The bonus of “alternative medicine” for most is that it puts control into your hands, allows you to experiment empirically, taking all the data you can, and applying it with the best information you can find to achieve a cure.
“Alternative medicine” is very rarely supported by well documented research with good methodology. When it is, it tends to become mainstream.
You can experiment empirically with mainstream medicine, as with alternative medicine, but in both cases usually only with a sample size of one. Research in mainstream medicine is corrupted by publication bias and industries with vested interest in funding studies with positive results, but alternative medicine is even worse, adding complete failure to understand credible research design or statistics into the mix. Individuals engaging in personal experimentation tend to be no less prone to bias, and are in a much worse position to conduct meaningful research.
“Alternative Medicine”, I continue
“Has either not been proved to work,
or been proved not to work.
You know what they call “alternative medicine”
that’s been proved to work?
Medicine.”
Which is to say that Alternative Medicine that works will be a decade or two ahead of Medicine. If you don’t have a problem with being a decade or two behind the best treatments, or never getting a treatment because no one has an interest in spending a billion dollars to “prove” it works, limiting yourself to Medicine is not a problem.
Which is to say that Alternative Medicine that works will be a decade or two ahead of Medicine
Sure, some forms of alt med might potentially fall into that category. But the vast majority will just be wrong and will often contradict basic laws of physics. Homeopathy is a good example of this.
I’m not assuming that homeopathy works, but I have been unable to find good quality experimental evidence on it. Anyone can say it seems to violate the laws of physics, but the only way to be sure is to test it. It does have a reputation and takes its basis thousands of years ago in the writings of Hippocrates.
It’s not terribly crazy to withhold judgment. I’m looking for good quality experimental data on its effectiveness.
Actually, homeopathy only dates to the 19th century.
Anyone can say it seems to violate the laws of physics, but the only way to be sure is to test it.
You can’t be sure about anything. Everything has some small chance of being the case, but homeopathy is grossly at odds with very basic aspects of modern physics, including simple issues of reductionism. Don’t privilege the hypothesis
http://lesswrong.com/lw/19m/privileging_the_hypothesis/ any more than any other idea out there.
It doesn’t take anywhere near a billion dollars to test a new medicine, and if there were a good reason for singling it out as worthy of serious investigation, drug companies would probably already be on it.
“Alternative medicine” mostly falls into two categories; procedures which would have to work by mystical mechanisms which our current scientific understanding suggests almost certainly cannot work, which mostly haven’t been tested, and traditional folk remedies which could work by the same sorts of mechanisms as ordinary medicine. Most of the latter have been found not to work, since traditional folk remedies are a significant source which pharmaceutical companies investigate in search of new drugs.
The more plausible a piece of “alternative medicine” sounds, the more likely it is to have already been investigated and found not to work.
It doesn’t take anywhere near a billion dollars to test a new medicine, and if there were a good reason for singling it out as worthy of serious investigation, drug companies would probably already be on it.
The only good reason a drug company has to investigate a drug treatment is if they can make substantial money on it, which they generally can’t with off patent drugs and natural compounds already in use.
In fact, when they have patent medicines for the same malady, they have every interest in seeing that off patent medicines are banned.
If a natural compound is already in use and works, drug companies have an interest in testing derivatives which can be made more effective or lower in side effects, and which can be patented. Aspirin and all forms of opiates are well known examples of drugs originating in this way.
“Drug companies can’t patent natural compounds, so they don’t bother to research them” is a commonly used excuse by alternative medicine industries, but in fact drug companies frequently do test natural compounds. It can be done cheaply with a small sample size, because they don’t have to investigate all the potential side effects or whether it stacks up to all the drugs currently on the market, just whether it works well enough to merit being made the focus of further research to create new medications.
I would like to see sources that show drug companies to be far-reaching and impartial in their exploration of traditional medicines.
