Natural Therapies: Healthy or Hogwash?

I am becoming more open to experimenting with alternative medicines. I don't mean taking them myself, I mean pretending I've taken them with great success and recommending them to friends and neighbors so they'll take them, and I can see if they really do work. - Dennis Miller

I'm struggling to figure out how I'm going to cram an encyclopedia's worth of debate, points and counterpoints into a blog that strives to be "reader-friendly". My goal is to try and make sense of the issue of Allopathic (conventional, Western) medicine and alternative medicine (complementary, or CAM - complementary alternative medicine). There are just so many directions one could go in this area, so I hereby provide 15 random thoughts about merits and drawbacks of each and let the great minds of the Diet Blog readership discuss.

1. Just because a treatment/remedy/supplement is "natural", does not mean it is safe or effective.
2. Just because a treatment/drug is "conventional", doesn't mean it is vastly effective.
3. Conventional and natural medicines have their merits and their flaws. Conventional medicine is skewed by corporate pharmaceutical interest, while many aspects of natural medicine are poorly regulated and not supported by strong evidence. There are ethics problems in both forms of medicine.
4. The best approach to health is a preventative one. Lifestyle management including healthy diet and exercise are the ONLY truly preventative approaches to health. Natural medicine does not equal preventative.
5. Both conventional and alternative medicine are multi-billion dollar industries (conventional much more so than alternative)
6. Natural therapies should be given opportunities to be studied more rigorously to determine therapeutic value. The industry is big enough to fund independent studies.
7. Speaking of therapeutic - anything strong enough to cause a therapeutic effect will be strong enough to cause side-effects.
8. It is a sin that medical schools spend so little time teaching nutrition and nutrition-based therapies as mandatory courses.
9. An integrative approach, in my opinion is the best way to look at medicine. Taking the best of both natural and conventional methods.
10. I favor looking at whether a therapy is evidence based rather than whether it is "conventional" or "alternative".
11. Consider the placebo effect. This normally accounts for about 35% of any result and has been shown to account for as high as 80%! Be sure that whatever remedy/treatment you study, that it has undergone placebo-controlled studies.
12. Both allopathic physicians and naturopathic physicians are well educated, however they tend to blindly follow they philosophies in which they were taught (I realize I'm generalizing here - it's just my observation/opinion). It is difficult to open one's mind to a completely different paradigm.
13. When examining specific types of CAM disciplines, it is difficult to label any one as "effective" or "ineffective" due to the wide variety of therapies used therein. For example, one may conclude that chiropractic works, even though it wasn't chiropractic per se, but rather manipulative therapy used by a chiropractor that was useful (Physiotherapists are trained in manipulation as well).
14. There is often blurring with regards to whether an intervention is alternative or conventional - with the philosophy behind each treatment making the difference. For example, stick needles in someone according to meridians because their "chi" is off and it's alternative (acupuncture). Stick needles in someone to relieve trigger points based on neuromusculoskeletal anatomy and its conventional (Intramuscular stimulation).

There's acupuncture, which works on the principle of distraction. You're not going to feel the arthritis in your knee when someone's ramming a butterfly specimen needle into the nape of your neck. It's the same reason your nose never itches when your ankle is caught in a bear trap.

Again, Dennis Miller
15. Being 'open-minded" does not necessarily mean relinquishing critical thinking skills. There is a fine line between skepticism and closed-mindedness, but there is an equally fine line between open-mindedness and gullibility.