Alternative medicine is not medicine

You may have heard about a branch of "medicine" available to people who want to get away from all of those icky unnatural substances that greedy pharmaceutical corporations put into medicines designed to produce drug dependency with no real benefit. It's for those who want to return to a more natural, alternative way of living.

Of course, all of the above is complete nonsense. As comedian and musician Tim Minchin wryly quipped in the middle of a beat poem called "Storm," "by definition alternative medicine has either not been proved to work, or has been proved not to work. Do you know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? Medicine."

Alternative medicine, like homeopathy, vitamins and minerals, herb-based therapies, crystal healing, faith healing and most "eastern medicine," is usually based on historical or cultural practices – time-tested traditions that people have long known to be effective, even though conventional medicine hasn't gotten around to scientifically verifying, bottling and commoditizing it yet.

Alternative medicine claims are all based on anecdotes – stories about their success that are usually either wholly fabricated or confuse correlation with causation. In either case, alternative medicine is fundamentally unscientific. It's not evidence-based and shouldn't even be called medicine. The term "alternative medicine" presupposes that it's a legitimate alternative to real medicine, when it's clearly not. If you want to sell people vitamins and herbs, that's fine, but don't call it medicine, and don't tell people that it works.

Some alternative medicine is so bizarre that it's hard to believe that anyone could be fooled by it. Homeopathy is my favorite example. It works based on the "law of similars", which German physician Samuel Hahnemann made up in the late 18th century. The preparation of a homeopathic remedy involves taking a very small amount of some substance and putting that substance into distilled water. This is followed by vigorous shaking, and then a small sample of that dilution is taken and put into fresh distilled water, which is also shaken. That process is then repeated several times. When it's finished, there's usually not any of the original substance left. If there is any of the original substance left, it's so small that it's basically immeasurable. They then give this to the patient.

Thankfully, science has weighed in on homeopathy, and it's repeatedly been proven to be no more effective than a placebo. Not a terribly surprising result, since the recipient of the treatment is basically just drinking water. The same is often true of other alternative medicines. This is one of the sillier examples of the impotence of natural remedies, but there are still plenty of people who believe that it works.

Alternative medicine also isn't always harmless. While there are a lot of jokes to be made at the expense of alternative medicine providers and their gullible customers, there can be real danger involved. There's a website called whatstheharm.net that does a good job of documenting examples of harm caused by pseudo-science. It includes a lot of examples of people dying unnecessarily because they chose alternative medicine at the expense of real medicine, including a 9-year-old German boy named Dominick. "His parents chose an alternative treatment for his cancer involving vitamin and mineral doses. The government tried to intervene. The boy eventually died." There are many other stories like that on the site.

Vitamin and mineral doses didn't kill Dominick though; his parents' belief in pseudo-science did. Alternative medicine becomes more than an oddity when it's substituted for real medicine, especially in life-threatening cases. And this wasn't a fluke – that's how it's marketed. It's an alternative to other (scientific) medicine.

It may seem like I'm wholly opposed to natural remedies, but that's not the case. Much of real medicine is based on recognizing benefits that come from natural substances and making them suitable for human use. I'm fine with natural remedies as long as they are based in solid empirical research, as opposed to the unproven and unscientific "alternative medicine." Science gives us a good idea of what works and what doesn't, and it's absolutely the only thing that we should trust for something as important as our health. Alternative medicine may charm you with talking points about the need to go "natural," and need to get away from pill dependency, but don't fall for it – it's just snake oil. It's a waste of your time and money, and depending on what real medicine you forgo, it could cost you your life.