A good question then is, since there are also a lot of medicine companies which promote traditional remedies, why are the larger pharmaceutical companies, which exhibit undeniable biases and pay out billions in false advertising lawsuits each year seen as the more valid side of the fence?
Many of these natural health companies employ fully trained doctors and receive patronage from fully trained doctors, and are a growing industry in the US.
Is it then rational to assume that an industry being far outspent by large pharmaceutical companies is picking up market share because the remedies it promotes don’t work?
The whole basis of the argument to dismiss alternative medicines in this thread is based on the idea that it’s possible for people to be irrational about their medical choices: but this is a rationalization, not a rational argument. So the current argument is both that:
A. non-alternative treatments don’t work sufficiently better than alternative treatments for there to be a noticeable negative difference in switching to alternatives (since an abundantly obvious difference in quality of healthcare would not admit of people making the wrong decisions against coercive market forces).
B. alternative treatments fulfill some non-physical need of the patient which draws people to use them.
C. Following this line of reasoning, we should arrive at the conclusion that alternative treatments are no worse than non-alternatives. Since alternative treatments are usually less expensive and less invasive, and since they do meet non-physical need (as we have posited), there is certainly no basis for discrediting them.
I of course pose the ontological question: how exactly is one to presume to lump them all together? Or is the act of this division not also an act of bias towards those treatments associated with particular institutions?
I would like to see sources that show drug companies to be far-reaching and impartial in their exploration of traditional medicines. A good question then is, since there are also a lot of medicine companies which promote traditional remedies, why are the larger pharmaceutical companies, which exhibit undeniable biases and pay out billions in false advertising lawsuits each year seen as the more valid side of the fence?
Because the alternative medicine companies are even worse.
Both mainstream and alternative medicine companies try to skirt the line of what they can legally claim about their products under government regulation, but mainstream drug companies skirt the limits of what they can say while meeting the minimum standards of peer reviewed research, while alternative medicine companies skirt the limits of what they can say without meeting any standards of research whatsoever.
The whole basis of the argument to dismiss alternative medicines in this thread is based on the idea that it’s possible for people to be irrational about their medical choices: but this is a rationalization, not a rational argument.
Can you please explain why it’s a rationalization rather than a rational argument? People are clearly irrational about many things, to their own detriment. People spent hundreds of years if not more tossing around various folk cures for scurvy, when in fact there is only one chemical which works, and works perfectly, to cure it. That’s countless people dying, and a major barrier to world exploration standing for centuries due to people’s failure to find out what works when left to their own devices, when some very simple tests were able to lay the matter to rest forever. Even after the experiments that determined quite conclusively that vitamin C containing foods were necessary to prevent scurvy, there were explorers who refused to believe it. They continued to get scurvy. Why do you not accept as a rational argument the claim that people continue to behave in a similarly irrational manner with respect to medicine today?
So your argument is both that:
A. non-alternative treatments don’t work sufficiently better than alternative treatments for there to be a noticeable negative difference in switching to alternatives (since an abundantly obvious difference in quality of healthcare would not admit of people making the wrong decisions against coercive market forces).
B. alternative treatments fulfill some non-physical need of the patient which draws people to use them.
It’s rationalization instead of a rational argument because postulating that people can sometimes be irrational (e.g.: believing traditional medicine to be magical) isn’t an argument for them making that choice over another. By the exact same argument, you could posit the opposite and it would seem correct: e.g. that people choose non-alternative medicine because they perceive it to be magic.
It’s practically axiomatic to say that people sometimes (even often) act irrationally, but you’ve defined one side as rational and the other as irrational, from what I can tell based solely upon your (unconvincing) arguments that 1. drug companies have broadly tested and dismissed traditional medicines and 2. that alternative medicines don’t work in general. If this isn’t what you meant, please elaborate.
