Medical science is just that, medicine that follows the scientific method. (Or at least it’s supposed to).
The scientific method is basically testing guesses (sometimes educated ones) and seeing what happens.
There’s a whole lot of structure and guidelines, but testing guesses(hypotheses) is where it’s at mostly.
The current state of any science is usually “the best theory we have right now, given the data and resources available to us”
Some people hear that and think “look, they’re just guessing, why should I listen to them?” and thats absolutely valid.
Where that falls down is that they then go on to assume all guesses are equal and ignore the time and resources that went in to that current scientific best guess.
Is it always correct? no, is it more likely to be beneficial than a random social media post by an influencer with no medical expertise? Generally yes.
I would expand “testing guesses” to repeatedly testing guesses. It’s a fundamental thing to be able to recreate the testing results, or it’s not science at all it’s just fuckign around lol
Most professions could be described like this, but when doctors are “trying shit” it is backed up by many years of training and education, and their behavior is scrutinised by professional bodies and so on.
When your local quack is “trying shit” it’s just based on the vibe.
Or we could just start selling placebo tablets and make a fortune. I have some clay in my garden that should be easy enough to shape into pill shapes. We could even paint a few of them red and sell those as extra strong.
Um Clay would have an effect. Use powdered sugar and simply compress them into a pill. This is literally one way they do already make placebos in pill form. You can buy a pill press on amazon
We are only ‘pretty sure’ of the mechanism of how Tylenol works biochemically as of 2025.
You can test for effectiveness and dangers and everything else you need to prescribe something to get a good idea of whether its actually doing something or not.
‘Alternative medicine’ is largely, “I felt better after a bit”.
It’s known to potentially have an effect , even if the actual treatment administered was known(by third parties) to be inert and the effect wasnt the one originally planned.
Thats not the same as not working at all.
This is a core part of blind tests, the whole reason you test using a placebo is to isolate the effects that can’t be attributed to the actual medicine.
I’m not sure why you are repeating what I said as if I didn’t already say that.
Yes, it’s known to have an effect. But the placebo itself literally does nothing. It’s not a placebo unless it is guaranteed to do nothing or it wouldn’t have any value to science with how they use it. Any effect is psychosomatic and NOT an effect of the placebo. Hence the term “placebo effect” this is incredibly important when testing to gather useful data.
I’m guessing you just misunderstood what I was saying since you seem to be repeating me, other than the distinction between placebo and placebo effect
You recited the placebo effect to me like i didn’t just mention it directly.
I recited it back with extra detail , to make clear that i know what it means.
You recited it again, with additional detail, and asked me if i misunderstood your reply containing the definition of the thing i was asking about, by name ?
Yeah I know which is why Im confused why you seem to be disagreeinf with me when we are saying the same thing. So I’m repeating myself with different words to try to find where we are having a problem.
I was literally guessing that that might be where the disconnect was. I’m not a great communicator so apologies If I’m just too dumb to figure out whats happening at this point
The quote is from Tim Minchin. I think the track name is Storm.
It’s him talking to someone at a dinner party and he’s trying to bite his tongue when someone new starts talking stupidity, but it gets to a point where he breaks and goes off on a rent.
It’s a very well written and entertaining bit.
What what’s missing from the quote is something along the lines of
“You know what they call alternate medicine that is proven to work? Medicine”
The whole point of the quote is exactly what you are saying that some medicines legitimately started as alternative medicines
Edit: i realize now it might not have been a quote at all regardless of how similar it is the that Tim Minchin bit
“Herbal medicine’s been around for thousands of years!” Indeed it has, and then we tested it all, and the stuff that worked became ‘medicine’. And the rest of it is just a nice bowl of soup and some potpourri.
From Dara Ó Briain. Also from him:
Chinese medicine, oh, Chinese medicine! “But there are billions of Chinese, Chinese medicine must be working.” Here’s the skinny on Chinese medicine. A hundred years ago the average life expectancy in China was 30. The life expectancy in China at the moment is 73. And it’s not feckin’ tiger penis that turned it around for the Chinese. Didn’t do much for the tiger, if you don’t mind me pointing out.
