Alternative "medicine"

This was a pretty interesting and insightful article:

( Boost for alternative medicine )

Some interesting points raised:

• "Dietary supplements do not have to be proved safe or effective before they can be sold. Some contain natural things you might not want, such as lead and arsenic. Some interfere with other things you may be taking, such as birth control pills." "Fifteen years ago, Congress decided to allow dietary and herbal supplements to be sold without federal Food and Drug Administration approval."
  

  In other words, alternative medicine does not have to be demonstrated to be safe, never mind proven to work. I remember passing a "health shop" in Sandton City a few years ago, and they were asking people to sign a petition to have herbal remedies excluded from pending legislation that would have required all such medicines and remedies to undergo testing for safety. I couldn't figure out why anyone would want something like that able to be sold with no safety testing at all.



• "But more than $2.5bn of tax-financed research has not found any cures or major treatment advances, aside from certain uses for acupuncture and ginger for chemotherapy-related nausea. If anything, evidence has mounted that many of these pills and therapies lack value."
  

  Well, yes, no surprise there. Something I've often seen from alternative medicine fans is that the big money-grubbing pharmaceutical companies are trying to shut down the little herbal/homoeopathic suppliers; of course, it should be obvious that if any of the remedies did actually work, the money-grubbing pharmaceutical companies would have got hold of the remedies, patented them, and would be trying to sell them.



• "Even when the ingredients aren't risky, spending money for a product with no proven benefit is no small harm when the economy is bad and people can't afford health insurance or healthy food. But sometimes the cost is far greater. Cancer patients can lose their only chance of beating the disease by gambling on unproven treatments. People with clogged arteries can suffer a heart attack. Children can be harmed by unproven therapies forced on them by parents who distrust conventional medicine."
  

  There have been some cases recently of people dying or being at great risk of dying because they (or their parents) resorted to alternative remedies instead of medicine. (Let's not even get started on Jenny McCarthy, whose anti-vaccination campaign has led to several deaths from things like measles).