That's because people in general, probably you too, are willing to take the tradeoff for resolution of acute problem over long term consequences. Most people are willing to pay for expensive cancer treatments even with the socioeconomic consequences because the alternative is death. Now whether they should or not is a different discussion altogether. Every medical intervention has associated risks and side effects - from the most routine blood draw to a simple laparoscopic hysterectomy to the antipsychotic to treat your schizophrenia. We are willing to take those risks because we decide that it is worth it.

And I would be careful to not make sweeping generalizations about how mainstream medicine makes chronic problems worse. First, most chronic problems are due to population and socioeconomic determinants of health that are often well out of the scope of healthcare providers at least in the inpatient setting. Second, even with chronic problems we have made advances: think about insulin for diabetes, antihypertensives for blood pressure, or statins for heart disease.

That is why I said majority of stuff, some are clearly good, like insulin for TDB1. For TDB2 however, the insulin also kills pateints due to the hypoglicemia (as body adapts to its sympothoms) in what I deem to be unacceptable number, while there may be more promissing treatments in "alternative medical circles". Statins are useful only for small subset of patients - clearly overprescribed just like AB and lead to diabetes, dementia and other adverse effects.

The points you made about the causes of those deseases are irrelevant when we talk about treatments. The reasons for a disease are not the reasons for clearly suboptimal treatments. And you certainly can't justify destroying family to lengthen the life of cancer patient for few months, maybe a year, in a general case ?

> ... are willing to take the tradeoff for resolution of acute problem over long term consequences

Meh... majority of acute treatmets have very low long term consequences. AB is not one of those as evidence shows that gut flora may take very long time to recover (or it may never recover) even after single usage (and we know that disfunctional gut flora is bad). But I can probably take a bet that few doses of ibuprofen will not harm me at all. What I am saying is that standard medicine does have many fenomenal things but that people should probably look elsewhere for help about stuff it doesn't handle good at all. This requires everybody to be very well informed, not something most of humans have time or motivation to do.

> We are willing to take those risks because we decide that it is worth it.

No, "we" are taking those risks because doctors tells us its safe and that risks are trivial or non existent (while at the same time bashing supplements as dangerious?!). "First do no harm" should probably be deleted from mission statement. You don't really think that random person knows anything about medicine or that it questions doctor ? Its mostly buisnis only.

You're doing a lot of hand waving that is not only not backed by the evidence but smells strongly of drinking the kool aid of alternative medicine.

Modern medicine not having tools to fix chronic disease says more about the second law of thermodynamics than it does about the state of modern medicine, and thinking that alternative modalities (which have been tried and tested ad nauseum) will do any better is complete madness. But you're welcome to waste your money if you wish.

Now when you get to the price of cancer treatments, fortunately I live and practice medicine in a western country with a universal health system - i don't have to have discussions with patients about whether they will be able to afford a treatment - everyone gets everything they need. The US would do well to introduce a good system here, but apparently that smells too much like communism... even if it does create the horrible situations you allude to