"By definition, Alternative Medicine has either not been proved to work, or been proved not to work. Do you know what they call Alternative medicine that's been proved to work? Medicine." --Tim Minchin

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujUQn0HhGEk

And how would you call medicine that has been proven not to work? This is what the original discussion is about: the medical system can be too slow to recognize and stop harmful practices.

There are many examples: Thalidomide, operating on babies without anesthesia [0], intensive glucose control [1], adenoid removal (the topic here) etc.

[0] http://www.nocirc.org/symposia/second/chamberlain.html [1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa0810625

"Alternative" means "unproven or disproven", doesn't it?

To pro-alternative folks like myself it just means "not in the medical textbooks yet". Most 'alternative' approaches do have rigorous studies backing them up, just recent and ignored by a lot of people.

Homeopathy doesn't work. Acupunture doesn't work. Traditional Chinese Medicine doesn't work. Faith healing doesn't work. These rigorous studies you're mentioning do not exist.

This meta-study supports the use of acupuncture to treat chronic pain: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...

The practice seems to have a (very small) effect compared to placebo or "fake" acupuncture, but the "traditonal" theory of it has no explanatory value whatsoever.

What about getting allergy shots? Do you know that it was considered 'quack science' just as recently as a few decades ago? Now it's been adopted by mainstream medicine as one of the most effective ways to help deal with allergies.

Believe it or not, western medicine doesn't have all the answers, especially when it comes to chronic conditions. Thinking that steroids and antibiotics will cure IBS is quack science, and that's what's being practiced in western medicine.

You have a distorted view of the methods and procedures of "western" (evidence based) medicine. It is obviously not perfect (and I'm pretty sure that you don't actually know the worst of it - the current obsession with having universal prescriptive protocols for everything is a rather clear local minimum that medical practice is stuck into), but everything else generally doesn't rise above the "not even wrong" bar.

"Western" medicine dramatically improved in the last few decades. "Alternative" medicines do not have the intellectual framework or the ability to improve.

I don't know, it's a matter of definition. What I know is that the article makes a good point.