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I've also found that questioning generally accepted medical analysis is met with a surprising amount of hostility.
Probably because it's so very very common and almost always utter bollocks.
People who would never think they were capable of comment on, say, nuclear reactor design with an hours study never the less think they're qualified to talk about the health effects of xyz based on about as much.
And sadly they get taken seriously, unlike in many other fields. news shows will include nuts who believe that vaccines cause autism for "balance" opposite the doctor but in the following segment on rocketry they don't feel the need to include someone who believes that the sky is a dome of water opposite the physicist for the sake of "balance".
It's a form of bikeshedding.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding
Because health/biology is easy to relate to life around them(not the same as actually easy) and actions people assume it's easy and try to boost their status by making up waffle about it that sounds vaguely reasonable to laymen so it leads to a lot of useless waffle.
Much as doctors, who know jack shit about statistical and causal inference, or risk analysis, consider themselves not only qualified to make claims in those domains, but consider their ill informed opinions the Word of God, which it is blasphemy to question.
I suggest that they're using a poor reference set.
There are plenty of people here who know much more than jack shit about statistical and causal inference, and those have usually been the grounds of the criticism here of the generally accepted medical analysis.
Statistical Literacy Among Doctors Now Lower Than Chance
From the article, why I may seem a little miffed about the whole thing:
Actually, Doctors practice reflects little about what the scientific literature says about vaccines, or most anything else. Medical decisions are routinely made worse than randomly. Here's a recent review article. They reviewed all the articles for 10 years in a high impact journal. The majority of the articles surveyed study a new practice, but of the 27% that test an existing practice, 40% reverse the practice and 38% reaffirm. My remark on this is: 50%-50% would be what you'd expect if the result of the test were random. So this indicates they are doing no better than random in introducing new practices replacing old ones. If you go on a random walk with each step forward or backward, how long does it take before you know nothing? http://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196%2813%2900405-9/abstract
This isn't unusual. Everybody who looks seriously at medical practice, finds between 10-30% of it is supported by science. Here's an article with a bunch of references to such studies by the BMJ and the Congress and the like. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-larry-dossey/the-mythology-of-science_b_412475.html
And like I pointed out, the vaccine safety surveys routinely ignore all of the actual pertinent scientific literature on dangers, so no wonder they decide they are safe.
If you read naturopaths online, they actually justify what they prescribe much better than Doctors ever will.
Here's another one Clin Oncol (R Coll Radiol). 2004 Dec;16(8):549-60. The contribution of cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adult malignancies. Morgan G1, Ward R, Barton M. RESULTS: The overall contribution of curative and adjuvant cytotoxic chemotherapy to 5-year survival in adults was estimated to be 2.3% in Australia and 2.1% in the USA. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15630849
Personally, I'd try some recommendation like Curcumin first. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18386790
Studies testing an existing practice are much more likely to be done if there is already reason to suspect that the existing practice isn't working well.
I was lightly reading along the whole discussion. I stopped and looked up a definition of naturopath just in case I was thinking of a different one. Here is the link I found. http://www.australiannaturaltherapistsassociation.com.au/therapies/naturopathy.php
This is completely off topic from the original post.
What is the current retort to - mild metal poisoning (not that you get any, at all from vaccines, but if we play a devils advocate...) - still better than catching the diseases we vaccinate against? right? No one wants polio do they?
Now, if only contemporary medicine were as capable of understanding its subject as nuclear engineering...
In general, objects which are deliberately designed by humans are easier to understand than objects which arose from evolution. This is true even when one tries to apply genetic algorithms to build simple circuits or antenna- trying to understand why they work can frequently be very hard.
If only even a single human cell was even close to as simple as a nuclear reactor. Physics students with merely 2 or 3 years experience can talk about such things with reasonable authority. A doctor with a decade of study is still a newbie.
As it is it's like trying to decompile a 6Gb self modifying probabilistic program with no documentation and no debugger, running on self modifying hardware designed by the self modifying program itself.
That they've been able to figure out anything concrete at all is remarkable. That every nutter with a random idea feels they have equal standing to people who've worked in the field for one or more decades is going to piss people off.