My point about questioning your ontology was in pointing out that you seem to define “alternative treatments” as ineffective without using any data to back up your claims. If you define alternative treatments as ineffective without there being a meaningful ontological distinction unifying them, you’re not making any argument at all but only arguing a tautology. I would argue that this false distinction is rooted in corporate marketing practices intended to guise economic bias behind a word-veil (not that you are doing it on purpose), just like the two American political parties try to define themselves as the correct choice despite there being little identifiable ontological difference between them.
Id est, corporations define things they like as medicine and other things as “alternative treatments”, but the distinction between them is based upon concepts of economic ownership and maneuvering of the market instead of useful empirical evidence.
Excuse me, I didn’t mean to say that this A-B-C argument was your argument. (I’ve corrected the single word in the original post which made it sound like that). I was making a statement about the only argument against alternative treatments which was developed enough to identify in this thread.
In regards to what you were arguing, I answered above by requesting some real data for your broad claims about pharmaceutical companies doing extensive research on traditional remedies.
My point about questioning your ontology was in pointing out that you seem to define “alternative treatments” as ineffective without using any data to back up your claims.
I suggest checking out this book for an abundance of such. It’s a very good read in its own right besides. It’s not that alternative medicine is ineffective by definition, but that it is effectively defined as “alternative” by not meeting the standards of evidence that we demand of mainstream medicine (which are pretty lax standards already.)
Corporations don’t define things they like as mainstream and things they don’t like as alternative, the Food and Drug Administration in America, and comparable organizations in other countries, upholds certain standards for evidence about medicine, and medicine becomes “alternative” by not meeting them.
You can experiment empirically with mainstream medicine,...
That’s nearly a contradiction in terms. Mainstream medicine, as a practice, refuses empirical experimentation on particular patients. Here’s the disease. Here is the cookbook cure that has been sanctioned by some professional board, with backing by a billion dollar study that shows some statistical advantage over a whole population. If there is no such study, then the prescription is a shrug and a pat on the head.
Older family practicioners often aren’t like that. They’ll say “I don’t really know what will work for you, but we can try a few things”.
Think of a car mechanic. He thinks about how a car works, runs diagnostic tests, and swaps out parts. He doesn’t have placebo controlled double blinded studies, and doesn’t just shrug when he doesn’t have a study, or doesn’t have an immediate answer.
Individuals engaging in personal experimentation tend to be no less prone to bias, and are in a much worse position to conduct meaningful research.
I completely disagree. He is uniquely situated and motivated to conduct research to solve the problem at hand—his problem
If it works for you, then it works for you. No billion dollar study required, and it doesn’t matter what the statistical averages are when you determine it works for you. That is the problem to be solved—an individual’s problem. Given that he and no one else has possession of the system requiring fixing, he is in a very good position to do “research” to fix his problem, if he is not prevented by regulations and institutions barring him from tests, materials, and treatments. He has much more motivation to fix the problem than his doctor, who has a great many more compelling interests than healing his patient.
That’s nearly a contradiction in terms. Mainstream medicine, as a practice, refuses empirical experimentation on particular patients. Here’s the disease. Here is the cookbook cure that has been sanctioned by some professional board, with backing by a billion dollar study that shows some statistical advantage over a whole population. If there is no such study, then the prescription is a shrug and a pat on the head.
This is actually not quite true. There’s been a surprising amount of self-experimentation in medicine and experimentation on individual patients. Lawrence Altman’s “Who Goes First?” is a somewhat dry book on this subject that looks at self-experimentation by doctors and scientists in history. Most examples are things where they do deliberate harm to themselves (e.g. trying to figure out how a specific disease is transmitted by trying all sorts of different methods of infection, or deliberately reducing their intake of some specific vitamin and measuring the effects) but others involve actively trying to cure diseases that they happen to have. (Edit: For one recent unsuccessful example see here).
If it works for you, then it works for you. No billion dollar study required, and it doesn’t matter what the statistical averages are when you determine it works for you.