I need to be more specific in how I mean “alternative” here.
What I mean is “not of the current scientific consensus” , which I realise isn’t exactly the same wording as the wikipedia definition
Thats my bad.
I also failed to mention that it also works the other way as well, where current science is discredited(fully or partially) , due to flaws in it’s methodology, reproducibility or some other reason.
I think there are actually very few interventions which were “not of the current scientific consensus” which later became accepted medical practice.
Also I think in the current era there are practically no alternative therapies by that definition which will later become medical practice.
A salient example might be ketamine therapy. It’s been a party drug since at least the 90s but in the last several years has become a government subsidised therapy for PTSD in Australia. That doesn’t mean kids at ravfes were doing the therapy in the 90s, because the manner in which the ketamine is administered is the key to the beneficial outcome.
That said, I think the treatments a medical doctor can prescribe or even recommend are less than a third of the treatments or behaviors that can manage a chronic illness. What I mean is, if you have a chronic condition there’s (hopefully) medications that will help you manage it, but it’s the lifestyle changes that will influence your quality of life in the coming decades.
Yeah the only ones I can think of that used to be used the current medical way are cannabis for appetite and analgesia and psychadelics for ptsd and addiction. Both of these examples are obvious to anyone who’s used such substances.
Cannabis just makes you hungry and hurt less. Traumatized people who do psychedelics tend to revisit their trauma in new lights and having a guide to help with it is something a lot of people figured out was a good idea.
Was a tincture or tea of white willow used as a folk medicine for generations until it got studied and the compound in it isolated by Bayer
Cocaine.
Indigenous population would chew coca leaves as a stimulant for various reasons and someone figured found out about it, studied it, and found out how to isolate the active compound and now we have Cocaine
Opiates
Opium Poppy was used for centuries for a variety of uses, but mostly recreational in the form of opium, then it got studied and turned into some of the most effective painkillers we have. (Morphine, codeine, heroin are naturally derived opium compounds, some others are synthetic or a blend such as oxycodone, methadone, fentanyl, carfentanyl)
Edit: white birch bark(I’m not 100% certain this is the right tree, but it was a tree, please correct me if I’m wrong) found the correction in another comment
I think it depends how you frame this question. For example, aspirin originated from a compound in willow bark. Currently, most of us aren’t chewing on willow bark to relieve pain, but at some point that (or making willow bark teas, etc.) was the case. Whether you consider that as “alternative” depends on what point in history you ask that question.
Leeches, which are still used today, also come to mind. Modern medicine has greatly refined how they’re used, but that’s not how it started.
There are quite a few things that people noticed produced effects but didn’t understand the mechanism. Science changed that.
However, if you consider using things with known properties in a wildly irresponsible manner as the definition of “alternative medicine,” that’s a very different question.
Even when novel therapies from existing medicine do come to light at times, generally this is through scientific observation and testing, not Cletus taking horse medicine.
My pharma professors liked to say that if Aspirin was discovered today, it would never pass the bar for human trials, because after all these years the mechanism of action isn’t properly understood.
That’s the best argument for alternative medicines that I’ve heard, and it’s also something to consider when we think about how insanely high the bar is for compounds that are approved as medicines.
I wonder if thats because we know very little about how the brain actually works in regards to how the brain create thoughts. It’s so very much a mystery in many ways where thoughts are created
Let’s just assume dose-response is linear. So, go find what concentration of chemical X (medicine, food additive, cosmetic, whatever) kills 50% of the bacteria/rodent/etc population. Draw a line from there down to 0% dead at 0 concentration.
Now decide what % of deaths is acceptable, given the benefit of chemical X. Use the line we just drew and that tells you what the regulations should set for max concentration under as-directed usage.
This ignores facts like
response curves are very often literally curves, sometimes with more than 1 minimum
response curves (and lines!) often depend heavily on all sorts of other chemicals’ presence in the environment, in varying mixtures & amounts
It’s a combinatorial explosion we can never meaningfully test against. We do what we can, with the tools that we have.
Almost every signal response, and certainly in chemistry, is an S curve. A small span of that curve may be approximately linear, but you absolutely can not approximate the slope of that linear span by just the mid point.
