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 traditional allopathic 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. One alternative to the alternativists' non-material 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 spec ific 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. Perhaps that very contentiousness makes research universities the natural arena for alternative medicine to respond to the challenge of science.