The response was surprisingly well argued. The email I got didn't claim that alternative therapies cure people, or that there was any scientific evidence for them. Rather, the institute they were supporting used these therapies as a last resort -- they take patients who have tried all the conventional treatments.

For these patients, they claimed that the outcomes were the same as normal hospital treatment, but the patients were happier, presumably because they were still being 'treated'.

I'm uneasy about this because, well, I'm a scientist. On the other hand, it makes some desperately ill people happy. As long as it's not used instead of real cures, I suppose I can live with it.
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(,   ,') -- eep
"This option is deprecated, as it is conceptually flawed." -- man psql

IIRC, the last study on acupuncture didn't show that it didn't work, but rather that the 'bollocks component' (scientific terms ahoy!) had no necessary basis to it. Going from memory (thus risking inaccuracy, but I can't be arsed to look it up), the control group showed an improvement of ~20%, whereas both the 'official acupuncture' and the 'acupuncture-but-ignoring-the-official-theory / let's-stick-pins-in-random-places' groups both showed equivalent improvement rates of around 43%.

There are statistical and measurement problems with all these studies that make it hard to take anything conclusive from them, but I found that study's result interesting because it seemed to show something that I think critics (including myself) often overlook.

The problem with alternative therapies is not that they work / don't work, but that they often get a lot of things right which have nothing to do with the treatment being peddled or the bullshit to which they're shackled; that they can often get good results but for the "wrong" reasons.

It's been theorized, for some time, by clinical physicians, that sticking needles in people may be beneficial for a number of different reasons: distributed release of endorphins and antihistamines; targetted muscle stimulation; 'distractive' pain taking attention away from the area of concern etc. -- none of which has anything to do with chi, or meridians, or the build-up of some nebulous 'negative energy'. Likewise, the infamous 'Brain Gym' may be good at getting kids to calm down and concentrate (breaks are good, exercise is good, drinking water is good, the placebo-belief in the method can be motivating), but the reasons they peddle for its efficacy are patently nonsense.

All of these things succeed by dabbling in an area about which science has little to say. Science doesn't care whether you're doing yoga, or calisthenics, or going to the gym, or swimming, or orienteering, or canoeing: some combination of relaxation / concentration / exercise is known to be beneficial; whichever one you do is borderline-irrelevant, provided you do one. So people find something which works for them and then make the mistake of buying into its tenets without necessarily critically appraising why it might be 'working'.

Furthermore, one area in which alternative medicine is, quite frankly, taking conventional medicine to the cleaners is 'patient care'. If a person has to wait four days for a doctor's appointment, at which they end up sitting in the waiting room for the best part of an hour before being brusquely and dismissively interacted-with and then shown the door in a manner more akin to a sheep dip, then goes to an alternative therapist who is on-time, quiet, offers cups of tea, spends an hour "diagnosing" by essentially talking about them / their worries and getting them to relax, it's no surprise that, because the "bedside manner" is better, people react more favourably to the latter regardless of what it is they happen to be peddling. Again, they've got something right but for irrelevant or wrong reasons.

There are two types of selfish person in this world: the type who's time is precious and the type who's enjoyment is precious. I'm in the first camp, so I don't care if a doctor's session is brief because I don't want to waste time any more than they do. I don't need the mollycoddling, or necessarily respond particularly well to it, because I know it's largely irrelevant to whether the antibiotic will work. Also, I'm not in the group of people who'll go to the doctors just because "they've been feeling a bit run-down recently". An awful lot of people are not in the same camp as me, though; they're in the other one; and it's these people for whom alternative therapies may 'work' in some sense.

It reminds me of something Sam Harris said to Richard Dawkins in a discussion over the 'new atheism', which is that, because religion is pretty-much the only game in town which seems to address / respect / dignify / celebrate / provide-a-framework-for spiritual or numinous experiences, it sometimes makes people like them (Dawkins and Harris) look a bit drab, lacking and clinical in comparison, even though there's no necessary reason for numinous experiences and any given religion to be shackled together.

It's the same thing with these alternative therapies. Until people can get what they're getting from the alternative therapy process elsewhere, a large body of them will always keep going, because it's the only game in town (apart from £1000-an-hour consultations on Harley Street) where you can have an intimate, relaxing chat as part of the process, or where the "doctor" actually seems to give a toss.

The last issue is whether it should be subsidised by the NHS. I have a natural revulsion to the idea but can see that, in the case of last-chance patients as mentioned by gpig, it may offer them some respite. The problem then is that there seems to be no natural limit on 'scope creep'. Once you've allowed it on principle, at what point are you allowed to say 'No, because that's a total waste of money'? I'm pretty certain we oughtn't to be paying for everyone's psychotherapy sessions by proxy, which is what a lot of 'alternative consultations' are -- and, if we were going to do that, perhaps we should be paying psychotherapists instead of quacks homeopaths.