Many people who suffer from allergies, or think that they do, go to practitioners of alternative medicine, often because they have not been helped enough by ordinary doctors. There are many kinds of alternative practitioner. Some mainstream qualified doctors also practice alternative medicine. It is therefore difficult to generalise. The short answer from us is this.
Mainstream medicine uses all sorts of treatments which originally come from herbal remedies.
These medicines have been shown to work, and nowadays the active ingredient will have been purified or made in a pure form by chemistry. The right dose, the effectiveness, and the side effects will have been studied. There is a reporting system for suspected side effects, so that patterns of side effects can be picked up which an individual doctor could not be sure about. This is an example of the difference between mainstream and alternative medicine. Alternative medicine does not test its remedies with anything like the same thoroughness for the very simple reason that if it did, and if the treatment was shown to work by the same standards as those used in mainstream medicine, it would be adopted by mainstream medicine and would no longer be alternative medicine.