You don't have people flipping coins to see if a bridge will hold up. The battle over scientific method has been joined vigorously by defenders of evidence-based medicine. And that's my argument with Andrew Weil and with all alternative medicine practitioners. It's their suggestion that there's really a better way, or an acceptable alternative way, of finding out what's true. In Search of Evidence One alternative to the alternativists' nonmaterial interpretations of clinical results may involve the placebo effect.
Patients probably do feel better, since the placebo effect is potent medicine.
We all could build pretty successful practices by dispensing little else. But since controlled clinical trials generally have not been performed, the problem is how to distinguish the psychotherapeutic benefit of treatment from the actual effects of the specific treatment. So it's becoming more important for practicing physicians to have some familiarity with the alternative modalities and to try to figure out what advice to give people. We should want to know whether our treatments are safe and effective, regardless of whether they're natural or synthetic. If people want real answers, they need to support more clinical research, and the public should be demanding it.