I was also going to use aspirin as an example, there is also psychedelics as a treatment for various psychological ailments.
I’m also going to post a response i made to a comment further up.
I need to be more specific in how I mean “alternative” here.
What I mean is “not of the current scientific consensus” , which I realise isn’t exactly the same wording as the wikipedia definition
Thats my bad.
I also failed to mention that it also works the other way as well, where current science is discredited(fully or partially) , due to flaws in it’s methodology, reproducibility or some other reason.
In generalities i was thinking more of how certain branches or offshoots of what was considered to be mainstream ( or mainstream adjacent ) science were later found to be scientifically provable.
They were posited over the years in varied forms by multiple independent people, but they weren’t really fully accepted until the invention of a way of actually observing them.
This is largely what medicine was prior to the current , formal scientific method.
Local “medicine people” would have salves, cures, potions and other such concoctions passed down to apprentices, they might have some knowledge of how it works, but most of that knowledge would be in the practical application and treatment using said concoctions.
That’s not to dismiss this practice, the years of experience and experimentation (of a kind) was, in some cases, essentially a precursor to modern scientific method.
There are ways of analysing effects and positing theories without fully understanding how the underlying mechanism works.
Sometimes that leads to legitimate data around the effects of a medicine or treatment being dismissed as “alternative”, at least until formal experimentation is done and verified
As i said in another reply, I’m not saying it’s common, all i was saying was that it’s a possibility.
Nowadays we can potentially evaluate what is considered “alternative” for actual benefit, and if benefit is found then elevate it to actual medical science.
Formal science isn’t the only source of potential hypotheses.
If it’s not considered beneficial we can discard (for now), perhaps a fresh look later when our tooling and understanding has improved.
That way we can try to gain benefit where possible, and definitively ( for the current level of technology and resource ) suggest people kindly not overdose on de-wormer because we’ve scientifically determined it’s stupid and potentially lethal.
Formal science isn’t the only source of potential hypotheses.
It’s hard to believe that, considering all low hanging fruits were picked already and now new hypotheses are obtained through hard work of teams of scientists.
The issue is that alternative forms of medicine are most often studied scientifically and either found to work (upgraded to medicine) but more often than not it is found to have no greater effect than placebo or random chance, but these alternatives continue to be practiced, meaning people end up getting ineffective care, and their money is funneled into an industry incentivised to discredit and spread distrust towards real proven medicine
Well said. A balanced viewpoint that doesn’t try to be all black and white. Even the stupidest bullshit can sometimes contain a kernel of truth. That doesn’t mean the 99% bullshit isn’t any less shit.
Im all on the “listen to the medical experts” train.
There are however some medicines and treatments that legitimately started as “alternative”.
A lot of it is horseshit though.
Also modern medicine isn’t infallible(nor the people that practice it).
Statistically though, it’s fucking high magic compared to most internet sourced diagnoses.
Have friends in the medical field, a lot of time they are just sort of trying shit and then are happy it worked.
Medical science is just that, medicine that follows the scientific method. (Or at least it’s supposed to).
The scientific method is basically testing guesses (sometimes educated ones) and seeing what happens.
There’s a whole lot of structure and guidelines, but testing guesses(hypotheses) is where it’s at mostly.
The current state of any science is usually “the best theory we have right now, given the data and resources available to us”
Some people hear that and think “look, they’re just guessing, why should I listen to them?” and thats absolutely valid.
Where that falls down is that they then go on to assume all guesses are equal and ignore the time and resources that went in to that current scientific best guess.
Is it always correct? no, is it more likely to be beneficial than a random social media post by an influencer with no medical expertise? Generally yes.
I would expand “testing guesses” to repeatedly testing guesses. It’s a fundamental thing to be able to recreate the testing results, or it’s not science at all it’s just fuckign around lol
An important distinction.
The people who “guess” are guessing way down the decision tree, not like hmm is this cancer or a flu?
They also are highly trained, in a field that is centuries old.
Indeed, though I’d argue that’s an issue with modern academia as an industry rather than the scientific method itself.
edit: not that the scientific method doesn’t have it’s flaws.
