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Nazgrim wrote:
I said value, not power. There's nothing necessarily wrong with employing alternative medicine along side traditional cures. Remember, the goal of medicine is different from science. The primary duty of the medical field is to provide patients with symptom relief. If that can be done with alternative medicine via the placebo effect, then there is some kind of value added by the whole enterprise. This is especially true in the case of ailments that are still poorly understood by medicine and aggravated by stress. Drinking some ridiculously diluted solution might just provide enough stress relief for a patient to experience actual symptom relief, provided the patient believes in the efficacy of said ridiculous solution. That's worth something.

I'd argue that the problems with alternative medicine arise from the ethics of its practitioners, not from the practices themselves.

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Nazgrim wrote:

The benefits of the placebo effect are woefully undervalued by the skeptic community.

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