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mytyde comments on [LINK] Why did Steve Jobs choose not to effectively treat his cancer? - Less Wrong Discussion
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The point is not for individuals to create generalizeable claims, but rather to allow idiosyncratic individuals with unique problems and life situations to improve their health. You cannot argue with the results individuals achieve. Of course, much of this individual research is only necessitated by the utter lack of reliable data:
"Researchers reviewed 546 drug trials and found that industry-funded trials reported positive outcomes 85% of the time compared with 50% of the time for government-funded trials and 72% of the time for trials funded by nonprofits or non-federal organizations. Among the nonprofit or non-federal studies, those that received industry contributions were more likely to be positive (85%) compared with those that did not have any industry support (61%). ... But the new study also showed that results of industry-funded studies were published within two years of the study completion 32% of the time compared with 54% for government trials and 56% for nonprofit or non-federal trials." http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/02/news/la-heb-studies-20100802
Corruption in the drug industry is not trivial in the least, and because of the economic organization of the world such bias will not be going away in the forseeable future.
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.