Which is to say that Alternative Medicine that works will be a decade or two ahead of Medicine. If you don't have a problem with being a decade or two behind the best treatments, or never getting a treatment because no one has an interest in spending a billion dollars to "prove" it works, limiting yourself to Medicine is not a problem.

I've never argued that research in mainstream medicine is good, only that "alternative" medicine is a worse alternative. If there is no evidence whatsoever that a piece of alternative medicine provides benefit over placebo, you're better off taking something for which there is even weak evidence of it being better than placebo. At least you should get the benefit of the placebo effect either way.

One common way in which industry funded studies are slanted is by measuring their drugs against placebo, when the relevant information is how they perform against the best drugs already on the market. A drug that comes out ahead in these tests may be strictly inferior to other drugs that are are available, but it's probably still better than alternative medicine, which reliably fails to outperform placebos.

If an individual takes alternative medicine and gets better, there's no point arguing that they didn't get better, but that doesn't mean that taking alternative medicine was a good idea.

That's nearly a contradiction in terms. Mainstream medicine, as a practice, refuses empirical experimentation on particular patients. Here's the disease. Here is the cookbook cure that has been sanctioned by some professional board, with backing by a billion dollar study that shows some statistical advantage over a whole population. If there is no such study, then the prescription is a shrug and a pat on the head.

If no study shows that any treatment has a particular advantage over placebo, many doctors will prescribe a placebo. Prescribing actual medicines at random would be a bad idea, since there's no reason to arbitrarily privilege the hypothesis that any particular treatment will help you more than a placebo, and a placebo has less danger of side effects. Of course, you can always go to a drugstore and buy mainstream medicines which have been found to be useful for something to test on yourself, and like alternative medicine, this will give you something to point at when you get better, but it's not a very wise treatment plan.

If it works for you, then it works for you. No billion dollar study required, and it doesn't matter what the statistical averages are when you determine it works for you. That is the problem to be solved - an individual's problem. Given that he and no one else has possession of the system requiring fixing, he is in a very good position to do "research" to fix his problem, if he is not prevented by regulations and institutions barring him from tests, materials, and treatments. He has much more motivation to fix the problem than his doctor, who has a great many more compelling interests than healing his patient.

If mere motivation was enough to overcome bias and incompetence at processing evidence, we would have no need for this site at all.

The advantage of "alternative medicine" is that you can always turn to it for a harmless placebo, but this is much less useful once you know that it's what the advantage actually is.

That's nearly a contradiction in terms. Mainstream medicine, as a practice, refuses empirical experimentation on particular patients. Here's the disease. Here is the cookbook cure that has been sanctioned by some professional board, with backing by a billion dollar study that shows some statistical advantage over a whole population. If there is no such study, then the prescription is a shrug and a pat on the head.

This is actually not quite true. There's been a surprising amount of self-experimentation in medicine and experimentation on individual patients. Lawrence Altman's "Who Goes First?" is a somewhat dry book on this subject that looks at self-experimentation by doctors and scientists in history. Most examples are things where they do deliberate harm to themselves (e.g. trying to figure out how a specific disease is transmitted by trying all sorts of different methods of infection, or deliberately reducing their intake of some specific vitamin and measuring the effects) but others involve actively trying to cure diseases that they happen to have. (Edit: For one recent unsuccessful example see here).

If it works for you, then it works for you. No billion dollar study required, and it doesn't matter what the statistical averages are when you determine it works for you.

It is often difficult to tell if actually works for you or not. Self-evaluation is really tough, and when your sample size is one, the noise level can easily outweigh the signal. Still, there are actual steps that self-experimentation can include that help a lot. One can without too much difficulty double-blind self-tests with a help of a friend.