I dislike alternative medicine. You know why? Because it doesn’t work. And when it does, there’s no reason to believe - from a scientific perspective - that it’s anything other than the placebo effect at work.

I’ve tried some of this stuff before. Well-meaning people have given me herbs, pills made from herbs, pills made with active bacteria, pills made with ground-up rocks, and pills made of who-knows-what.

It just doesn’t work. Maybe because I’m a skeptic, I never feel or see any positive effects from these so-called medicines.

And the whole idea of “alternative medicine” is stupid. Idiotic, in fact. You know why it’s “alternative” medicine? Because it doesn’t work! If it did work, and if it could be proved to work, it would become actual, real medicine. Like, for instance, penicillin.

I’ve seen families with my own eyes, families so afraid of the medical establishment, that they were literally scared to go to a doctor. And you know what? They were some of sickest people I’ve ever known. This isn’t always true, but it has been true a lot of the time. You know what I think the problem was (and I’m no doctor)? They had a genuine medical problem that they were trying to sort out with quackery. No wonder they were sick!

I don’t think we really have any idea how blessed we are by the modern medical establishment. Is it flawed? Yes. Are there unscrupulous drug companies out just to make a buck? Yes. But the fact that a doctor can remove a baby by c-section when the cord is triple-wrapped and both the child and mother survive this operation is simply amazing. Show me a homeopath that can do that repeatedly without the modern medical establishment, and I’ll give you a thousand dollars. We live in an age where all but the most complex diseases can be treated, if not cured. People who would have, three hundred years ago, died in relative youth can live to a ripe old age.

You can go get your chokras ballanced, go get tiny needles stuck into your muscles, have a chiropractor re-align your neck, but at the end of the day, these people aren’t really doing anything serious. Accupunture and chiropracty - even though they may have some slight basis in science that we don’t quite understand yet - are meant to relieve pain, and that’s it. Anyone that claims otherwise is lying to you.

There are drug companies, for instance, that go to great lengths to test every single natural remedy so they can capitalise on it. They have a huge multi-billion dollar industry; do you think, seriously for a moment that they haven’t tested and re-tested every homeopathic so-called remedy that exists to see if they can sell it? Of course they have! They’ve tested things that aren’t even on the periphery of the homeopathic mindsphere, if you can even call it that. The reason they don’t sell your magic remedies, homeopathic folks, is because your magic remedies don’t work.

Then you see things like people who won’t vaccinate their children. Do you understand how idiotic that is? How self-centred and how very moronic. For over a hundred years the world has made a concerted effort to stamp out diseases by innoculation and vaccination, and to a very large extent, it’s worked! The only reason you can opt not to have your children vaccinated is because the diseases they would be immunised against aren’t even a threat anymore thanks to - you got it! - vaccination. The only reason that your children aren’t getting smallpox and polio is because everyone else is vaccinated against these very diseases; if everyone was as selfish as you are, children and adults would once again be dropping like flies.

Not only that, you don’t understand statistical analysis, or cause-and-effect. You know how rare problems from vaccination are? Extremely, extremely small percentages. But we take that risk for a reason: for the whole human race to be better off. You can opt-out if you like, but that doesn’t change the facts as they stand. You choose to drive to work every day despite the chances of you dying in an accident and dying being much higher than your child having developmental problems from inocculation. Not to mention people trying to blame autism and the like on vaccination: how does that work again? We’re just now starting to diagnose autism, much less understand it, and you’re trying to tell me that the rise in autism figures isn’t because we’ve begun to diagnose it better? That’s like saying that we have more aneurisms today because in the 1700s they had no idea what an “aneurism” was!

Another problem is that the homeopathic industry suffers from exactly the same problems that the drug companies suffer from. Do you imagine somehow that homeopathic remedy makers aren’t out to make a profit? Of course they are! The only difference between them and people who make actual medicine is they have no accountability at all, their remedies don’t work, and the cost to actually make their pills and such is much smaller. Not to mention the raft of snake-oil salesmen that have literally swamped the homeopathic market with their wares. You would think that in an age filled with the knowlege of generations of people fooled by shady guys selling sugarwater off the side of a wagon people wouldn’t be fooled by this madness, but apparently there’s still a sucker born every minute. And the homeopathic industry is filled with suckers, that much is for certain.

Now - some of you are going to have a gut reaction to what I’ve said - almost a religious reaction to it. Ask yourself this: why? Have you really examined these beliefs, or are you simply reacting againt the admitted problems of the modern medical community. Or are you just a gullible person? Or are you so blindly committed to a way of life that you can’t admit you’re wrong?

And when you’re done that, check out http://www.quackwatch.org. Really. You need to.

Tags: opinions