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?
Because the alternative medicine companies are even worse.
Both mainstream and alternative medicine companies try to skirt the line of what they can legally claim about their products under government regulation, but mainstream drug companies skirt the limits of what they can say while meeting the minimum standards of peer reviewed research, while alternative medicine companies skirt the limits of what they can say without meeting any standards of research whatsoever.
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.
Can you please explain why it's a rationalization rather than a rational argument? People are clearly irrational about many things, to their own detriment. People spent hundreds of years if not more tossing around various folk cures for scurvy, when in fact there is only one chemical which works, and works perfectly, to cure it. That's countless people dying, and a major barrier to world exploration standing for centuries due to people's failure to find out what works when left to their own devices, when some very simple tests were able to lay the matter to rest forever. Even after the experiments that determined quite conclusively that vitamin C containing foods were necessary to prevent scurvy, there were explorers who refused to believe it. They continued to get scurvy. Why do you not accept as a rational argument the claim that people continue to behave in a similarly irrational manner with respect to medicine today?
So your 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.
No, this is not what I am arguing at all.
It's rationalization instead of a rational argument because postulating that people can sometimes be irrational (e.g.: believing traditional medicine to be magical) isn't an argument for them making that choice over another. By the exact same argument, you could posit the opposite and it would seem correct: e.g. that people choose non-alternative medicine because they perceive it to be magic.
It's practically axiomatic to say that people sometimes (even often) act irrationally, but you've defined one side as rational and the other as irrational, from what I...
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