this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
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I'm not sure what are you trying to tell me.
That you agree with me that "alternative medicine = not proven to work, but I'm wrong somehow"?
If your definition is that something can be called "alternative medicine" simply because we have no proof if it works or not, my magic stick that heals all wounds is alternative medicine.
What? There are no studies proving it doesn't work... and no, I won't let you touch it. But it's alternative medicine!
That's literally alternative medicine defined as per well, science. And you being silly doesn't take from it. In the past, viruses were considered alternative medicine (quackery even), until they were proven to exist and work as in theory.
If you hit someone with a stick and that person gets cured of cold, it's alternative medicine (you suspect there's correlation or causation, and repeating the treatment during other incidents tends to have similar effect, i.e. when you hit more people they also get cured). When it's proven that there's causation between your action and the cure, then it's medicine.
There's no scientific definition of alternative medicine, it's not a real category.
I think you sorted things into three types of medicine:
[ pseudo, alternative, modern/mainstream ]
I think he believes that most things you put into the alternative category have already been mostly studied; those being not proved or disproved to work.
I think the that some issue here comes from the fact that conspiracy theorists / other (for lack of an agreed upon modifier) medicine gurus may have used the argument that some medicines arenβt proven to be bad yet as a way to give them legitimacy.
Whether or not other medicine is good for you should be be studied and determined to be medicine or not. Until then we canβt say anything about its efficacy. But there can be carry on effects: protein powder was found to have heavy metals, is protein powder good? Maybe in certain circumstances, but concentrating a given substance can have unintended consequences when not properly analyzed.