where is this evidence published? Any reputable peer reviewed journal or are they just talking about it on quack sites such as Mercola, extraordinary medicine, naturalnews, etc, -where fallacy’s are offered instead of evidence? There’s a reason for this.

Also note that there is a difference between results seen in vitro and in vivo. The quacks have a very irritating habit of extrapolating results seen in lab studies to human studies- they hope you are too dumb to notice.

Be cautious of any quack telling you to "try it and see". Anecdotes are not on parr with data.

The quacks on here just parrot what the see on quack sites, they never provide valid data.

Edit: Notice the fallacy’s: "It’s obviously not a case of legitimacy because Chiropractic, Osteopathy, Homeopathy, TCM/Acupuncture and Naturopathy have been used by millions of people worldwide"
Popularity does not demonstrate efficacy.

" And they may be blocked from pursuing these specialty areas themselves by the rules of their medical associations!"
Not true. Most Doctors ignore alt.med because it does not work.

"In other instances the medical associations view holistic health professions as the "competition".
LMFAO!

"Drugs and surgery are not "guaranteed"
Nothing in life is ever 100% guaranteed.

Alt.med neither treats the cause nor symptoms of any specific disease entity.
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"Alternative therapies ARE legitimate and have been practiced in other cultures for thousands of years before western medicine was know as such."
Again, appeal to antiquity/tradition. Time does not test modalities- science does.

"There’s plenty of literature that supports their practice."
Evidence.

"Unfortunately here in the US there is a large movement among the medical communities and Universities to disrepute the practices and treatments having to do with alternative medicine. "
Clearly you haven’t been on a med school campus in the US lately? Alt.med is being pushed left and right.

As you can see, fallacy’s instead of evidence.
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Research online, ask questions and check blogs/forums out. Trial it out and see if you are happy with the results. Alternative medicines are usually cheap and almost always non fatal so it’s a win win situation.
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RedAngel

It’s obviously not a case of legitimacy because Chiropractic, Osteopathy, Homeopathy, TCM/Acupuncture and Naturopathy have been used by millions of people worldwide and in many jurisdictions are registered health professions.
You need to do your own research into what form of therapy seems to fit your phsysiological complaint. Very often a combination of two or more work better than one alone.
Conventional medicine only offers drugs and surgery as patient treatments: that’s why these other systems of medicine are not somehow incorporated into it, but enlightened MD’s refer their patients to the experts in those areas. They’re wise enough to know that the scope of their training as family doctors doesn’t extend to these other specialty areas. And they may be blocked from pursuing these specialty areas themselves by the rules of their medical associations! In other instances the medical associations view holistic health professions as the "competition".
Drugs and surgery are not "guaranteed" to successfully treat any condition even through their focus of symptom suppression rather than cure.
Trolls who are fond of quoting the nonsensical phrase that "it would just be called medicine" are just mincing words and wilfully ignoring facts.
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Alternative therapies ARE legitimate and have been practiced in other cultures for thousands of years before western medicine was know as such. I am referring to Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda. There’s plenty of literature that supports their practice. Unfortunately here in the US there is a large movement among the medical communities and Universities to disrepute the practices and treatments having to do with alternative medicine. Naturropathic doctors are trained to treat the whole person.body, mind and spirit. They don’t push drugs because they have no affiliation with big pharma and they seek to treat the cause of the illness not just the symptoms. There are many hospitals and medical practices across the US where integrative medicine is being practiced with excellent results.It is not uncommon nowadays to find MD,ND practitioners. And that is because undoubtedly there’s a place for both in the treatment of disease. Seek a professional with good credentials and give it a try, you won’t regret it.
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I am a Clinical Microbiologist and a Reiki Level II practitioner

If your think your doctor has screwed up then you can report him/her to the appropriate regulatory body who have the power to investigate and strike him off the register. One Dr. Wakefield comes to mind straight away.

As for the alternatives to medicine, well that’s exactly that alternative medicine is, an alternative to medicine.

"Research online, ask questions and check blogs/forums out. Trial it out and see if you are happy with the results. "

How weird, nothing about "research by looking on PubMed and using prestigious peer-reviewed journals in your local library. Blogs and trial and error. Yep works for me when it’s my health at stake.
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There are a couple of ways to find out what works. First I recommend using PubMed. See Link below. Do a search for the disease or symptom you are looking for. You’ll find a variety of options as well as medications that may be helpful.

Just an example say you had ALS and were curious if vitamin E could be helpful. You can’t search a number of different ways and get different results. You can search with different combinations.

For ALS you can use…

Lou Gehrig’s disease, ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. To to Wikipedia and find the different names of the disease and use them in your search.

Next you can search for vitamin E. Then other names like tocopherol and then the types alpha-tocopherol, d-gamma-tocopherol, d-beta-tocopherol and d-delta-tocopherol. Next go to the tocotrienols. Then combine your searches.

