If what you get for your money is death from a pharmaceutical drug, that's not a very good bargain. Modern, science-based medicine is the way of the future. Alternative medicine belongs to the past. It is old wine, albeit sometimes now being served in new bottles, and is unlikely to produce new knowledge or improve future medical care. It has a strong appeal to those who want to believe in a human-friendly universe, and in the benevolent healing powers of nature.
Alternative medicine can be a compelling hobby for the healthy, and a final hope for the dying.
But however valuable these things may be for some of us, we ought not to forget that our best chance for a healthier future rests on continued advances in conventional medical practice, based on science and objective evidence. It's the patient that suffers in this. How much better it would be, if there were physicians trained to advise patients about the intelligent combination of the different kinds of therapies that are out there. We went back and looked at the records of cancer patients that we've seen over the past year and a half. Of the first 60 cancer patients that were seen in our integrative clinic, none was taken off any kind of conventional therapy, and 11 who said that they would not do conventional therapy were persuaded by our integrative fellows to do conventional therapy.