Very few practitioners with an interest in alternative medicine are trained in research. As a result, hardly any funds in Canada are spent on the evaluation of alternative medicine. What we need, and what we are going to get, is greater public involvement in determining research agendas. This will require mutual education and listening. And it will have to involve a process for integrating the desires of patients with the knowledge of scientists.
Science progresses infrequently through serendipity.
Scientific investigation is hard work and relies heavily, if not almost exclusively, on past research. And, not incidentally, it is the very nature of this hard work and the stiff competition for limited research dollars that makes scientists so intolerant of what they see as useless research. In China, high school graduates who want to become doctors have a choice between studying traditional Chinese medicine or Western medicine. Those who do well in science and mathematics are encouraged to enter medical schools not unlike our own. Those who do well in language tend to enter traditional medicine.