Don’t forget to check out the medication and treatment you are on also for the disease. There are often cutting edge treatments available that your doctor may not be aware of.

I really like Natural Medicines Database it is saves a lot of searches. It is written by MDs and pharmacy PhDs and looks at all the evidence for natural products, some diseases, and some therapies. It also has all the research articles from PubMed listed with it. I have their book and online access and the book is over 2000 pages and nearly 17000 PubMed references.

It also show drug and natural product interactions and contradictions. It is a handy reference. It is all evidence based. They are the same people who publish the Pharmacist’s letter or new medical research so they aren’t any fly by night company. However it isn’t free as it is usually purchased by doctors and pharmacists but I think it is worth the money.

In the USA many MD are not calling it alternative therapy but complimentary therapy. Using it as an adjunct to their practice to try and see better results. It isn’t like there is no evidence for anything out there as there is and open minded MD’s will do the research to help their patient recover when something complimentary may help. For ALS for example there isn’t a lot of good therapies and sometimes those who have difficulties want options.

However I think every patient should do their own research and know their options. Watch Lorenzo’s Oil……you’ll see how one family doing their own research saved their child’s life. Recently we did the same for a family member with Cancer. 5 years later he is still cancer free when he had about 3 months to live. He doctor didn’t recommend a surgery available at another hospital as it was available to the doctor. The other hospital was able to do the surgery. Be a partner with your doctor and take charge when needed as it is your body.
References :
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/

If you have time, you can watch this.

http://www.cbc.ca/marketplace/2011/cureorcon/
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It’s very simple, just ask:

Is it used in medical hospitals?

Does your medical doctor prescribe or recommend it?

If not, stay the heck away, it’s voodoo.
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Okay – So that task is to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Obviously a Google search is not going to be very helpful, because any retailer of some sort of alternative therapy will make sure, that his/her idea gets the highest ranking on Google with links to sites endorsing it as much as possible. If there is any valid criticism it is sometimes very hard to find it among the many persuasive sites.

One way of figuring out what works and what don’t is to seek out what scientific studies have been done to answer that very question. All scientific studies on conventional therapies as well as alternative therapies are indexed in this search engine: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed

All you need to do is to put the alternative therapy you are interested in and the condition you need treatment for into the search field. That will return you a long list of scientific articles, and you can click on them to get a summary (in most cases). But then you are faced with the problem that some of them report that it works and some of them that it doesn’t. And that is where it becomes tricky to figure out what is right and what is wrong. A good place to start is to seek out the so called "systematic reviews". Those are reviews that attempt to summarise the studies taking into account how well these studies eliminated bias. On the basis of that they conclude what the overall evidence says about the effectiveness of the reviewed therapy.

If you are interested in further knowledge on how evidence about various types of alternative therapies can be assessed I recommend the following books: Snake Oil Science by Barker Bausell (Don’t let the title intimidate you – it really is fair) and "Trick or Treatment" by Simon Singh & Edzard Ernst.

A few characteristics can be useful in detecting what are bogus therapies:

1) Persecution complex
Many alt. med proponents claim that their ideas have not been successful because some powerful ‘Mafia’ is preventing them from becoming mainstream. The ‘Mafia’ usually is the medical establishment, the pharma industry or some other wealthy organisation. Just take a look around this board, and you will see plenty of examples. But you have to remember, that it is not enough to be persecuted to be a genius. You also have to be right. And if the only argument is that it is being suppressed by "Big Pharma", then there really is no argument for this type of alternative therapy to work.

2) Testimonials
A hallmark of any alt med "evidence" is the dominance of testimonials over proper research.

3) Incredible statistics
Alt medders usually claim therapeutic success in at least 75% of all cases. There are sadly not many evidence-based treatments which can boast of such a percentage. But the potential victims don’t know that and are impressed.

4) Pseudoscientific lingo
To convince lay people, it seems to be necessary to sound scientific. As alt medders are not scientists, the result of them trying their hand in science will be pseudoscience. Watch out for talk about quantum effects, cosmic energy, chaos theory or bio-resonance.

4) Ancient wisdom
The application of science to medicine has achieved much but that does not prevent people from craving the time-tested knowledge from the ‘good old times’. If a treatment has its origins in ancient Chinese, Indian or Arabic texts, it is often used in a persuasive manner.
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well, you just listen to the same people who just finished failing to get you well. after all, they are the only legitimate source of information because… well… they say so, and just because they’ve failed you time and time again and maybe nearly bankrupted you and or disabled or killed you in the process doesn’t give you the right or reason to doubt their expertise, at least that’s their opinion. on the other hand, if you have your cognition still intact after their abuse, you might use it to come to your own conclusions by investigating for yourself-reading, asking others you know, asking practitioners of alternatives and weighing the evidence. it’s your body, life and health. don’t blindly trust anyone with them.
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