2015-08-21
484
False hope
Many practitioners exploit vulnerable patients. They give false hope to people who are incurably sick and frequently charge high prices for useless treatments. The belief that alternative medicines are somehow "less risky" or "less harsh" than conventional medicine has led some to take alternative medicine over conventional medicine. While this may often be true (though don't say that to someone who's lost skin or body parts to black salves sometimes used for skin cancers), the potential health risks of not taking conventional medicine for an illness far outweigh the risks from the side effects of these medicines. Lack of regulation.
Taste the pain: a scarificator - a 19th century spring-powered bloodletting instrument creating multiple cuts in the skin at once. For some reason, this is a less fashionable alternative treatment but still goes on in Unani, Ayurvedic, and traditional Chinese medicine.
When a student wants to become a physician, he or she must attend a certified medical school, pass rigorous medical exams, and participate in carefully monitored and regulated internships all regulated by the governmental bodies who license the doctor. For the majority of alternative medicine, no such regulation is in place. For a few specific alternative therapies like chiropractic work and massage therapy, regulatory bodies do exist. However, pretty much every other field of alternative medicine has no regulation at all. Call yourself a color therapist, and lo and behold, you are one.
There is also a lack of regulation in the products sold as "alternative" or "herbal" medicines. You cannot, for example, know what is in a "sleep healing tea", how much of each ingredient, how potent the pills are, or even whether it contains the listed ingredient(s) at all (some herbal products, in fact, do not contain the herb(s) listed on the label).[3] Also, as there is little scientific research, "doses" are always a guess. "Try one pill. If that doesn't work, take two."
Kinds of alternative medicine
You can't neatly brush it all into the quack corner. Some of them work, but not all of them.
