I would like to see sources that show drug companies to be far-reaching and impartial in their exploration of traditional medicines. A good question then is, since there are also a lot of medicine companies which promote traditional remedies, why are the larger pharmaceutical companies, which exhibit undeniable biases and pay out billions in false advertising lawsuits each year seen as the more valid side of the fence? Many of these natural health companies employ fully trained doctors and receive patronage from fully trained doctors, and are a growing industry in the US. Is it then rational to assume that an industry being far outspent by large pharmaceutical companies is picking up market share because the remedies it promotes don't work?

The whole basis of the argument to dismiss alternative medicines in this thread is based on the idea that it's possible for people to be irrational about their medical choices: but this is a rationalization, not a rational argument. So the current argument is both that:

A. non-alternative treatments don't work sufficiently better than alternative treatments for there to be a noticeable negative difference in switching to alternatives (since an abundantly obvious difference in quality of healthcare would not admit of people making the wrong decisions against coercive market forces).

B. alternative treatments fulfill some non-physical need of the patient which draws people to use them.

C. Following this line of reasoning, we should arrive at the conclusion that alternative treatments are no worse than non-alternatives. Since alternative treatments are usually less expensive and less invasive, and since they do meet non-physical need (as we have posited), there is certainly no basis for discrediting them.

I of course pose the ontological question: how exactly is one to presume to lump them all together? Or is the act of this division not also an act of bias towards those treatments associated with particular institutions?