Most professions could be described like this, but when doctors are “trying shit” it is backed up by many years of training and education, and their behavior is scrutinised by professional bodies and so on.
When your local quack is “trying shit” it’s just based on the vibe.
Am engineer and agree
The difference between medicine and “alternative medicine” is proof of effectiveness. If something provably works it’s medicine.
That’s certainly a definition.
(As a genuine question) How dos that definition account for the placebo effect ?
edit: re-read this and realised it sounded significantly more confrontational than i intended, so i added bracket context.
“Proof of effectiveness” means a placebo controlled trial. Preferably multiple, with sample sizes substantial enough for sufficient statistical power.
Or we could just start selling placebo tablets and make a fortune. I have some clay in my garden that should be easy enough to shape into pill shapes. We could even paint a few of them red and sell those as extra strong.
Not hurting anyone…
Why waste valuable clay when you can just sell homeopathic remedies?
Um Clay would have an effect. Use powdered sugar and simply compress them into a pill. This is literally one way they do already make placebos in pill form. You can buy a pill press on amazon
Sugar isn’t great for diabetics. Wouldn’t clay just pass through as it has no nutritional value.
Well sure but you could use other household ingredient that aren’t contaminated with whatever might be in your soil.
It was intentional that i said it’s one way they already make placebos in pill form.
It entirely is only important if you care about hurting people and not just stealing from them.
Which you seem to since you are arguing over diabetes
People eat clay sometimes. IIRC its a famine thing used to bulk out actual food to make it feel slightly more filling.
Pills are tiny. Wtf do you think the soil is contaminated with?
ah, that makes sense.
Does that still apply if the underlying mechanism isn’t understood?
I know examples of this exist already , I’m wondering if “proof of effectiveness” really means just the effectiveness in this context.
Effectiveness is independent of mechanism. As an example, to my knowledge SSRIs don’t really make sense but mostly outperform placebo.
Agreed,
Pretty sure anesthesia is similar, (in the not fully understanding the underlying mechanism)
We are only ‘pretty sure’ of the mechanism of how Tylenol works biochemically as of 2025.
You can test for effectiveness and dangers and everything else you need to prescribe something to get a good idea of whether its actually doing something or not.
‘Alternative medicine’ is largely, “I felt better after a bit”.
We didn’t know how alcohol worked but it was still an effective medicine for battlefield surgeons through history.
I would say how doesn’t it?
A placebo is known to NOT work. That medicine has defined, understands and even utilizes the placebo effect is exactly in that definition.
It’s known to potentially have an effect , even if the actual treatment administered was known(by third parties) to be inert and the effect wasnt the one originally planned.
Thats not the same as not working at all.
This is a core part of blind tests, the whole reason you test using a placebo is to isolate the effects that can’t be attributed to the actual medicine.
I’m not sure why you are repeating what I said as if I didn’t already say that.
Yes, it’s known to have an effect. But the placebo itself literally does nothing. It’s not a placebo unless it is guaranteed to do nothing or it wouldn’t have any value to science with how they use it. Any effect is psychosomatic and NOT an effect of the placebo. Hence the term “placebo effect” this is incredibly important when testing to gather useful data.
I’m guessing you just misunderstood what I was saying since you seem to be repeating me, other than the distinction between placebo and placebo effect
Yeah I know which is why Im confused why you seem to be disagreeinf with me when we are saying the same thing. So I’m repeating myself with different words to try to find where we are having a problem.
I was literally guessing that that might be where the disconnect was. I’m not a great communicator so apologies If I’m just too dumb to figure out whats happening at this point
i think the miscommunication was mutual, but started with me, apologies.
The quote is from Tim Minchin. I think the track name is Storm.
It’s him talking to someone at a dinner party and he’s trying to bite his tongue when someone new starts talking stupidity, but it gets to a point where he breaks and goes off on a rent.
It’s a very well written and entertaining bit.