It is often difficult to tell if actually works for you or not. Self-evaluation is really tough, and when your sample size is one, the noise level can easily outweigh the signal. Still, there are actual steps that self-experimentation can include that help a lot. One can without too much difficulty double-blind self-tests with a help of a friend.
That’s nearly a contradiction in terms. Mainstream medicine, as a practice, refuses empirical experimentation on particular patients. Here’s the disease. Here is the cookbook cure that has been sanctioned by some professional board, with backing by a billion dollar study that shows some statistical advantage over a whole population. If there is no such study, then the prescription is a shrug and a pat on the head.
If no study shows that any treatment has a particular advantage over placebo, many doctors will prescribe a placebo. Prescribing actual medicines at random would be a bad idea, since there’s no reason to arbitrarily privilege the hypothesis that any particular treatment will help you more than a placebo, and a placebo has less danger of side effects. Of course, you can always go to a drugstore and buy mainstream medicines which have been found to be useful for something to test on yourself, and like alternative medicine, this will give you something to point at when you get better, but it’s not a very wise treatment plan.
If it works for you, then it works for you. No billion dollar study required, and it doesn’t matter what the statistical averages are when you determine it works for you. That is the problem to be solved—an individual’s problem. Given that he and no one else has possession of the system requiring fixing, he is in a very good position to do “research” to fix his problem, if he is not prevented by regulations and institutions barring him from tests, materials, and treatments. He has much more motivation to fix the problem than his doctor, who has a great many more compelling interests than healing his patient.
If mere motivation was enough to overcome bias and incompetence at processing evidence, we would have no need for this site at all.
The advantage of “alternative medicine” is that you can always turn to it for a harmless placebo, but this is much less useful once you know that it’s what the advantage actually is.
The point is not for individuals to create generalizeable claims, but rather to allow idiosyncratic individuals with unique problems and life situations to improve their health. You cannot argue with the results individuals achieve. Of course, much of this individual research is only necessitated by the utter lack of reliable data:
“Researchers reviewed 546 drug trials and found that industry-funded trials reported positive outcomes 85% of the time compared with 50% of the time for government-funded trials and 72% of the time for trials funded by nonprofits or non-federal organizations. Among the nonprofit or non-federal studies, those that received industry contributions were more likely to be positive (85%) compared with those that did not have any industry support (61%).
…
But the new study also showed that results of industry-funded studies were published within two years of the study completion 32% of the time compared with 54% for government trials and 56% for nonprofit or non-federal trials.”
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/02/news/la-heb-studies-20100802
Corruption in the drug industry is not trivial in the least, and because of the economic organization of the world such bias will not be going away in the forseeable future.
I’ve never argued that research in mainstream medicine is good, only that “alternative” medicine is a worse alternative. If there is no evidence whatsoever that a piece of alternative medicine provides benefit over placebo, you’re better off taking something for which there is even weak evidence of it being better than placebo. At least you should get the benefit of the placebo effect either way.
One common way in which industry funded studies are slanted is by measuring their drugs against placebo, when the relevant information is how they perform against the best drugs already on the market. A drug that comes out ahead in these tests may be strictly inferior to other drugs that are are available, but it’s probably still better than alternative medicine, which reliably fails to outperform placebos.
If an individual takes alternative medicine and gets better, there’s no point arguing that they didn’t get better, but that doesn’t mean that taking alternative medicine was a good idea.
“Alternative medicine” is very rarely supported by well documented research with good methodology. When it is, it tends to become mainstream.
You can experiment empirically with mainstream medicine, as with alternative medicine, but in both cases usually only with a sample size of one. Research in mainstream medicine is corrupted by publication bias and industries with vested interest in funding studies with positive results, but alternative medicine is even worse, adding complete failure to understand credible research design or statistics into the mix. Individuals engaging in personal experimentation tend to be no less prone to bias, and are in a much worse position to conduct meaningful research.
