Re: What say you - Alt Med is a "Belief System" ?

Belief in natural medicine is based on thousands of years of man using and observing natural healing to work.   Belief in science-based medicine assumes that the science of today has all or most of the answers, when history has taught us again and again that today's often becomes tomorrow's quackery.  I would say that blind belief in mainstream medicine is more of a religion that belief in natural alternatives.

Would you seriously have us believe that alternative therapists are more influential than doctors in today's world of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of "ask your doctor" propaganda we are inundated with?

Nature:  thousands of years of use and observed success with few serious side effects and almost no deaths.

Mainstream medicines:  scores of dangerous drugs recalled, drugs which do not work for most people the majority of the time by the drug industry's own admission, drugs which have side effects over 95% of the time, drugs which cause millions of serious adverse reactions each year and drugs which cause over 140,000 deaths in hospitals and homes each year.

If we have to pick our religions (or poisons as it were), I will go with nature.

"What a strange religion medicine makes.  It's the only religion that is federally backed, and even amid scientific controversy, cannot be questioned openly without persecution or ridicule." - Upton Sinclair

"We have not lost faith, but we have transferred it from God to the medical profession" - George Bernard Shaw

"We have no real proof of the boasted effectiveness of any form of anti-toxin or vaccine or serum... If such a vaccinated or immunised person contracts the disease which he is supposed to be protected, it is pretty good evidence that such "protection" is valueless, isn't it? Surely people do contract disease against which they are supposed to be immunised, as we all know.... Well, are you satisfied that WE ARE QUACKS? In the eyes of those who are willing to forgot the present prestige of medicine, such as it is, with all its dignity, its scientific jargon, its pratings of altruism, its great endowment, its well heralded "achievements," we are most assuredly quacks, professing to do things we cannot do, and yes, taking money under this pretence." - Dr. Paul M. Koonin, D.D.Sc.