I agree with you that there are a lot of careful testing that goes in drug approval today. However, that can get really tricky. When I read Leonard Mlodinows The Drunkards Walk, it just really impressed me how subtlety you can affect the results of testing without even knowing it. I tried to find reference to an article that I read in either Barrons or the Wall Street Journal. It was by a person who had gone back and re-run medical testing they had done years ago as a young man. His results then fit what was expected. However, years later he got different results. I believe that phenomena of the first run of tests fitting the expected are even recognized now. Unfortunately, I cannot find the article and cannot spend more time looking for it, but it has been since Nov. 1.
While I think there is some wiggle room in arguing about statistics, that is not what I want to focus on. I will grant you that if I have an infection, I go to a doctor and they cure it with drugs. I will grant you that if I have a broken leg, I will go to a doctor and they will solve that problem. I am alive because traditional medicine is very good at that. However, when you move beyond that I do not buy that classical medicine always knows best.
Medical science is limited both by its knowledge and its prejudices, as are all human activities. Do you remember when only an absolute idiot (according to doctors) would think that ulcers could be caused by bacteria or cancer could be caused by a virus? I do. At one time traditional doctors condemned chiropractors as charlatans. I can think of three things for me personally that traditional medicine could not resolve or gave bad advice. Those got more into the chronic or psychosomatic issues. Fortunately, I tried other approaches when traditional medicine did not work. Saying piss on milk and bland diets and drinking beer and eating pizza solved my ulcer when I was 18. Regular vitamin B-12 as suggested by a naturopath solved recurring colds when I was 50. Going to a chiropractor saved nerve surgery when I was 55. When you get into those other medical issues, it is not unheard of to have auto-remissions of terrible things that medical science cannot explain and, I am sure, some percentage of fakers that are cured by sugar pills.
There is another part here also. I hesitate to say this because as a young adult I was as atheistic as could be and a rigid believer in the strict scientific method. However, I and others I know with decades of life under our belt have had things happen that make you think that there is something else going on in life. I do not claim to know all the answers, only that the redneck Christian church I was raised in would be utterly hopeless to even begin explaining things. But I do know that I personally have been to two different people who healed by laying on of the hands. I do know that they solved issues and that other people have had exactly the same experience. I am not talking about snake handlers here, but reasonably educated and professional people. So the question becomes if you require the rigid testing under fixed conditions as in paragraph 1 or are you willing to have a shot with a treatment where multiple people with the same issue have been found the same result (relief)? I now am at least open to the belief that some people have a talent to help other people with health issues. I do not know if it is energy or what, but I am open to that.
You gareth 19, of course, are welcome to call all of this superstition, but I look at it as one more tool (which I do not understand) to keep us active thru the decades which we could not do without some type of help and intervention. A country manager a couple of years ago called me the mutant for still working at my age in tough conditions and I can assure you that I would not be doing that if I had only been to classical doctors.
health insurance industry. So physicians loose while Blue Cross, et al profit.
a year and the referred caller who called today cannot explain it except to say, 'several rate increases over the last year'. 
It is a 2K deductible and 30% me and almost no drug coverage. Stuff beyond out of pocket limits always seem excluded.