What what’s missing from the quote is something along the lines of “You know what they call alternate medicine that is proven to work? Medicine”
The whole point of the quote is exactly what you are saying that some medicines legitimately started as alternative medicines
Edit: i realize now it might not have been a quote at all regardless of how similar it is the that Tim Minchin bit
From Dara Ó Briain. Also from him:
“Alternative medicine” is too broad a term to be helpful.
Yeah, I saw it after I’d posted.
I need to be more specific in how I mean “alternative” here.
What I mean is “not of the current scientific consensus” , which I realise isn’t exactly the same wording as the wikipedia definition
Thats my bad.
I also failed to mention that it also works the other way as well, where current science is discredited(fully or partially) , due to flaws in it’s methodology, reproducibility or some other reason.
I think there are actually very few interventions which were “not of the current scientific consensus” which later became accepted medical practice.
Also I think in the current era there are practically no alternative therapies by that definition which will later become medical practice.
A salient example might be ketamine therapy. It’s been a party drug since at least the 90s but in the last several years has become a government subsidised therapy for PTSD in Australia. That doesn’t mean kids at ravfes were doing the therapy in the 90s, because the manner in which the ketamine is administered is the key to the beneficial outcome.
That said, I think the treatments a medical doctor can prescribe or even recommend are less than a third of the treatments or behaviors that can manage a chronic illness. What I mean is, if you have a chronic condition there’s (hopefully) medications that will help you manage it, but it’s the lifestyle changes that will influence your quality of life in the coming decades.
Yeah the only ones I can think of that used to be used the current medical way are cannabis for appetite and analgesia and psychadelics for ptsd and addiction. Both of these examples are obvious to anyone who’s used such substances.
Cannabis just makes you hungry and hurt less. Traumatized people who do psychedelics tend to revisit their trauma in new lights and having a guide to help with it is something a lot of people figured out was a good idea.
What are those?
Aspirin.
Was a tincture or tea of white willow used as a folk medicine for generations until it got studied and the compound in it isolated by Bayer
Cocaine.
Indigenous population would chew coca leaves as a stimulant for various reasons and someone figured found out about it, studied it, and found out how to isolate the active compound and now we have Cocaine
Opiates
Opium Poppy was used for centuries for a variety of uses, but mostly recreational in the form of opium, then it got studied and turned into some of the most effective painkillers we have. (Morphine, codeine, heroin are naturally derived opium compounds, some others are synthetic or a blend such as oxycodone, methadone, fentanyl, carfentanyl)
Edit:
white birch bark(I’m not 100% certain this is the right tree, but it was a tree, please correct me if I’m wrong)found the correction in another commentI think it depends how you frame this question. For example, aspirin originated from a compound in willow bark. Currently, most of us aren’t chewing on willow bark to relieve pain, but at some point that (or making willow bark teas, etc.) was the case. Whether you consider that as “alternative” depends on what point in history you ask that question.
Leeches, which are still used today, also come to mind. Modern medicine has greatly refined how they’re used, but that’s not how it started.
There are quite a few things that people noticed produced effects but didn’t understand the mechanism. Science changed that.
However, if you consider using things with known properties in a wildly irresponsible manner as the definition of “alternative medicine,” that’s a very different question.
Even when novel therapies from existing medicine do come to light at times, generally this is through scientific observation and testing, not Cletus taking horse medicine.
Thank you.
At the time mainstream medicine was rejecting use of willow bark? Or why it’s considered alternative medicine?
Usually herbs found by ethnographers.
Aspirin, for example, IIRC discovered by a scientist investigating traditional therapeutics (tree bark)
My pharma professors liked to say that if Aspirin was discovered today, it would never pass the bar for human trials, because after all these years the mechanism of action isn’t properly understood.
That’s the best argument for alternative medicines that I’ve heard, and it’s also something to consider when we think about how insanely high the bar is for compounds that are approved as medicines.
That wasn’t a blocker with antidepressants, for better or worse.
I wonder if thats because we know very little about how the brain actually works in regards to how the brain create thoughts. It’s so very much a mystery in many ways where thoughts are created
Most medications are poorly understood (at best!) lol, it’s trial and error all the way down.
With some exceptions like the RNA messenger covid vaccine…
Oh God LD50 is the craziest thing ever.