Or, as Tim Minchin puts it:
Which is to say that Alternative Medicine that works will be a decade or two ahead of Medicine. If you don’t have a problem with being a decade or two behind the best treatments, or never getting a treatment because no one has an interest in spending a billion dollars to “prove” it works, limiting yourself to Medicine is not a problem.
Sure, some forms of alt med might potentially fall into that category. But the vast majority will just be wrong and will often contradict basic laws of physics. Homeopathy is a good example of this.
But if you happen to be rational, you can weed out the treatments that contradict the basic laws of physics.
I’m not assuming that homeopathy works, but I have been unable to find good quality experimental evidence on it. Anyone can say it seems to violate the laws of physics, but the only way to be sure is to test it. It does have a reputation and takes its basis thousands of years ago in the writings of Hippocrates. It’s not terribly crazy to withhold judgment. I’m looking for good quality experimental data on its effectiveness.
Actually, homeopathy only dates to the 19th century.
You can’t be sure about anything. Everything has some small chance of being the case, but homeopathy is grossly at odds with very basic aspects of modern physics, including simple issues of reductionism. Don’t privilege the hypothesis http://lesswrong.com/lw/19m/privileging_the_hypothesis/ any more than any other idea out there.
It doesn’t take anywhere near a billion dollars to test a new medicine, and if there were a good reason for singling it out as worthy of serious investigation, drug companies would probably already be on it.
“Alternative medicine” mostly falls into two categories; procedures which would have to work by mystical mechanisms which our current scientific understanding suggests almost certainly cannot work, which mostly haven’t been tested, and traditional folk remedies which could work by the same sorts of mechanisms as ordinary medicine. Most of the latter have been found not to work, since traditional folk remedies are a significant source which pharmaceutical companies investigate in search of new drugs.
The more plausible a piece of “alternative medicine” sounds, the more likely it is to have already been investigated and found not to work.
The only good reason a drug company has to investigate a drug treatment is if they can make substantial money on it, which they generally can’t with off patent drugs and natural compounds already in use.
In fact, when they have patent medicines for the same malady, they have every interest in seeing that off patent medicines are banned.
If a natural compound is already in use and works, drug companies have an interest in testing derivatives which can be made more effective or lower in side effects, and which can be patented. Aspirin and all forms of opiates are well known examples of drugs originating in this way.
“Drug companies can’t patent natural compounds, so they don’t bother to research them” is a commonly used excuse by alternative medicine industries, but in fact drug companies frequently do test natural compounds. It can be done cheaply with a small sample size, because they don’t have to investigate all the potential side effects or whether it stacks up to all the drugs currently on the market, just whether it works well enough to merit being made the focus of further research to create new medications.
I would like to see sources that show drug companies to be far-reaching and impartial in their exploration of traditional medicines. A good question then is, since there are also a lot of medicine companies which promote traditional remedies, why are the larger pharmaceutical companies, which exhibit undeniable biases and pay out billions in false advertising lawsuits each year seen as the more valid side of the fence? Many of these natural health companies employ fully trained doctors and receive patronage from fully trained doctors, and are a growing industry in the US. Is it then rational to assume that an industry being far outspent by large pharmaceutical companies is picking up market share because the remedies it promotes don’t work?
The whole basis of the argument to dismiss alternative medicines in this thread is based on the idea that it’s possible for people to be irrational about their medical choices: but this is a rationalization, not a rational argument. So the current argument is both that:
A. non-alternative treatments don’t work sufficiently better than alternative treatments for there to be a noticeable negative difference in switching to alternatives (since an abundantly obvious difference in quality of healthcare would not admit of people making the wrong decisions against coercive market forces).
B. alternative treatments fulfill some non-physical need of the patient which draws people to use them.
C. Following this line of reasoning, we should arrive at the conclusion that alternative treatments are no worse than non-alternatives. Since alternative treatments are usually less expensive and less invasive, and since they do meet non-physical need (as we have posited), there is certainly no basis for discrediting them.
