Alternative medicine

Lore & Background

Alternative medicine encompasses a wide range of practices that are not part of evidence-based medicine. These practices often originate from hearsay, religion, tradition, superstition, belief in supernatural energies, pseudoscience, or fraud. Some alternative practices are based on theories that contradict established science of how the human body works, while others appeal to the supernatural or superstitions to explain their effect. Research into alternative therapies frequently fails to follow proper protocols such as placebo-controlled trials or blind experiments, producing invalid results.

Reader's Guide

The significance of alternative medicine lies in its persistent presence alongside mainstream medicine despite lacking scientific validation. Much of its perceived effect arises from the placebo effect, belief in its effectiveness, or the natural course of disease resolving on its own. For serious diseases like cancer or HIV, studies show significantly worse outcomes when patients turn to alternative therapies, partly because they avoid effective treatment and partly because some alternative therapies are actively harmful, such as cyanide poisoning from amygdalin or intentional ingestion of hydrogen peroxide.

The alternative medicine sector is a highly profitable industry with strong lobbying power and faces far less regulation than mainstream medicine. Billions of dollars have been spent studying alternative medicine with few or no positive results and many methods thoroughly disproven. The terminology has shifted over time, with terms like complementary medicine and integrative medicine used to combine alternative practices with mainstream treatment, though critics describe this as an attempt to bring pseudoscience into academic medicine.