There’s only medicine that works and medicine that does not, writes Paul Offit.
Fonte: There Is No Such Thing as Alternative Medicine
If you want to sell an idea an opponent is helpful, especially if what you’re selling cannot stand on its own merit. For example, homeopathy creator Samuel Hahnemann had trouble proving his provings offered anything beyond a placebo response. Given his reservations against the medical industry — many complaints were credible — he dubbed any treatment offered by the conventional system ‘allopathic.’
Unfortunately for Hahnemann his philosophy — the less of an active ingredient remains the more powerful a remedy is (once you reach 13c on the homeopathic scale there is no longer any active ingredient left) — is nonsense. While today homeopaths still use ‘allopathic’ as a derogatory sleight against mainstream medicine, they’re only shadowboxing an invisible enemy.
Alternative medicine, which includes homeopathy as well as vitamin and supplement companies and a number of other therapeutic modalities, is a $34 billion a year industry. While these companies enjoy the fruits of loose, and in many cases non-existent, regulations, their argument against allopaths is not the cry of the oppressed, but the desperate pleas of businesses concerned with their bottom lines.
Medicine is medicine. As pediatrician Paul Offit writes,
There’s no such thing as conventional or alternative or complementary or integrative or holistic medicine. There’s only medicine that works and medicine that does not.
This does not stop the irrational stream of unproven (or disproven) therapies arising from the holistic and wellness sphere. While pharmaceuticals and the companies producing them have their own problems, the rigorous standards of multiple trials, years of development and research, and millions of dollars spent are absent in the vitamin aisle of Whole Foods.