I of course pose the ontological question: how exactly is one to presume to lump them all together? Or is the act of this division not also an act of bias towards those treatments associated with particular institutions?
Because the alternative medicine companies are even worse.
Both mainstream and alternative medicine companies try to skirt the line of what they can legally claim about their products under government regulation, but mainstream drug companies skirt the limits of what they can say while meeting the minimum standards of peer reviewed research, while alternative medicine companies skirt the limits of what they can say without meeting any standards of research whatsoever.
Can you please explain why it’s a rationalization rather than a rational argument? People are clearly irrational about many things, to their own detriment. People spent hundreds of years if not more tossing around various folk cures for scurvy, when in fact there is only one chemical which works, and works perfectly, to cure it. That’s countless people dying, and a major barrier to world exploration standing for centuries due to people’s failure to find out what works when left to their own devices, when some very simple tests were able to lay the matter to rest forever. Even after the experiments that determined quite conclusively that vitamin C containing foods were necessary to prevent scurvy, there were explorers who refused to believe it. They continued to get scurvy. Why do you not accept as a rational argument the claim that people continue to behave in a similarly irrational manner with respect to medicine today?
No, this is not what I am arguing at all.
It’s rationalization instead of a rational argument because postulating that people can sometimes be irrational (e.g.: believing traditional medicine to be magical) isn’t an argument for them making that choice over another. By the exact same argument, you could posit the opposite and it would seem correct: e.g. that people choose non-alternative medicine because they perceive it to be magic.
It’s practically axiomatic to say that people sometimes (even often) act irrationally, but you’ve defined one side as rational and the other as irrational, from what I can tell based solely upon your (unconvincing) arguments that 1. drug companies have broadly tested and dismissed traditional medicines and 2. that alternative medicines don’t work in general. If this isn’t what you meant, please elaborate.
My point about questioning your ontology was in pointing out that you seem to define “alternative treatments” as ineffective without using any data to back up your claims. If you define alternative treatments as ineffective without there being a meaningful ontological distinction unifying them, you’re not making any argument at all but only arguing a tautology. I would argue that this false distinction is rooted in corporate marketing practices intended to guise economic bias behind a word-veil (not that you are doing it on purpose), just like the two American political parties try to define themselves as the correct choice despite there being little identifiable ontological difference between them.
Id est, corporations define things they like as medicine and other things as “alternative treatments”, but the distinction between them is based upon concepts of economic ownership and maneuvering of the market instead of useful empirical evidence.
Excuse me, I didn’t mean to say that this A-B-C argument was your argument. (I’ve corrected the single word in the original post which made it sound like that). I was making a statement about the only argument against alternative treatments which was developed enough to identify in this thread.
In regards to what you were arguing, I answered above by requesting some real data for your broad claims about pharmaceutical companies doing extensive research on traditional remedies.
I suggest checking out this book for an abundance of such. It’s a very good read in its own right besides. It’s not that alternative medicine is ineffective by definition, but that it is effectively defined as “alternative” by not meeting the standards of evidence that we demand of mainstream medicine (which are pretty lax standards already.)
Corporations don’t define things they like as mainstream and things they don’t like as alternative, the Food and Drug Administration in America, and comparable organizations in other countries, upholds certain standards for evidence about medicine, and medicine becomes “alternative” by not meeting them.
That’s nearly a contradiction in terms. Mainstream medicine, as a practice, refuses empirical experimentation on particular patients. Here’s the disease. Here is the cookbook cure that has been sanctioned by some professional board, with backing by a billion dollar study that shows some statistical advantage over a whole population. If there is no such study, then the prescription is a shrug and a pat on the head.
Older family practicioners often aren’t like that. They’ll say “I don’t really know what will work for you, but we can try a few things”.