Here’s how it works:
Let’s just assume dose-response is linear. So, go find what concentration of chemical X (medicine, food additive, cosmetic, whatever) kills 50% of the bacteria/rodent/etc population. Draw a line from there down to 0% dead at 0 concentration.
Now decide what % of deaths is acceptable, given the benefit of chemical X. Use the line we just drew and that tells you what the regulations should set for max concentration under as-directed usage.
This ignores facts like
It’s a combinatorial explosion we can never meaningfully test against. We do what we can, with the tools that we have.
Almost every signal response, and certainly in chemistry, is an S curve. A small span of that curve may be approximately linear, but you absolutely can not approximate the slope of that linear span by just the mid point.
I was also going to use aspirin as an example, there is also psychedelics as a treatment for various psychological ailments.
I’m also going to post a response i made to a comment further up.
In generalities i was thinking more of how certain branches or offshoots of what was considered to be mainstream ( or mainstream adjacent ) science were later found to be scientifically provable.
An example of this is microbes.
They were posited over the years in varied forms by multiple independent people, but they weren’t really fully accepted until the invention of a way of actually observing them.
This is largely what medicine was prior to the current , formal scientific method. Local “medicine people” would have salves, cures, potions and other such concoctions passed down to apprentices, they might have some knowledge of how it works, but most of that knowledge would be in the practical application and treatment using said concoctions.
That’s not to dismiss this practice, the years of experience and experimentation (of a kind) was, in some cases, essentially a precursor to modern scientific method.
There are ways of analysing effects and positing theories without fully understanding how the underlying mechanism works.
Sometimes that leads to legitimate data around the effects of a medicine or treatment being dismissed as “alternative”, at least until formal experimentation is done and verified
As i said in another reply, I’m not saying it’s common, all i was saying was that it’s a possibility.
I think it’s safe to say nowadays we can rely on scientific method to find new cures, and completely abandon “alternative” medicine.
that’s the exact opposite of what i was saying.
Nowadays we can potentially evaluate what is considered “alternative” for actual benefit, and if benefit is found then elevate it to actual medical science.
Formal science isn’t the only source of potential hypotheses.
If it’s not considered beneficial we can discard (for now), perhaps a fresh look later when our tooling and understanding has improved.
That way we can try to gain benefit where possible, and definitively ( for the current level of technology and resource ) suggest people kindly not overdose on de-wormer because we’ve scientifically determined it’s stupid and potentially lethal.
It’s hard to believe that, considering all low hanging fruits were picked already and now new hypotheses are obtained through hard work of teams of scientists.
All low hanging fruits we know of.
This is one of those unknown unknown situations where there are things were don’t even know to be looking for.
Like microbes, yes we posited something like them, but the full implications the confirmation weren’t understood until after.
You believe a layman is still able to discover something in medicine. We’ll see.
Various new snake oils (ivermectin or urine for cancer , COVID and whatnot) sure aren’t it.
I think the belief that “the only place innovation can come from is trained scientists” is arrogant and unscientific, even in specialised fields.
Im not suggesting people will be producing testable medical end- products on the weekends.
Just that some things are worth testing/looking into, even if its suggested by someone not wearing a white coat.
If anything, the lack of low hanging fruit in the current common knowledge base should be an incentive to look in unorthodox places.
In addition there’s a wealth of historical information that is siloed by culture, language and accessibility (among other things).
That includes dusty old tomes in buried cities but also folk remedies passed down among small villages or families and everything in-between.
Absolutely agree.
The issue is that alternative forms of medicine are most often studied scientifically and either found to work (upgraded to medicine) but more often than not it is found to have no greater effect than placebo or random chance, but these alternatives continue to be practiced, meaning people end up getting ineffective care, and their money is funneled into an industry incentivised to discredit and spread distrust towards real proven medicine
Agreed,
I was positing the possibility of a move from “alternative” to “scientifically recognised”, not that it was likely to happen.
Well said. A balanced viewpoint that doesn’t try to be all black and white. Even the stupidest bullshit can sometimes contain a kernel of truth. That doesn’t mean the 99% bullshit isn’t any less shit.