Excluding accidents and trauma, everybody is going to develop an illness which will be fatal. They may be able to avoid or cure one or several illnesses, but they will get another one sooner or later that will be untreatable or incurable. It will happen to everybody. Since there is no scientific way to avoid it and since nobody wants to die there is nothing else to do but to try anything. This assures a large, continually renewing population of desperate people.
Unconventional therapies can be useful in certain circumstances.
They give hope where none is otherwise expected. They allow the patient to participate more and to take more control over their treatment. Unconventional therapy should not take the place of conventional therapy as long as there is scientific proof that the conventional treatment may be helpful. Unfortunately, there are many situations in which it has been scientifically proven that conventional treatment will not be helpful. In these situations the options are no treatment, investigational scientific studies, or unconventional treatment.