Here is an interesting article on complementary/alternative medicine. Have a look at the comments as well, since they present the usual collection of justifications, reactions, and anecdotes.
Complementary medicines are useless and dangerous, says Britain’s foremost expert
Useless. Dangerous. Even crooked. The brutal verdict on our most popular complementary cures – by Britain’s foremost expert:
A lot of complementary medicine is ineffective, and some positively dangerous. Meanwhile, alternative treatments that promise to cure cancer ‘are downright irresponsible, if not criminal’.
These are the views not of an old-school doctor dismissive of alternative therapies, but of Professor Edzard Ernst, Britain’s first professor of complementary medicine and, you would have assumed, its greatest champion.
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A lot of interest groups were very puzzled because, surely, complementary medicine was, by and large, very safe, and mainstream medicine was where you had side-effects,’ says Ernst, who is professor of complementary medicine at the Peninsula Medical School at the universities of Exeter and Plymouth.
‘But when we did our research we found a lot of surprises – and since we started our work 13 years ago, various things have been banned from the market because they are so unsafe.’
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his department has published well over 1,000 research papers and tested a hugely diverse number of therapies, making it the most productive research unit in the world in this field.