Think of a car mechanic. He thinks about how a car works, runs diagnostic tests, and swaps out parts. He doesn’t have placebo controlled double blinded studies, and doesn’t just shrug when he doesn’t have a study, or doesn’t have an immediate answer.
I completely disagree. He is uniquely situated and motivated to conduct research to solve the problem at hand—his problem
If it works for you, then it works for you. No billion dollar study required, and it doesn’t matter what the statistical averages are when you determine it works for you. That is the problem to be solved—an individual’s problem. Given that he and no one else has possession of the system requiring fixing, he is in a very good position to do “research” to fix his problem, if he is not prevented by regulations and institutions barring him from tests, materials, and treatments. He has much more motivation to fix the problem than his doctor, who has a great many more compelling interests than healing his patient.
This is actually not quite true. There’s been a surprising amount of self-experimentation in medicine and experimentation on individual patients. Lawrence Altman’s “Who Goes First?” is a somewhat dry book on this subject that looks at self-experimentation by doctors and scientists in history. Most examples are things where they do deliberate harm to themselves (e.g. trying to figure out how a specific disease is transmitted by trying all sorts of different methods of infection, or deliberately reducing their intake of some specific vitamin and measuring the effects) but others involve actively trying to cure diseases that they happen to have. (Edit: For one recent unsuccessful example see here).
It is often difficult to tell if actually works for you or not. Self-evaluation is really tough, and when your sample size is one, the noise level can easily outweigh the signal. Still, there are actual steps that self-experimentation can include that help a lot. One can without too much difficulty double-blind self-tests with a help of a friend.
If no study shows that any treatment has a particular advantage over placebo, many doctors will prescribe a placebo. Prescribing actual medicines at random would be a bad idea, since there’s no reason to arbitrarily privilege the hypothesis that any particular treatment will help you more than a placebo, and a placebo has less danger of side effects. Of course, you can always go to a drugstore and buy mainstream medicines which have been found to be useful for something to test on yourself, and like alternative medicine, this will give you something to point at when you get better, but it’s not a very wise treatment plan.
If mere motivation was enough to overcome bias and incompetence at processing evidence, we would have no need for this site at all.
The advantage of “alternative medicine” is that you can always turn to it for a harmless placebo, but this is much less useful once you know that it’s what the advantage actually is.
The point is not for individuals to create generalizeable claims, but rather to allow idiosyncratic individuals with unique problems and life situations to improve their health. You cannot argue with the results individuals achieve. Of course, much of this individual research is only necessitated by the utter lack of reliable data:
“Researchers reviewed 546 drug trials and found that industry-funded trials reported positive outcomes 85% of the time compared with 50% of the time for government-funded trials and 72% of the time for trials funded by nonprofits or non-federal organizations. Among the nonprofit or non-federal studies, those that received industry contributions were more likely to be positive (85%) compared with those that did not have any industry support (61%). … But the new study also showed that results of industry-funded studies were published within two years of the study completion 32% of the time compared with 54% for government trials and 56% for nonprofit or non-federal trials.” http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/02/news/la-heb-studies-20100802
Corruption in the drug industry is not trivial in the least, and because of the economic organization of the world such bias will not be going away in the forseeable future.
I’ve never argued that research in mainstream medicine is good, only that “alternative” medicine is a worse alternative. If there is no evidence whatsoever that a piece of alternative medicine provides benefit over placebo, you’re better off taking something for which there is even weak evidence of it being better than placebo. At least you should get the benefit of the placebo effect either way.
One common way in which industry funded studies are slanted is by measuring their drugs against placebo, when the relevant information is how they perform against the best drugs already on the market. A drug that comes out ahead in these tests may be strictly inferior to other drugs that are are available, but it’s probably still better than alternative medicine, which reliably fails to outperform placebos.
If an individual takes alternative medicine and gets better, there’s no point arguing that they didn’t get better, but that doesn’t mean that taking alternative medicine was a good idea.