Taking Issue Many of the most prominent therapies in the alternative movement are inseparable from their roots in Taoism, Vedism or other metaphysical traditions. In addition, such therapies bear directly or are linked inseparably with a message that flatly contradicts the teachings of Scripture. If these ideas are correct, not only must every science textbook be completely rewritten, but the entire message of the Bible must be dismissed as well. Ignoring or dismissing this phenomenon outright would be a mistake not only because alternative medicine is definitely not going away, but because there is so much to learn from reflecting on its rising popularity. Why alternative therapies are now so acceptable, and what those reasons say about conventional medicine's strengths and weaknesses, is in many ways more important than their actual content.
Many popular therapies fly in the face of well-established principles of biology and physics.
Giving them credibility essentially repudiates more than two centuries of hard-fought effort to wrest medicine from the grip of superstition, misunderstanding and ignorance. Most of the history of human effort to ward off illness has been a discouraging litany of wrongheaded theories, misguided efforts to manipulate gods or demons, fanciful concoctions derived from every substance on the face of the earth, elaborate rituals and, worst of all, harsh treatments that have seriously reduced the sick or injured person's odds of survival. It could be reasonably argued that the therapeutic systems with the most longevity, such as traditional Chinese medicine, have endured not because they possessed an accurate understanding of the human body, but because they did relatively little harm while increasing the patient's expectation of improvement. This represents a serious and frequently overlooked challenge to their credibility. In general, the more incompatible the therapy with widely accepted scientific principles, the more hostile it is to the basic teachings of the Old and New Testaments.