In my opinion, taking things from your perspective is going to be very hit-and-miss. Combined with the replication issues that seem to crop up in these fields, a great deal of money and energy might be spent on a non-drug remedy that is simply a more effective placebo. It could take years to figure out whether a treatment provides life-lasting effects.
If any company, today, cured major depression with a drug, it would be making essentially monopoly profits for at least five, while analogs were found, at at most until 2036.
I come from a cognitive/social psychology background; it is mostly social psychology that has a replication crisis. Double-blind drug trials, even with psychiatric drugs, are usually fairly well done. (That doesn't mean the theory behind these drugs is necessarily sound, and in fact we're learning that a large class of drugs, SSRIs, may only provide a primary effect along a previously though auxiliary axis).
It seems hard to argue that any alternative medicine field is as productive or as effective, empirically speaking, as the drug companies. They have huge incentive to win big and they go for it all the time. In the US they can sway things a little with ads, but only after they get past our admittedly corrupt regulatory gatekeepers, and only in that market. A cure for major depression alone would be 7-20 years of guaranteed monopoly profits. There is not a drug company in the world that would keep pressing SSRIs if that sort of treatment was available. The brand loyalty alone would be well worth it.
This isn't to argue against anything, really, except that psychiatric drug manufacturers have incentive not to produce cures. They assuredly do.
Just using penicillin as an example:
Imagine you have an incurable infection and I told you that there's this mysterious blue mold that, when crushed up and consumed, will cure you. That sounds a lot like alternative medicine, but when you extract the active component and put it in a certain delivery system (i.e., a pill/capsule/tablet) it's "traditional," modern medicine.
> ... traditional medicine doesn't actually heal you.
And penicillin has saved millions [1] of lives.
[1] estimates ranging from "several" to "hundreds" of millions.
My point is that generalising both traditional medicine and "western" modern medicine misses the mark. Treat everything on balance, specific to the medicine in question, not the class it came from, in my opinion.
Well if only! Much of modern medicine unfortunately are "symptom-suppressors" (pain-killers, antihistamines, fever prevention, blood-pressure/blood-sugar 'regulators', cholesterol-lowering agents, anti-fungals etc) of deeper underlying health issues --- true "band-aid" medicine is/would be a step forward if you think about it: if we get wounded or break a bone, real band-aids don't "heal" but assist and speed the body's built-in healing capabilities. And as the alternative folks say, nothing can heal any ailment but the body itself: the "best"/most proven medicine does seem to "merely" improve the milieu/environment in which the body attempts to self-heal: that's true for antibiotics (kill off most of the bad guys so ideally the good guys are now in better balance to "self-heal": finish off the rest), vaccines (prime the immune system for "self-healing": fighting off a future infection), antiseptics etc. --- many of which were 'evolved' from traditional (herbal etc) treatments/insights over centuries isolated into "works for most with the least side-effects" pharmaceuticals.
It's cured all sorts of things. Vaccines, antibiotics, joint reconstruction, etc, etc.
Vaccines are interesting, since they don't directly solve the problem, but aid your body in helping itself.
I concede antibiotics and joint reconstruction. However, we've only begun to scratch the surface of what's possible. As a society, we shouldn't limit ourselves to only what is taught in a medical degree.
http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/66783/1/WHO_EDM_TRM...
Things like herbal therapies and acupuncture and so on.
Have you heard of sound therapy? Laser therapy? NLP? These are therapies you probably would never hear at a traditional doctor's office.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-are-chiropractors-not-considered-r... [2] http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/altmed.htm...
There is something I've recently realized. Hospitals are optimized to receive patients, control the situation, prevent pain & death, and then hope for the best. In other words, traditional medicine doesn't actually heal you. It only controls the situation, and trusts that your body will heal itself.
This was a strange realization to make. My whole life I've always associated medicine with healing. But now I see that, although very useful, medicine only serves as a band-aid. It doesn't solve the underlying problem.
I think we as a society need to realize this. Not because traditional medicine is bad (it has helped save countless lives, for sure), but because we need to start looking into alternative medicine that could potentially provide actual healing. There's currently a stigma of anything that isn't a traditional drug / pill... we need to progress past this mindset.
Edit: Sorry for being overly broad. I have more in mind physical and mental health conditions. Regardless, instead of downvotes, how about we have an enlightening discussion?
Edit 2: I misspoke "traditional medicine"; but what I meant was "western medicine", as I was kindly corrected by maxerickson. I apologize for the confusion.